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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jsaving" data-source="post: 7988454" data-attributes="member: 16726">Well, what we know for sure is that sorcerers are much less popular than wizards around the gaming table despite sorcerer spells coming exclusively from the wizard spell list.  D&D Beyond pegs sorcerers as the game's second least popular class based on data from tens of thousands of players and char-gen sites also put sorcerers more or less at the bottom.But as [USER=7024283]@KnightGwen[/USER] and others illustrate, there is no consensus on why they are unpopular.  Some people see 5e sorcerers as similar to 3e rangers, wimpy power-wise but with flavor text that hints at great possibilities if only the proper power-ups could be found.  However others see 5e sorcerers as more akin to the 2e cleric, fine power-wise but terminally dull because party dynamics force them into cookie-cutter build choices lest they offend somebody around the gaming table by choosing too many "fun" spells.  For example:I personally think the 5e team made a couple of key design mistakes that contributed to this perception.  The most fundamental mistake was to "balance" the sorcerer's class features by severely limiting the size and variety of its spell list, which fails to actually do much for balance but does greatly increase the chances of cookie-cutter meta builds dominating the sorcerer landscape.  A related mistake was to choose that limited spell list in such a way that sorcerers more or less automatically have specialist schools, but without the rich set of abilities and lore provided to 5e's specialist wizards.  And a third mistake was not leaning much more heavily into the flavor of why sorcerers are supposedly different from wizards, their ability to shape spells rather than simply memorizing formulae.What I would do is give them no extra "nova" power whatsoever but lots more versatility.  Give them the wizard spell list.  Let them retrain metamagic feats every time they rest.  Let them hot-swap flavor variables like the type of damage done to emphasize their no-need-to-prepare ethos ("oh it's a fire elemental, step aside wizard while I cast an iceball").  And then make sure wizards never receive the ability to make similar substitutions in as fluid a manner.That, I think, is the way to actually give sorcerers a unique and viable role in an edition where wizards have absorbed just about everything sorcerers used to be.</blockquote>

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