D&D 5E So Where my Witches at?

[Alzrius]

Looking this thread over, I'm left wondering if D&D could take any inspiration from Pathfinder's implementation of a witch character class, something it's had in both first and second edition. Given that there's no discussion among Pathfinder fans (that I'm aware of) about "playing a character with levels in the witch class doesn't really feel like playing a witch," I'd presume that Paizo's succeeded in fulfilling the conceptual space that we think of a witch as occupying. What, if anything, could D&D take away from that?​

 

[SkidAce]

OK, so how do you gate that restrictiveness in mechanical terms to force the Witch/Occultist to be less common? Minimum stat requirements?

You dont have to force anything...the players can play as many as they like, and you design the world and say whether they are rare or not.

And in their post they mentioned a reason for witchcraft to be rare, wizardry is easier.

 

[Remathilis]

Looking this thread over, I'm left wondering if D&D could take any inspiration from Pathfinder's implementation of a witch character class, something it's had in both first and second edition. Given that there's no discussion among Pathfinder fans (that I'm aware of) about "playing a character with levels in the witch class doesn't really feel like playing a witch," I'd presume that Paizo's succeeded in fulfilling the conceptual space that we think of a witch as occupying. What, if anything, could D&D take away from that?​

Which (witch?) is a bit of my point; I did a quick Google search through the Paizo boards and found a single thread that ranted about how the witch was sexist for only being for women (it's not) and that it doesn't accurately represent Wiccan tradition (it's not supposed to). The vast majority of PF players disagreed with that OP. There might have been more somewhere, but I wasn't going to try to find every keyword search to find them.

Suffice to say, if there had been major blowback to Witch being a character class, Paizo probably wouldn't have updated the class to 2nd edition.

D&D, with a different design philosophy than Pathfinder, might not need a full witch class. But I still believe there is good design space for subclasses that could bring elements of it to other classes.

 

[SkidAce]

No, it isn’t.

At all. You’ve got it completely wrong. Misogyny is any discrimination that is oriented on a non-masculine gender, whether it’s against “all the women” or against a single women, but the specific action, word, or attitude, is about her gender rather than directly about whatever else is going on.

That is, calling a woman who doesn’t act how you would prefer women to act by a term that is specific an insult for women, like “witch” or its close rhyming cousin, is misogynist. Calling her a douche bag, jerk, a-hole, or other such general insult, is not.

You do know the origin of "douch bag" right? I don't think its general.

 

[Remathilis]

You dont have to force anything...the players can play as many as they like, and you design the world and say whether they are rare or not.

And in their post they mentioned a reason for witchcraft to be rare, wizardry is easier.

It could also just be that there are fewer practitioners of it because there are fewer people to train them. The Old Ways have fallen out of favor and wizardry is more common or accepted.

 

[Guest 6801328]

You do know the origin of "douch bag" right? I don't think its general.

Err...a douche bag isn’t female. It’s an inanimate object, and usually (in my experience) applied to men, and...curiously enough...often to exactly the sort of guy who uses the word “witch” to describe a woman who is insufficiently awed by his own imagined alpha status.

If there’s any misogyny inherent in the word, it might be the implication that a product designed for that purpose is especially unclean.

 

[Guest 6801328]

It could also just be that there are fewer practitioners of it because there are fewer people to train them. The Old Ways have fallen out of favor and wizardry is more common or accepted.

Or maybe they are rare because so many get burned at the stake.

 

[Lanefan]

Why does it mean to be gated? Even if every player in your campaign chose that class, the numbers would still be statistically insignificant, right?

That's just it - the idea of a rare class is that every player can't choose it: it only comes up once in a while.

 

[Lanefan]

I personally would make them Wisdom based arcane casters, giving the druidy/clericy "old-magic" feel to the class.

Wisdom-based arcane casters. Hmmm - that's an interesting concept.

Another option might be that they need both good Int and good Wis - say, good Int to learn their spells and then good Wis to cast them?

This would keep with the theme of them having to search the deeper parts of the multiverse to channel their magic, instead of just having to study it like Wizards do. You could even make them have to learn their spells instead of prepare them, making them much more restricted than Wizards are.

Every arcane caster has to learn spells (once only for each one) so I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Elaborate?

 

[cbwjm]

That's just it - the idea of a rare class is that every player can't choose it: it only comes up once in a while.

That used to be the idea until 3e where ability requirements were done away with. Since then, class rarity is more a background element for a world.