Vancian isn't really dead...?

[RyvenCedrylle]

"Gawd. That hurts. My main problem with it is now, just like before, you have to see the future and wonder which will be more important that particular day, Blur or Feather Fall... sigh." is not entirely right. It's more like having to choose between Fireball and Acid Breath (from 3E). In 4e, Blur and Feather Fall are Utilities and don't impinge on your ability to play magical artillery barrage. You've got 3 of those by level 10 on top of all your fireworks. I actually enjoyed playing wizards that didn't use heavy firepower at all, but that's a different post.

 

[SSquirrel]

That was probably the first houserule my wife made. If you have multiple abilities of a given level you don't have to memorize, you always know them and just have the normal daily limits on how many of them you make use of. If you use Acid Arrow, go ahead and set aside the card for your other L1 daily spells.

 

[hong]

You could just not play a wizard.

Apropos of nothing, I wonder how the game would change if you made all per-day powers per-milestone instead.

 

[Otterscrubber]

You could just not play a wizard.

Apropos of nothing, I wonder how the game would change if you made all per-day powers per-milestone instead.

I like this thought, it just doesn't sit well with me that some fairly popular abilities from 3e are now usable only once, and then you have to rest 8 hours to get them back. I always like that as you leveled, abilities that you were able to use 1/day at 5th level became 3/day at 15th, or something along those lines. Helped provide a sense of advancement. Perhaps something like dailies eventually become encounter once you are 10 levels past the point where you could originally use them? I can see problems with this though as some L1 dailies are still quite useful at the higher levels, but I think you see what I mean. Right?......

 

[Regicide]

You could just not play a wizard.

Apropos of nothing, I wonder how the game would change if you made all per-day powers per-milestone instead.

Make them per encounter. *shrug* If the players want to fight once and go back to town and tell the plot it can go shove itself, theres only so much railroading the DM can do.

 

[hvg3akaek]

Yeah, I was hoping for "daily" powers to eventually become "encounter" powers, and possibly (by epic levels) your initial dailies would become at-wills.

 

[hvg3akaek]

((double post))

 

[Harr]

Well, actually, if it's the "seeing the future" aspect of it that bothers you, 4e is probably worse than 3e. You're picking even your encounter powers from a list and will be stuck with them at least until you gain a level and have an opportunity to retrain. Picked Lightning Bolt just in time to learn that storm giants will feature heavily in the next few sessions? Oops.

Huh, I never thought of ti that way... By this logic, Wizards not only kept vancian spellcasting, but actually made the entire system vancian.

Check it, you:

- choose your powers way before you ever know if they're going to be the right choice
- have a limited number of uses of powers per encounter or per day
- a certain amount of time must pass before you can use them again.

Is that a good description of what 'vancian' is? (I'm not really sure). If it is, Wizards not only kept us in vancian spellcasting, they also gave us vancian melee combat, vancian archery, vancian stealth, vancian demon-pacts, etc etc. Which is hilarious (I'm probably wrong though).

 

[Seeker_of_Truth]

Double post

 

[Seeker_of_Truth]

(I'm probably wrong though).

You're not wrong about power selection, but it's not Vancian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_(gaming)

Memorization — The game character must memorize a fixed number of spells from the list of all spells the character knows. This memorization can only occur once in a specified time period, usually a day, or it may require the character to rest for several hours. This system is sometimes called "Vancian" in the game designer community, since its first use, in Dungeons & Dragons, was inspired by the way magic works in Jack Vance's Dying Earth world