Vancian Spellcasting's Real Problem - CoDzilla

[UngeheuerLich]

Vancian casting was not the problem. 3.5 was.
ADnD had checks and balances. The wizard was always on the brink of death. One enemy getting close could mean a fast death for the wizard if not prepared properly.

 

[JRRNeiklot]

Vancian casting was not the problem. 3.5 was.
ADnD had checks and balances. The wizard was always on the brink of death. One enemy getting close could mean a fast death for the wizard if not prepared properly.

This. Also casting times meant a kid with a rock could disrupt any spell.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No, you, actually, do not. Some people just have it locked in their minds that there has to be one. There are people that have run all Fighter campaigns. All rogue campaigns. All wizard campaigns. These single class campaigns have even been discussed in 2e Complete Class Handbooks and Dragon articles (I can't recall if the 3e Complete Handbooks discussed such campaigns). Guess what? nobody could cast healing magic and there were no cure light wound wands.

Yes, but there is a huge impact on how the game plays. Without healing magic your typical AD&D character is pretty much stuck with the hit points they started out with unless they can take a week off every time they get hit with a sword (which is possible of course, but there you go, major impact). Most published content is designed around the standard paradigm of having a cleric with several CLW/CSW/etc spells on hand too.

There's of course nothing WRONG with playing that way, but it is a very different game than the expected standard. Nothing would stop you from say playing without leaders in 4e either, though the details will be different and the impact less. Still, options exist.

The point is in AD&D, unless the game was set up for it specifically, a cleric was pretty much mandatory.

 

[Janaxstrus]

Yes, but there is a huge impact on how the game plays. Without healing magic your typical AD&D character is pretty much stuck with the hit points they started out with unless they can take a week off every time they get hit with a sword (which is possible of course, but there you go, major impact). Most published content is designed around the standard paradigm of having a cleric with several CLW/CSW/etc spells on hand too.

There's of course nothing WRONG with playing that way, but it is a very different game than the expected standard. Nothing would stop you from say playing without leaders in 4e either, though the details will be different and the impact less. Still, options exist.

The point is in AD&D, unless the game was set up for it specifically, a cleric was pretty much mandatory.

We once wanted to try a 3.5 campaign with all warforged multiclass wizards with repair spells. Never got quite too it yet.

 

[Buugipopuu]

Were they casting Summon Nature's Ally *? Congratulations. Those summons can grapple and attack, which quickly shuts down most enemies cold. With their feats, they could easily get +4 STR/+4 CON (a simple feat listed in the Player's Handbook that was clearly made for druids to take) and then those summons could become grapple/trip monsters. A Dire Wolf made trip attacks with every successful hit, with a bonus from size category, and an enormous strength. Resisting was nearly impossible for any humanoid.

So, you get Summon Nature's Ally III at 5th level, having spent your first level feat on Spell Focus(Conjuration) and your 3rd level feat on Augment Summoning, (which probably forces your 6th level feat to be Natural Spell and your 9th level feat to be Combat Casting), then waste a turn at the beginning of the fight casting the spell, which you can only do a couple of times per day, and stand a chance of wasting if you are hit before the start of your next turn, as summoning was one of the rare occasions where you actually had a chance of losing a spell in 3.5. So you're 5th level and want to try out your shiny new Summon Nature's Trap Detector/Cannon Fodder III. Of the 40-something CR5 creatures in the SRD, 9 are immune to tripping (due to magical flight, incorporeality or lacking limbs), 13 can fly, and so probably stay out of reach of your doggie, and the average Trip defence modifier of a CR 5 creature is 9.33, compared to your doggie's trip modifier (with augment summoning) of 13. Average AC is about 18, so he'll be hitting about 65% of the time, and tripping 70% of that. So you spent all your feats, used up your best spell, and an entire turn to have a ~46% chance of tripping one enemy, as long as it's not one of the 10-ish enemies which are immune, assuming nobody hits you after your go, and there's room to summon a Large creature. And 14 of the 40-ish CR5 monsters outreach a Dire Wolf, so doggie will get smacked in the face with an AoO before he even gets the chance to trip a quarter of the time.

That is hardly looking like the overpowered combo you're making it out to be. And things only get worse as you level up, or encounter more difficult than average monsters. The CR of the monsters you can summon increases slightly faster than spell level, which means slightly more than half as fast as the CR of the monsters you're facing. By the time you're 17th level and have Summon Nature's Ally IX, you're summoning CR 11 creatures and facing CR 17 ones. And those concentration checks to avoid losing the spell when you get ganked only get more difficult, as damage scales faster than skill rolls. Things like incorporeality and flight don't get less common either.

There are many things that made Druid overpowered, using Summon Nature's Ally to grapple and trip is not one of them. That Wildshape let you completely dump Str and Dex and still be a better front-line melee fighter than an actual Fighter was. But we already knew that, since Wildshape is based on Polymorph, and even Wizards admit that Polymorph was too good.

 

[Aenghus]

I'm not a fan either of the eggshell armed with a hammer style "balance" of 1e and 2e wizards or potential uberpower of 3e spellcasters.

I know spellcasters gravitate towards the most broken spells, because I've done it myself, and many other players do so as well. As more content is produced for a particular edition, players who look for them will put together the most broken spells, get as many of them as possible approved by their referee, then exploit the hell out of them, including any unintended synergy from combinations of various spells.

All editions of D&D have rewarded players of spellcasters for hunting down and using the most effective spells in their edition. These rewards were often disproportionately large compared to non-spellcasters, who had much less content to search, especially as magic item selection was more of a referee perogative prior to 3e.

As a referee, one of the biggest advantages of 4e was that there were very few broken powers or combinations, and the brokenness that existed tended to be far less than in previous editions. Amongst the advantages of weakening the link between mechanics and flavour text in 4e was that the effect of powers was clear and transparent and much less subjective than in previous editions, where some spells (eg illusions) varied widely in usefulness from group to group (from completely useless to a one-spell victory in some cases, for the same spell).

In previous editions I avoided subjective-power spells in favour of more reliable ones, at least till I learned the tastes of a particular referee and found out how he ruled on illusions, polymorph etc.

The problem with laying the responsibility on balance on spell designers alone, is that this is obviously too much to load on them - there will be broken spells regardless of the class design used, but the design rules used can mitigate how broken they can end up being, and reduce referee workload. The class design has to look at the issue and see what they can do to mitigate spellcasting classes being too strong or too weak.

Personally I would prefer more specialised spellcasters such as enchanters, illusionists and evokers, with powerful magic in their own speciality but more limited access to general magic,. This gives spellcasters strengths and weaknesses that aren't catastrophic in nature, and that play better as members of an adventuring party.

 

[KesselZero]

I'm showing my noob again, but would someone please define CoDzilla for me?

Thanks!

 

[Minigiant]

I'm showing my noob again, but would someone please define CoDzilla for me?

Thanks!

Cleric or Druid Zilla.

Basically a cleric or druid of a high enough level in 3E can get a few easy to obtain spells or feats to serve as a decent warrior, skillmonkey, healer, blaster, and utility caster all at the same time. With more splatbooks and less DM wrangling, it goes from decent to excellent.

This is a problem as other classes have easily replicated major class features (as most of the time they are just high number values). A CoDzilla can accidentally show up and outclass another character, making that character unnecessary or ruining their characterization.

Fortunately true CoDzillas are rarely seen but they can accidentally show up if players and DMs don't make sure they don't appear.

 

[The Shadow]

So you're saying D&D, one of the most generic fantasy systems out there, needs to make its wizards more generic?

...What?

D&D generic? What color is the sky on your world?

Because on my planet, "D&D fiction" is its own sub-genre, instantly recognizable as standing out from any other kind of fantasy.

Other than people who are deliberately trying to mimic D&D in their writing, I'm not aware of *any* fantasy works that use Vancian casting, to name just one thing. (Even Jack Vance's works aren't all that close to what we call 'Vancian'.)

There are a thousand other things like this. The D&D druid resembles almost nothing in legend, myth, or history. The weird D&D mishmash of polytheistic pantheons with Templar clerics is utterly unique (and honestly a little silly). The D&D ranger is like nothing in non-D&D fantasy fiction. (No, Aragorn almost certainly wouldn't be a D&D ranger. He doesn't use spells, or a bow, or two-weapon fighting.) I could go on and on.

There's nothing wrong with all this. D&D has developed its own distinctive flavor of fantasy, and that's fine. I do think some bits are a little silly, as I mentioned, but hey, nobody's perfect. What D&D is emphatically NOT, is generic. It is, in fact, notoriously difficult to translate many classic fantasy tropes and characters into D&D - you end up having to pound lots of square pegs into round holes.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

...What?

D&D generic? What color is the sky on your world?

Because on my planet, "D&D fiction" is its own sub-genre, instantly recognizable as standing out from any other kind of fantasy.

Other than people who are deliberately trying to mimic D&D in their writing, I'm not aware of *any* fantasy works that use Vancian casting, to name just one thing. (Even Jack Vance's works aren't all that close to what we call 'Vancian'.)

There are a thousand other things like this. The D&D druid resembles almost nothing in legend, myth, or history. The weird D&D mishmash of polytheistic pantheons with Templar clerics is utterly unique (and honestly a little silly). The D&D ranger is like nothing in non-D&D fantasy fiction. (No, Aragorn almost certainly wouldn't be a D&D ranger. He doesn't use spells, or a bow, or two-weapon fighting.) I could go on and on.

There's nothing wrong with all this. D&D has developed its own distinctive flavor of fantasy, and that's fine. I do think some bits are a little silly, as I mentioned, but hey, nobody's perfect. What D&D is emphatically NOT, is generic. It is, in fact, notoriously difficult to translate many classic fantasy tropes and characters into D&D - you end up having to pound lots of square pegs into round holes.

Which was honestly one of the brightest spots in the whole 4e thing. It seems vastly easier to do this in 4e and cut loose from a lot of rather oddball D&Disms if you care too. Of course if you basically don't WANT to do that, then it can also sometimes be a drawback. One could of course argue for going further too, but well, there has to be a line somewhere between D&D and not-D&D...