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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6555988" data-attributes="member: 996">Just as well that I didn't make that assertion then.  Indeed, a 'dumb player' spraying around more spells and more powerful spells in a day than Gandalf cast in the entire trilogy might do so very ineffectively.    It doesn't take the same kind of 'smart player' prodigy to get a much-better-than-Gandalf level of performance out of a magic-user/wizard in D&D, like it does to eke out even a Conan-like performance from a fighter/barbarian. Sure.  And, a D&D wizard would, in his place use some spells, because he has 'em.  A lot of 'em, and they work really well.   So, you're saying that, somehow, giving a player of a Conan type character some PC resources to manage that allow him to pull the kind of against-the-odds things that Conan and other heroes routinely pull, some of the time, would somehow make the player stupid.  But, giving the player of the Gandalf type a larger set of resources to manage, that allow him to pull a much wider and more overt range of things than Gandalf ever did, somehow make him a 'smart player?'   So, we could, for instance, do away with Vancian magic, and let the DM judge what PC casters can do based on the respective players' knowledge of the occult, perhaps? The kind that are /really/ dramatic, require superhuman focus and determination - 'heroic' ones that not just anyone could do. It's not like they've often gotten a lot of options in combat, either.  Classic D&D had very few combat options, and they were across the board.  3.5 did better with feats, but it took a whole feat tree to really open up a combat option, and it was graven in stone almost from 1st level - that's pretty sad compared to choosing dozens of different spells each day.  Even 4e, though it offered many such 'exploits,' didn't offer that great a variety. It was a larger step in the right direction than 3e bonus feats or 5e battlemaster maneuvers.  And, it only worked to the extent it did, because, at the same time, they vastly contracted the number of spells each individual caster had access to.  In that sense, it was a fair solution in that it addressed both sides of both problems:  that martial characters fell far short of what they were in genre, while caster classes far exceeded their sources of inspiration and that players of martial characters were denied agency, while players of caster classes had a lot of it, whether they wanted it or not.5e could still have improved substantially upon what 4e did if it had made any effort to do so.  The biggest opportunity being the 'pillars' that were first articulated (though, like roles, they'd always been around) during the 5e playtest.  Bringing the same kind of balance and agency into the other two pillars would have been huge.  Incrementally improving the same in the combat pillar wouldn't have been too much to ask either, I don't think.</blockquote>

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