Should Power Source have greater meaning?

[UngeheuerLich]

hmmh, primal takes powe from the naturals (primal) plane... but is see where you are coming from...

actually primal as well as arcane take powers from the elemental power spurce, which makes everything blurry to be honest...

illusion should have been drawn from the shadow power source...

if you ask me, eliminate arcane completely... and then add arcane rituals... arcane for me is the power to bind all kinds of magic to you by oerforming arcane rituals...

A wizard would need to do an arcane ritual each morning to .... hmm lets call it "memorize" spells from those different sources.

Maybe add some FEW strictly arcane spells like "mnemonic enhancer" or "force" spells...

But divine should be eliminated as well... in the same manner... maybe some few splls should remain: radiant/holy energy spells. Maybe some astral summonings.

 

[Incenjucar]

Keep in mind that 4E intentionally avoids filling in the grid and the assumption of parallels.

Not every power source needs to come from a specific plane all its own, nor does every plane need to have its own power source.

Arcane is the catch-all due to historical issues, but it's basically Rules/Formula-Based magic. Unfortunately, because the elemental power source is the last source to be added to the game, and people are still used to everything being wizards, they were unable to split things off where it would have been appropriate.

 

[KidSnide]

And here's where the biggest screw up is for their power source concept... Arcane should be directly powered by the Feywild. The Feywild as spec'd has an overabundance of arcane energy and pretty much all the creatures there use it and are infused by it. But the problem is... because the Feywild is considered by pretty much everybody to be more about NATURE, rather than MAGIC... you have the conundrum of creating Arcane classes that have nothing to do with the Feywild, and instead Arcane becomes this nebulous source where dragons power sorcerers, music powers bards, putting elementals inside objects powers artificers, and warlocks negotiate with archfey, far realm creatures, devils, and their own ancestors to get their abilities! What the hell? The truth is... the Arcane source is actually NOT A POWER SOURCE AT ALL. It's a label that gets assigned to any class that uses the nebulous term 'magic'... regardless of where that 'magic' comes from.

I agree that the Arcane power source is less cohesive than most of the other power sources, but I don't see the faewild as significantly more "natural" than "primal". It's both those things. Eladrin, to pick an especially prominent faewild denizen, are explicitly the "magical" part of the elven race, in comparison to the considerably more primal Elves.

And I always liked the idea that the Primal power source is about the power of the prime material plane. The faewild just doesn't seem quite right.

And warlocks? They're the special ones who get to go cross-source, as they can be Primal for the Fey Pacts, Divine for the Infernal Pacts, Psionic for the Star Pacts, Shadow for Gloom Pacts, and Arcane for the Vestige Pacts.

This is a great point. I think warlocks are intrinsically arcane in the sense that they use arcane magic to draw upon these other power sources. But once a warlock makes a practice of drawing upon that other power source, the warlock totally becomes a multi-power source caster.

-KS

 

[Tony Vargas]

According to my PHB, there are also: Shadow, Ki, and Elemental.

Ki has been dropped - proscribed, quashed, condemned for being too ethnic - and the one Ki class, the Monk, folded into the Psionic source. Shadow was given short thrift in the Heroes of Shadow book - only two Shadow classes, only one of them new, aside from that, it's just an excuse to give Mages more schools and Warpriests another Domain. Elemental has yet to be developed, but is supposedly queued up.

So the extant Sources that actually have classes to their name are:

Martial
Divine
Arcane
Primal
Psionic
Shadow

Those Sources that have the complete quadfecta - that cover all 4 /roles/ are:

Divine
Arcane
Primal
Psionic


There was a little controversy over whether each source should cover all 4 roles. It was a tad comical, really. When PH1 hit, there were 3 sources, one covered 3 roles, the other 2, 2 each. People asked, "hey, what about a Martial Controller?" WotC responded "we're not going to just do 'grid-filling.'" They then proceded to fill the Divine and Arcane grids, and then introduce Primal and Psionics with their grids, likewise, filled. In doing so, they added classes that had precious little archetypal support - the Avenger (there was already an Avenging Paladin), Invoker (different from the cleric on a technicality), Ardent, Warden, Battlemind, & Shaman - with Monk and Barbarian shoe-horned in to Sources to round them out. Bizzarre. Then, after all that disembling, they introduced a martial/primal controller that overlapped both the Ranger and Seeker. WTH?

IMHO, each Source should cover all 4 roles, for one very good reason: So that a player can take a general concept he likes, and adapt it to fill a role that fits the party; so that everyone gets to play more or less the character they want. If the only Ki class were the Monk (a striker), and everyone wanted to play one, you'd have an imbalanced party. But if there were a Monk (striker), Teacher (leader), Master (controller), and Lord (defender), everyone could play something close to what they wanted without having a lopsided party or stepping on eachother's toes. (I know Ki is dead, it's just a hypothetical example).


Source also plays a big part in the flavor of a character. Martial hones skills, body, & mind to mastery, Arcane cast occult spells, Divine revere and are empowered by the Gods, Primal call up on the forces of untamed Nature. A martial power is already completely different from an arcane power: One will almost always involve a weapon if it's an attack, the other an implement; one might use a wide variety of damage keywords, another consistently untyped damage; and so forth. Those are pretty decent ways to evoke differences. But, /also/ using powers to paint differences among classes gets redundant, fighters and warlords both use a lot of melee weapon attacks, including some that end up quite similar. Sources would feel more meaningful - and, classes would be easier to design and builds easier to add - if powers were grouped under them, and classes differentiated by their features, including role-support in those features.


Finally, as far as mixing sources in a single character, it's fine, and certainly called for - but can be done by Multi-Classing, or Hybriding, or perhaps even by choice of Theme and background. With options like that, you can have /any/ combination of sources you like, a much more efficient aproach than doing such combinations one special class at a time.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I see "arcane" as less tied to any given plane, and more about the glue that binds. Really, if you get right down to it, being a "wizard" or "mage" or having access the "arcane" is all about knowing obscure things, and how to manipulate them.

This is perhaps getting too far afield into Rolemaster or similar territory, but conceptually, I see it more like this.

How you do things:

Martial - mundane means, mundane skills
Channeling - using something by rote and/or intuition
Arcane - magical manipulation means, lore, truenames, etc.

Then power sources would be:

Ki - internal energy
Primal - spirits, nature, elements
Far Realms - chaos, shadows
Divine - from the gods, astral

A martial character that wants water from the stream grabs a bucket and hauls it. A channeling character turns on his pipe and gets it. An arcane character teleports the water to his position, or arranges to be where the water is when he needs it.

 

[Gryph]

Ki has been dropped - proscribed, quashed, condemned for being too ethnic - and the one Ki class, the Monk, folded into the Psionic source. Shadow was given short thrift in the Heroes of Shadow book - only two Shadow classes, only one of them new, aside from that, it's just an excuse to give Mages more schools and Warpriests another Domain. Elemental has yet to be developed, but is supposedly queued up.

So the extant Sources that actually have classes to their name are:

Martial
Divine
Arcane
Primal
Psionic
Shadow

Those Sources that have the complete quadfecta - that cover all 4 /roles/ are:

Divine
Arcane
Primal
Psionic


There was a little controversy over whether each source should cover all 4 roles. It was a tad comical, really. When PH1 hit, there were 3 sources, one covered 3 roles, the other 2, 2 each. People asked, "hey, what about a Martial Controller?" WotC responded "we're not going to just do 'grid-filling.'" They then proceded to fill the Divine and Arcane grids, and then introduce Primal and Psionics with their grids, likewise, filled. In doing so, they added classes that had precious little archetypal support - the Avenger (there was already an Avenging Paladin), Invoker (different from the cleric on a technicality), Ardent, Warden, Battlemind, & Shaman - with Monk and Barbarian shoe-horned in to Sources to round them out. Bizzarre. Then, after all that disembling, they introduced a martial/primal controller that overlapped both the Ranger and Seeker. WTH?

IMHO, each Source should cover all 4 roles, for one very good reason: So that a player can take a general concept he likes, and adapt it to fill a role that fits the party; so that everyone gets to play more or less the character they want. If the only Ki class were the Monk (a striker), and everyone wanted to play one, you'd have an imbalanced party. But if there were a Monk (striker), Teacher (leader), Master (controller), and Lord (defender), everyone could play something close to what they wanted without having a lopsided party or stepping on eachother's toes. (I know Ki is dead, it's just a hypothetical example).


Source also plays a big part in the flavor of a character. Martial hones skills, body, & mind to mastery, Arcane cast occult spells, Divine revere and are empowered by the Gods, Primal call up on the forces of untamed Nature. A martial power is already completely different from an arcane power: One will almost always involve a weapon if it's an attack, the other an implement; one might use a wide variety of damage keywords, another consistently untyped damage; and so forth. Those are pretty decent ways to evoke differences. But, /also/ using powers to paint differences among classes gets redundant, fighters and warlords both use a lot of melee weapon attacks, including some that end up quite similar. Sources would feel more meaningful - and, classes would be easier to design and builds easier to add - if powers were grouped under them, and classes differentiated by their features, including role-support in those features.


Finally, as far as mixing sources in a single character, it's fine, and certainly called for - but can be done by Multi-Classing, or Hybriding, or perhaps even by choice of Theme and background. With options like that, you can have /any/ combination of sources you like, a much more efficient aproach than doing such combinations one special class at a time.

I think you could design a really good d20 game this way. You would spoil the design if you tried to shoehorn it into a set of classes.

This could be an excellent approach for classless D&D (if that's not an oxymoron) with character features, powers, feats, power sources and skills all largely intact from 4e.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think you could design a really good d20 game this way. You would spoil the design if you tried to shoehorn it into a set of classes.

Classes would still neatly fit at the intersection of Source & Role.

 

[TwoSix]

The concept of "Artifice" isn't a power source, it's a way of USING a power source. Martial Artifice is Batarangs, Arcane Artifice is Alchemy, Divine Artifice is Runes, Primal Artifice is Fetishes, Elemental is Golems, etc etc. Artifice is just using a variety of objects to make attacks, and tells you nothing about what empowers those objects.

A power source is where the ENERGY behind the ability comes from.

Artifice as a power source is like having a "Sword" power source.

If it weren't for Arcane, I would totally agree with you. All the other power sources map well to a defined place in the cosmology.* But arcane is really the power source of "well, you do magic" and class merely delineates the method of use.

*(Infernal pact warlocks and sorcerers in general argue against the "Arcane is from the Feywild" approach.)

 

[Incenjucar]

If it weren't for Arcane, I would totally agree with you. All the other power sources map well to a defined place in the cosmology.* But arcane is really the power source of "well, you do magic" and class merely delineates the method of use.

*(Infernal pact warlocks and sorcerers in general argue against the "Arcane is from the Feywild" approach.)

Arcane is the magic of secret knowledge, hence the name. Arcane is knowing that if you wiggle your thumb clockwise while thinking of exactly four daisies, a pumpkin will explode on the opposite side of the world. It's about knowing about oddities in creation that can be exploited for weird effects. It's a little bit of physics and a little bit of law, and all about finding the loopholes in reality.

You could certainly argue that arcane is, itself, a method of accessing other power sources, and not a power source - warlocks indicate this very strongly. However, you could also argue that it taps a more general magic, which other power sources drastically alter.

If someone held me at gunpoint and demanded that I indicate the power source for Arcane magic, I'd say it was the magic of the Ethereal. I am not familiar with anything about Arcane described in 4th Edition that would not work with that.

--

As an aside, I don't think that it is appropriate to consider magic to be strictly from one plane or another. All planes have plenty of room for Shadows, Chaos, Secrets, Divinity, Spirits, Minds, etc. Some places just have more affinity for one or the other.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Not every power source needs to come from a specific plane all its own, nor does every plane need to have its own power source.

But the thing is... they already HAVE power sources for all 5 planes. Divine does come from the Astral Sea, Elemental does come from the Elemental Chaos, Shadow does come from the Shadowfell, Primal does come from the Prime, and while Arcane doesn't come from the Feywild, the Feywild is full of it.

The only problem is... the Feywild as a plane is not arcane and magical enough, and is in fact too nature-based that the Primal classes should be an integral part of it (rather than based in the Prime).

Arcane is the catch-all due to historical issues, but it's basically Rules/Formula-Based magic. Unfortunately, because the elemental power source is the last source to be added to the game, and people are still used to everything being wizards, they were unable to split things off where it would have been appropriate.

I agree that we have the arcane source because of historical issues... but I disagree that its JUST rules/formula-based magic, because that really only applies to two of the classes-- the wizard and the artificer. Swordmages and bard don't follow rules or formulas... they just can 'tap into' magic (whatever 'magic' is). Sorcerers don't follow rules or formulas either, they just are magical (and get that magic from the 'wild' or 'dragons' or 'storms' or the 'cosmos' whatever that means). And warlocks are given their magic from outer-planal sources just like Divine characters are... except since its not from 'gods', they don't get attributed to the Divine source for whatever reason (even though it's a much closer source than whatever the 'arcane' source is supposed to represent.)