D&D General The 3.5 Binder was a really cool class

[I'm A Banana]

Right, but that's a very niche taste. Which sure, there's room for narrowly niche options in the game. But as pointed out, getting buy in from the entire group can sometimes be hard when it impacts everyone.

I do not think it is a very niche taste.

I have seen multiple wild sorcerers played in different groups without issue.

Rather, I think randomness appeals to one of the reasons why people enjoy TTRPGs, and control and decision-making, both being mentally exhausting activities, are part of why D&D (and to some degree other TTRPGs) can be hard to play.

Emergent gameplay is desirable, and randomness is a key element. We roll dice to find out what will happen. Determining what happens is often a lot less fun than finding out what happens.

 

[Hussar]

My personal experience has been that it’s very frustrating at low levels if one of the bad results come up. IE a tpk from a fireball centered on a party of level 2 pcs.

But, how would you get that result? In 2024, you could cast a Fireball but it's extremely unlikely. Like about .3% chance. And, even then, that's after you've surged. Most campaigns are never going to see that happen.

Having seen more than a few Wild Mages in action, I don't think anyone really seems to have much of an issue with it.

 

[I'm A Banana]

But, how would you get that result? In 2024, you could cast a Fireball but it's extremely unlikely. Like about .3% chance. And, even then, that's after you've surged. Most campaigns are never going to see that happen.

I don't think the "fireball yourself" is even an option in '24, and that is likely specifically due to that particular result sometimes being a bummer. I think it's fine to not have subclasses that might accidentally kill the party (even if it is a real low chance to do that -- you'd have to cast a spell, roll a 20, roll that result, and ALSO have your entire party within 20' of you...).

About the worst thing you can do in '24 is turn yourself into a plant or frighten yourself or poison someone. None of which are quite at the same scale. Though, they do suck a bit, getting a bad result on the die is not really a problem. It's part of the fun. If you don't want to roll bad sometimes, maybe don't choose a subclass where rolling bad sometimes is part of the fun.

The idea that narrative decision-making is the fun part of the game is only partially true. Rolling dice and reacting to what they tell you is ALSO a fun part of the game -- and a part the wild sorcerer leans into a bit more than others.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

In a scripted format, you'd get the silly results when the situation is low stakes, a negative result when failure is recoverable, and a beneficial result when you're in a pinch. No Fireballs out of nowhere when you're showing off in the tavern, very few moment where your magic fails you when you need it most, lots of praying for a lucky result and getting it when you need it most. Because that's the fantasy of wild magic.

I have absolutely no idea how to translate that into a game format better than the current version. The random result table is blindly random, which doesn't produce narratively appropriate results. But what else can you do? Have the DM hand pick a result? Give that power to the player and trust they won't always just pick the best one? Neither sounds like a great idea.

If you can dream up a better way, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise I'm marking it down as a character archetype that doesn't translate between mediums well. It'll go on the list right next to "Brooding lone wolf who refuses to interact with the party a majority of the time but in a dire situation turns out to have anticipated and prepared for exactly that crisis."

the only thing i can think of would essentially be to make multiple spell riders players can pick from that are flavoured as wild magic.
so like, you can have a feature where your magic does something silly like give you a duck's beak or make the chairs in the tavern dance, and mechanically that results in bombing the performance BUT being very distracting, so it becomes a useful tool for, say, buying the rogue time to break into someone's room.

that kind of rips the experience of wild magic out of the fiction, though, so...

 

[W'rkncacnter]

the only thing i can think of would essentially be to make multiple spell riders players can pick from that are flavoured as wild magic.
so like, you can have a feature where your magic does something silly like give you a duck's beak or make the chairs in the tavern dance, and mechanically that results in bombing the performance BUT being very distracting, so it becomes a useful tool for, say, buying the rogue time to break into someone's room.

that kind of rips the experience of wild magic out of the fiction, though, so...

well, actually, hold on, you could also do a "scrolling" random table (i.e. a table for which the possible results change based on some variable unrelated to the dice) that keys off, say, what percentage of your hit points you have remaining. so, like, at full HP you could have results be fairly trivial or mostly RP related, but then as you lose HP the results get more and more dangerous. then you could maybe have a turnaround point (e.g. bloodied) where results start getting more and more positive until nearly everything you've got at low HP is some form of comeback. i'd probably have the table's results scale as you level up too.