Li Shenron
Legend
Ok, here is the mechanical description of invocations from the playtest document:
Now personally, I think they can afford to shrink down a picture of Hennett fighting a dire rat to make room for that much text.
You misunderstood my point. The space to describe how invocations work is minimal. It is the description of all invocations which requires space. Currently, the Warlock ever knows many less invocations compared to the number of spells known by the Wizard, so the space needed for descriptions of all invocations is much less than the space needed for arcane spells. But still we need enough invocations in the book so that there is actually a wide array of choices to make the Warlock class flexible enough.
Personally I think that having 3 invocations in the book for each invocation that the Warlock can learn is a good ratio (notice than typically arcane spells in the book have been in the past more than 3 times the amount of spells a Wizard typically learns). This means that e.g. if each Warlock will have the capability of learning 15 invocations during the span of 20 class levels, there should be something like 40-50 invocations in the book to choose from. This allows the Warlock to feel like a major class rather than a niche.
That many invocations can probably fit in 8-10 pages. It's not too much, it can be done... my concern is only that if they want to squeeze too many classes in the first PHB and each class has its own totally separate system of abilities (NOTE that the Sorcerer OTOH has a separate mechanics but doesn't require new abilities defined and described because it uses the same spells as the Wizard), then the risk is that they have to diminish the flexibility of each class.
These are the factors summarized:
- number of classes in the PHB
- number of mechanics which need a list of their own selectable abilities
- number of unique spells/invocations/whatever for each class
- size of the PHB
They will have to make a trade-off between these factors, and you can bet that the size of the PHB will be limited by economic decisions. So all I'm saying is that if I had to make a decision on what to cut, I would cut the number of classes (not too much tho... not less than 8 in order to include all the most traditional classes) because I can always move the Warlock to a supplement and there give it all the space it needs.
YMMV, but the bottom line is that I personally prefer to have fewer PHB classes with more breadth and flexibiliy and then have supplements to add more classes and subsystems (so that supplements work more "modular").
The opposite approach is to have more PHB classes with fewer options each, and then let supplements add more options instead of modules. I like this approach less because IMXP it gives the PHB a shorter mileage and forces people to buy more supplements sooner.
