D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[EzekielRaiden]

Damn, I can't even remember what a Wilder was - was it one of the awful 3.XE psionic classes?

Correct. They had more juice but fewer powers, IIRC.

 

[Alzrius]

One thing I hate about the sorcerer is that they stole the inborn magical talent from the wizard. Now, everyone tends to treat arcane magic as:

1. Inborn, you're a sorcerer
2. Not inborn, don't worry, studdy hard and you can be a wizard.
3. I guess you can have granted power (be a warlock)

The way I see it is that, other than the warlock who is granted it, arcane magic is an inborn talent; sorcerer and wizard are just different ways of accessing that talent. This is why in a campaign setting you still have limited amounts of wizards, you don't have a large amount of people running around with an arcane magic initiate feat because they just don't have that spark for arcane magic.

The sorcerer might learn their magic somewhat randomly, focused around their bloodline. The wizard focuses their magic around their studies. They both have that inborn spark of arcane power, they just learn to harness it differently.

Gotta be honest, I've never seen wizards as embodying any sort of "arcane magic is inborn" idea in D&D.

What bothers me about sorcerers is that they upend the idea of "your character class is what you do, not who you are." Every class, as I recall, was about your profession, what your character was striving to be, deliberately working to cultivate skills even before they reached 1st level. Sorcerers (again, to me) changed that paradigm, because being a sorcerer wasn't something you trained for; it was something that just sort of happened, where you woke up one day and found yourself manifesting magic power because one of your ancestors got freaky with a blink dog or something. It was like having one of the X-Men plopped down right next to Conan the Barbarian, except not as cool as the one time that actually happened.

 

[TwoSix]

Damn, I can't even remember what a Wilder was - was it one of the awful 3.XE psionic classes?

Yea, introduced in the 3.0 Psionics handbook, and in the 3.5 Expanded book. Cha-based, could do a wild surge which let them bump up the caster level of their powers.

 

[aco175]

The wizard and sorcerer or are they both the same thing.

 

[TwoSix]

Gotta be honest, I've never seen wizards as embodying any sort of "arcane magic is inborn" idea in D&D.

What bothers me about sorcerers is that they upend the idea of "your character class is what you do, not who you are." Every class, as I recall, was about your profession, what your character was striving to be, deliberately working to cultivate skills even before they reached 1st level. Sorcerers (again, to me) changed that paradigm, because being a sorcerer wasn't something you trained for; it was something that just sort of happened, where you woke up one day and found yourself manifesting magic power because one of your ancestors got freaky with a blink dog or something. It was like having one of the X-Men plopped down right next to Conan the Barbarian, except not as cool as the one time that actually happened.

Yea, but I think that was just a codification of an idea that the game had been working towards for most of the 90s; a shift away from "class as chosen profession" and towards "class as identity." Virtually all of D&D's competitors in the TTRPG space in the '90s featured concepts that the PCs were forced into by birth or circumstance. It was just part of the tonal shift away from Appendix N/S&S concepts and towards modern "doorstopper" fantasy and comic book inspirations.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

I mean, Wizards are the worst class in the game due to how boring, uninspiring, and poorly designed it is, so they should be erased from existences like the waste of space they are.

I love the Sorcerer's identity of having this innate magical power that either manifests due to a connection to a powerful ancestry or by being so heavily infused with some form of magic power source at some point in your life that forever changes you, gifting you access to magic. The idea of a caster that wields raw magical power that is controlled through their force of will and emotions alone, learning to master themselves and these innate gifts is very appealing to me. That theme alone is enough to make me always pick a Sorcerer over a Wizard when I want to play a caster, regardless of mechanics. I also lean very heavily into this within my own campaign worlds, with higher level boons that often allow Sorcerers greater manifestations of power derived from their power source.

 

[Shardstone]

The real problem is clerics, because wizards and clerics are basically the same thing in most myths.

 

[Horwath]

I am not the biggest psion fan, but I would support replacing sorcerer with a psion. The arcane caster line-up is just too crowded, there is not enough room for thematical or mechanical distinction.

just use spell point only for sorcerer and you have that mechanical difference.
add sorcery points to spell pool.

 

[Horwath]

The real problem is clerics, because wizards and clerics are basically the same thing in most myths.

if it not for the whole "tradition" thing, D&D only needs one caster class.
then just add bunch of feat slots to have your specific theme manifested in mechanics.

 

[M.L. Martin]

Touche and yes that further debunks the whole "inborn talent" thing. Honestly, Sorcerers should never have been a class - they should just have been an alternate spellcasting regime for Wizards, but again, I said that back in 3E days, and nobody agreed with me so...

The 3E sorcerer exists in large part to justify spending all that PHB space on the massive wizard spell list, so I'm afraid that was a non-starter from the beginning.