Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 7405542" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Unpopular opinion: Fire-and-forget Vancian is better than 5e Vancian. In fire-and-forget, every single use of a spell is a limited resource, whereas in 5e Vancian, only the spell slot is a resource, as with spontaneous casters. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but then what’s the point of “preparing” a subset of your spells each day?I don’t see spell preparation as an interesting thing on its own. But at least in a traditional Vancian system it serves a purpose. It forces you to think not just about how many 3rd level spells you have left, but about how many fireballs you have left. The preparation is an added layer of complexity that you put up with because it makes for a deeper casting system. But in neo-Vancian, preparing spells is just this vestigial extra step with no benefit. Everyone’s a spontaneous caster, but some of them have to choose their list of spells they can spontaneously cast at the beginning of the day. But for what benefit? Why not just make everyone true spontaneous casters at that point? What do you achieve by making some classes decide which subset of their spells they can cast each day?Either embrace Vancian casting or drop it. Or choose on an individual basis which classes can cast spontaneously and which classes have to do Vancian spell preparation. But 5e Vancian is just the worst of both worlds. All the added busywork of spell preparation with none of the interesting resource management that’s supposed to come with it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charlaquin, post: 7405542, member: 6779196"] Unpopular opinion: Fire-and-forget Vancian is better than 5e Vancian. In fire-and-forget, every single use of a spell is a limited resource, whereas in 5e Vancian, only the spell slot is a resource, as with spontaneous casters. And there’s nothing inherently [I]wrong[/I] with that, but then what’s the point of “preparing” a subset of your spells each day? I don’t see spell preparation as an interesting thing on its own. But at least in a traditional Vancian system it serves a purpose. It forces you to think not just about how many 3rd level spells you have left, but about how many [I]fireballs[/I] you have left. The preparation is an added layer of complexity that you put up with because it makes for a deeper casting system. But in neo-Vancian, preparing spells is just this vestigial extra step with no benefit. Everyone’s a spontaneous caster, but some of them have to choose their list of spells they can spontaneously cast at the beginning of the day. But for what benefit? Why not just make everyone true spontaneous casters at that point? What do you achieve by making some classes decide which subset of their spells they can cast each day? Either embrace Vancian casting or drop it. Or choose on an individual basis which classes can cast spontaneously and which classes have to do Vancian spell preparation. But 5e Vancian is just the worst of both worlds. All the added busywork of spell preparation with none of the interesting resource management that’s supposed to come with it. [/QUOTE]

Verification