D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

[Minigiant]

How is "give bonus" of the Bard any different than "do thing" of the Cleric?

The Cleric's CD do thing has a unique base ability tied to Divinity and adds know abilities based on the Cleric's domain which are tied to its Divine Deities. In 2024, they Base Channel Divinity will have 2 base abilities.

The Bard's Inspiration is a simple extra bonus which barely matches the inherent lore of having song magic. Nor are all of its additional usages tied to song magic. Some feelig very martial, others skilled, andothers various forms of magical.

And what's the "defined mechanic" tailored to the Wizard? The spellbook? A thing that isn't even a mechanic, it's just an alternative way of calculating how many spells the class can have in their pocket.

Spellbook lets you do rituals without preparing them or knowing them. Making every ritual the wizard has available and never having a "I didn't preprare that ritual moment". This offers a player to use them often and warps the party's usage of them.

 

[Mecheon]

Please don't pretend that folks only rejected 4e because they don't like interesting mechanics.

Oh, completely fair

But if we're saying "kill the sorcerer because its 5E interpretation doesn't have interesting mechanics" then, well, classes having good mechanics doesn't mean why they stick around and also by that justification I can kill off half the classes in the process, not just sorcerer.

 

[ezo]

Spellbook lets you do rituals without preparing them or knowing them.

Well, you still have to "learn them", but otherwise yeah, I love the Wizard version of Ritual Caster. My longest running Wizard PC has these Rituals in his book:

• Alarm
• Comprehend Languages
• Detect Magic
• Find Familiar
• Identify
• Tenser's Floating Disk
• Unseen Servant
• Leomund's Tiny Hut (weaker version)
• Phantom Steed
• Water Breathing
• Rary's Telepathic Bond

And even at higher levels, most of them are still useful.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Except with sorcerer, it even has the same lore reasons as warlock for getting said powers. It even mentions draconic sorcerers getting their power via a pact with a dragon. Which is the exact definition of a warlock.

Except we have already addressed this false point. A warlock cannot gain powers by being sucked into the Shadowfell, and suffering from magical radiation. A Shadow Sorcerer can. A warlock cannot gain powers by being struck with a drop of a God's blood, but this can absolutely be an origin for a Divine Soul Bloodline. A warlock cannot gain powers by being born in the arcane wastelands left behind by a great war, a Wild Magic sorcerer can.

Sure, yeah, someone could make a pact, demand that their children get magical powers as part of this pact, and therefore a sorcerous bloodline is formed. That can happen. But that does not in any way mean that the lore of a Warlock who makes a pact with beings for power, binding themselves and their patron with contractual magic always and forever shares the exact same lore as a sorcerer born cursed or blessed with powers unasked for, and potentially of an unknown origin.

While simultaneously being a gimped wizard with the metamagic feat as their entire mechanical class identity.

Which can be fixed by making better mechanics for the sorcerer. Trust me, I have been an advocate for 10 years of giving the sorcerer better mechanics. But that does not mean that the best solution to throw away everything a sorcerer could be and just declare them all warlocks like that changes nothing.

I'm pretty sure that we don't have a dragon patron warlock simply because it would walk over sorcerer simply by existing.

I made one. Didn't invalidate the Sorcerer at all. Because they are telling different stories. Just like the Ascendant Dragon Monk tells a different story than the Dragon Sorcerer which tells a different story than a Dragonborn character.

Soul knife rogue, astral self monk, and psi warrior fighter all share 'psionic power' as their influence, but each at least has completely unique mechanics and individual themes within 'far realm psionics'.

While warlock and sorcerer are both 'a far realm entity influenced you and gave you psionic power'. The difference only being that the warlock class has unique mechanics, while the sorcerer is just a wizard clone.

So.
Make.
Better.
Sorcerer.
Mechanics.

This is a far better and simpler solution than just throwing our hands up and declaring all sorcerers a pointless endeavor.

In a new half edition like 1dnd, a class definitely shouldn't be randomly dropped.

When I talk about deleting classes, I'm referring to some hypothetical 6e down the road. In which there is no guarantee we would even have the same class-subclass system as 5e.

And there would be no guarantee that the mechanics would still be bad.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So.
Make.
Better.
Sorcerer.
Mechanics.

This is a far better and simpler solution than just throwing our hands up and declaring all sorcerers a pointless endeavor.

It is a matter of opinion which would be better, but it is blindingly obviously that the latter is simpler by far. Jettisoning a class takes no effort at all, whereas designing good and compelling class mechanics is actually a lot of hard work. If it was easy we would have it already.

 

[Chaosmancer]

More coherent metaphysics as well as my preferred version of sorcerer; the one using warlock-like chassis. Plus anything the writers have no time to write when they spend their time writing superfluous classes.

Well, my preferred version of the sorcerer isn't just a copy of the warlock, and many people have stated that, so that's not a universal loss of giving the sorcerer better mechanics.

There would be no superfluous classes either, since the sorcerer and warlock both have a strong thematic identity and the mechanics would give them a strong mechanical identity.

So, all that is left is "coherent metaphysics". So, please explain to me how being born with magical abilities via bloodline, or exposure to magic is incoherent? That seems like the single most coherent aspect of a magical world.

But like I said before, I can see a setup where they would be separate classes, but then their fluff would need o be refocused and their mechanics completely redone in way that would somewhat resemble swapping them between the two classes. So the sorcerer is the inherently magical being and becomes short rest based cantrip blaster with always-on magical features whereas the warlock focuses on being the occultist that meddles with forbidden knowledge, thus resembling the wizard more by being a traditional caster with some additional tricks. The role of the warlock would be the hexer, an anti-bard. A caster whose forte is debuffing the enemies as opposed to buffing allies. I would also see summoning to being a big part of their repertoire. Though I'm not quite sure that this is worth a full class either, as one could just see this as a creepy wizard.

It sounds much more like you don't like the warlock's mechanics than anything else

 

[Chaosmancer]

It is a matter of opinion which would be better, but it is blindingly obviously that the latter is simpler by far. Jettisoning a class takes no effort at all, whereas designing good and compelling class mechanics is actually a lot of hard work. If it was easy we would have it already.

Except for the near complete loss of one of the most common and compelling sets of tropes and archetypes in fiction.

 

[Mecheon]

It is a matter of opinion which would be better, but it is blindingly obviously that the latter is simpler by far. Jettisoning a class takes no effort at all, whereas designing good and compelling class mechanics is actually a lot of hard work. If it was easy we would have it already.

But this also results in massive backlash as suddenly 'Bring the sorcerer back' replaces 'Bring the warlord back' as the big class request.

The sorcerer has a longstanding tradition as a base class in the game, they're not going to scrap it because of one bad edition. If they were going to do that, we would have lost Monk after 3E

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So, all that is left is "coherent metaphysics". So, please explain to me how being born with magical abilities via bloodline, or exposure to magic is incoherent? That seems like the single most coherent aspect of a magical world.

That is coherent. It is the warlock fluff which is incoherent. Pact is "why" but not "how," and it is the how which would be the metaphysics.

It sounds much more like you don't like the warlock's mechanics than anything else

I like them a lot. They just represent the sorcerer better than they do the warlock. Though of course how to properly represent a warlock would first require answering the question of what warlock is in metaphysical sense, which the class currently doesn't.

Except for the near complete loss of one of the most common and compelling sets of tropes and archetypes in fiction.

Nah, that can still be represented via the warlock mechanics, so it is not lost.

 

[ezo]

So, at post #700, has anything been accomplished or decided on? At this point I have no idea of people want to change the sorcerer, make a new sorcerer, roll-over sorcerer into another class, move another class into sorcerer, or remove the sorcerer entirely? All of them? Something else? At this point, I want to start a poll with those options. ;-)