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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5911438" data-attributes="member: 32740">I would urge care in the choice of words here.  He didn't say "they WILL do this".  He said,In short, he hasn't set this in stone.  It is their current thinking.  He makes it quite clear further down that ALL the stuff about magic he was presenting was still subject to playtest; that just because they thought they had a good idea doesn't mean it was actually going to work out just as they thought.  It's a complex topic because it touches on nearly EVERY other aspect of the game - WHAT does magic affect?  HOW does it affect it?  How does that change the ways in which the various spellcasting classes and their abilities are actually used in a game?I think, personally, I will likely be able to accept any number of different, even restrictive and unpreferred means of handling things.  Keeping wands as spell containers for example... I've played D&D since the 1970' with that very notion.  If they didn't change it I don't supposed I would chafe too much.  However, I would certainly chide them for having missed SO MANY opportunities to make them vastly more interesting.  Just read through the thread and you pick up dozens of ideas and fuel for a dozen more. The issue as I see it is that D&D's handling of wands, staves, even potions and scrolls just doesn't fit fantasy FICTION (written, movie, or other) - EXCEPT that fiction which is directly based on D&D.  It is a highly "artificial" rules construction to make a magic wand a simple reservoir for a bunch of just one type of spell - wand of magic missiles, wand of cure light wounds, wand of fireballs.  Oh wizards do USE wands for those sorts of effects, but that is so rarely all that the wizard DOES do with a wand. But a wand is so seldom JUST an implement either.  It isn't just a little power amplifier that the wizard plugs into his hand to make the spells he casts more powerful.  Again, they indeed DO SO, but that is virtually never ALL that it is for. Where I think this leads is quite an "Old School" conceit - that magic is RARE, and special, and unpredicatable and above all interesting.  It isn't just a trite, fixed formula or variable to make the game go to 11.  If we want D&D to do more than model JUST D&D we need to have wands that are capable of doing a RANGE of things that we see spellcasters do with wands in books and movies.  I would rather see them just port over wand rules from Harry Potter straight across than leave wands continue as mere spell containers - EVEN IF they restrict the spells that wands can actually contain (a move that is only about 30+ years overdue.) We can't be asking, "what can a D&D wizard do with a scroll", we need to be asking, "what do we see wizards doing with scrolls in books and movies, how can D&D implement that, and how stupid would it be to just choose ONE THING from all those options and say scrolls will only ever do that."  I believe there is a HUGE temptation to do that - to limit scrolls or wands or whatever, to doing just ONE thing.  Doing even ONE OTHER thing will have to be a job given to something else - a staff, or a tome, or an innate class ability.  Why?  Because that makes it a rule that is easy to write and cannot be argued with.  You only have to convince people to accept the limitations that brings with it."I want to see a staff that does this.""Sorry, in D&D staves do something different - you need a magic shoe combined with the Widget Use skill to do what you're asking.""Well, I'd rather have a wizard with a staff who can do it, but I guess I'll make a shoe-wearing Widget specialist then." If you keep trying to put MAGIC items into mathematical little restrictive cubes in order to try to keep control of the chaos all you're going to do is force the chaos to find easier channels to squeeze out of.  EMBRACE the wow factor of magic.  Let wands do what we want wands to do - store a few spells, improve some of our casting ability, let us accomplish a few things we couldn't do without a wand, and grow with a character to become an item deservedly associated directly with that character. "Grabthar pulls out 'Grabthar's Hammer' (+2 !) and charges the enemy.""The enemy recognizes Grabthar's Hammer and half of them flee.""Pooter the wizard pulls out his brand new Wand +3(!) and warns the remainder that it is +1 better than his old Wand +2.""Pooter is mobbed by the enemy and takes umpty d-everything in damage because they could care less about your additional +1.  Plus, you have a dumb name." There are just gobs and gobs of really cool ideas you can do with magic and magic items and nearly every one of them would be worlds better than having ANYTHING in D&D be a mere spell container because it's one type of widget and not another, or a mere +x anything because it works easily with the math. I'm not offering the One True Solution unless it's to assert that there ISN'T a One True Solution.  Mearls says,THAT, I think, is at least the PATH to the solution.</blockquote>

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