D&D 5E (2024) What’s the difference between sorcerers, warlocks, and wizards?

[Micah Sweet]

Daggerheart has a proposal for this that is quite nice, not sure if you have reviewed all the material there, but it would be easily transferable.

I don't suppose there's a way to see what you're talking about without buying Daggerheart? Does the quickstart cover it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Anything where magic/psychic abilities are in born and magic users are feared.

Wheel of time comes to mind. There is the Tower which teaches skill but the power is just in certain people and not others to start. The White Cloaks hunt down those with the power.

So some versions of Merlin are he is part demon and that ties into his magic.

Seventh son of a seventh son.

Harry Potter with its muggle divide and wizarding magical family lines.

Burning witches can be a mutant menace analogy.

Babylon 5's telepaths too.

 

[Scribe]

I don't suppose there's a way to see what you're talking about without buying Daggerheart? Does the quickstart cover it?

The Warlock is preview material, free, and the SRD as well.

https://www.daggerheart.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Warlock-v1.5-The-Void.pdf

This is what I was referencing however. The bottom section about a tithe.

 

[Hriston]

Anything where magic/psychic abilities are in born and magic users are feared.

Wheel of time comes to mind. There is the Tower which teaches skill but the power is just in certain people and not others to start. The White Cloaks hunt down those with the power.

So some versions of Merlin are he is part demon and that ties into his magic.

Seventh son of a seventh son.

Harry Potter with its muggle divide and wizarding magical family lines.

Burning witches can be a mutant menace analogy.

Channelers in The Wheel of Time is a great example. I've only seen some of the TV series.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The whole innate/learned distinction is something that do not exist in most fiction, as often magic & similar are both. You need to have some sort of innate spark, and then you are trained to use it. And I'm pretty sure it was so in D&D too, until they needed to invent sorcerer for 3e because wizard mechanics were too annoying. Once they moved to neo-vancian, that was no longer needed and the class ceased to have a purpose.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Harry Potter with its muggle divide and wizarding magical family lines.

harry potter wizards, despite having certain families with more potent 'magical bloodlines' otherwise pretty much totally fall into the wizard position IMO,

i think in alot of media outside of DnD the types of characters which most fit into the 'sorcerer' archetype don't actually deal with 'special bloodlines' or being 'touched by magic' so much, it's there but it's not lingered on or treated as significant to the powers they develop, X-men mutants have already been mentioned, quirks from my hero academia i think fall into a similar niche, as do benders from avatar, characters for who developing their powers happens more as an extension of their body than as anything academical that they can 'study'

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Not in D&D. Your framing, incidentally, biases things inherently. Why would pacts be "cheat codes"? Why wouldn't they be, say, carte blanche, or stuff too hot to handle (which is the analogy I used)? You're inherently twisting it so the only story you permit is the one that makes you right and everyone else wrong. There are other stories we can tell. WotC chose a different one. You don't like the one they chose. That's not the same as saying that it's bad that they chose it!

I don't think they consciously chose any story. They had fluff they slapped some rules on, with little thought what those rules represent. Warlock mechanics are what they are because someone had idea for alternate spell progression and it got slapped on that class without any thematic justification.

No? Why would it?

Do dragons work that way? Do angels work that way? Do demons work that way?

Now you're just literally inventing things without basis.

Do dragons, demons and angels have innate always on-magical abilities? Yes, yes they do! And as warlock chassis sorcerer you could have those as invocations. Wings, scales, truesight, etc.

Uh....no?

How...do you think divine magic works...?

Because, as a religious person myself, no. That's nothing like how reverence and transcendental experience work. Like, at all. Not even a little bit.

I mean I am relatively confident that in real life being a priest does not grant you any magic powers whatsoever, so in that sense it will definitely work differently in the game.

But the justification you invented for why warlock magic works like it does, is that the warlock is channelling a power of more powerful being. Which is exactly what D&D clerics do.

I mean, I have very literally argued--I'm pretty sure to you personally--that the Sorcerer we got sucked, and that the playtest Sorcerer was awesome. It had this whole thematics of being dual-souled, of having a constant tug-of-war battle between their mortal soul and their arcane one, with the distant but theoretical threat of the latter consuming the former, leaving them a twisted monster forever. Unleashing their magic power (which, in this context, was specifically spell points, so they did in fact access their power differently compared to Wizards) literally was taking off the leash, allowing their arcane soul to physically manifest in the world.

It was cool as naughty word, GENUINELY completely different from Wizards, nothing to do with metamagic, everything to do with an evolving playstyle across the course of each day. The possibilities of what other sorcerous souls could produce--what would a storm soul do? A shadow soul? A celestial soul?--were incredibly tantalizing.

But nope. Welcome to 5th edition, the place where creative game design went to die. Everything had to be """traditional"""--and by "traditional" I of course mean "like 3.5e as much as possible while paying lip service to the fact that it's known to have problems."

If you want to be mad, don't be mad at me for saying Sorcerers and Warlocks are cool. Be mad at WotC for caving to peer pressure at a moment's notice when they should have given even one single attempt to address the concerns and create something people could get behind.

But they didn't. They surrendered instantly, because 5e was all about surrendering to haters, and now we're stuck with dull, boring, flavorless crap.

Congratulations on winning the edition war. I'm sure your winnings must be ever so sweet.

I mean I'm pretty sure I was not part of any 3e vs 4e war and at that junction I chose 4e over Pathfinder even though I certainly have a lot of issues with it. So please leave your edition war paranoia out of this. But given your abject dislike of 5e, I don't understand why you are so ferociously defending the questionable design decision in it. And I am definitely not looking at this from the perspective of defending any sort of a tradition; quite contrary, I think including stuff just for tradition's sake is exactly what caused the issues here in the first place. I agree with @Aldarc that it would be best to have fresh look at what caster themes there could and should be, and then design classes that support those. And this would probably not result the same arcane caster classes that we currently have.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Service magicians provided, or at least purported to provide, spells for healing, divination, love, and protection from witchcraft, among other things. In England they were known as “cunning folk”. Their alleged sources of power included birthright, such as being the seventh son of a seventh son (or daughter), encounters with fairies, or possession of grimoires. These correspond, respectively, to D&D’s sorcerer, warlock and wizard classes.

In this excerpt from Popular Magic: Cunning-Folk in English History (2003), Owen Davies discusses inherited abilities and fairies:

To a certain extent, magical ability was also held to be a natural or inherited gift. This was most evident when it came to healing. Seventh sons and daughters, for example, were believed to possess innate powers to cure certain conditions, and, not surprisingly, cunning-folk often claimed to be so blessed. But such hereditary abilities were usually related to specific fields of practice. They did not imbue the practitioner with comprehensive magical powers. Prior to the eighteenth century some cunning-folk and other healers also claimed to have gained powers from the fairies. In 1438 a Somerset fortune-teller and healer named Agnes Hancock was charged before an ecclesiastical court with communicating with fairies, and claiming that she 'sought their advice whenever she pleased'. The Dorset cunning-man John Walsh told an ecclesiastical court in 1566 that he would go up to the hills where there were 'great heapes of earth' at midday or midnight, and there he would speak with the fairies who would tell him which of his clients were bewitched and where stolen goods could be found. In later decades fairy associations were most likely to be claimed by female practitioners. Joan Willimott, a Leicestershire healer examined for witchcraft in 1618, said she obtained her abilities to help the sick after a man named William Berry 'willed her to open her mouth, and hee would blow into her a Fairy which should doe her good'. In 1645 Ann Jefferies of St Teath, Cornwall, was arrested and questioned about the healing touch she said she had gained from the fairies (p. 70).​

Here, the same author gives an account of the use of magic books by cunning folk in his article “Cunning-Folk in England and Wales during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries” (1997):

Perceptions of inherited knowledge and innate ability (being a seventh son for example) certainly helped generate respect, but so did literacy and 'book learning'. The magical books of cunning-folk were held in great awe, and over and over again it is recounted how cunning-folk impressed their clients by poring over large tomes. The profitable production of written charms also required some degree of literacy, as did the reading and writing of the postal consultations many cunning-folk conducted. The evidence points to the fact that an illiterate cunning-person was unlikely to go very far. As one dissatified farm foreman remarked, after consulting the son of a cunning-woman, in 1889: 'he "was not scholar enuf" to be able to help' (p. 93).​

 

[Doug McCrae]

The X-Men, etc al. People born with strange supernatural abilities gain from their ancestry, whose powers spontaneously manifest, initially out of their control until they learn to harness them.

Don't tell me the Marvel Universe isn't a fantasy setting!

I completely agree that the X-Men are a major influence on the D&D sorcerer. In the 3.5 PHB's Background section for the sorcerer class, "sorcerers develop rudimentary powers at puberty." Marvel mutant powers first appear at the same time. "Their first spells are incomplete, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and sometimes dangerous." This also sounds rather like mutant powers such as Cyclops' optic rays. "Sometimes a sorcerer is fortunate enough to come under the care of an older, more experienced sorcerer, someone who can help him understand his new powers." This is much like the relationship between Professor Xavier and his students. Sorcerers may be "feared by erstwhile friends and misunderstood by family." Again this resembles the anti-mutant prejudice in the Marvel universe.

The description of good and evil sorcerers in the Adventures section is a lot like the difference between Professor Xavier's X-Men and Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. Good sorcerers "seek to win places in society" while those who are evil wish to "gain power over those they look down upon."

 

[Charlaquin]

I had a vague idea for a setting back in early 3e (when Sorcerers were New and Shiny and had Belts), where Wizardry was the main advantage the "civilized" people had over other humanoids. Kobolds, goblins, orcs, and the like could occasionally be born with sorcerous power, and that magic could sometimes be really powerful. But elves and humans and the like had figured out how to teach someone to use magic – a more laborious process, to be certain, as shown by wizards having a higher starting age, but basically anyone with Intelligence 11+ could be taught to be a wizard if you just applied the resources for it. So the orc horde might have a handful of sorcerers around, but the human army would have dozens if not hundreds of wizards.

I like the underlying idea of wizardry as a formalized, institutionalized means of magical education more associated with settled cultures vs. sorcery as a more informal, personalized or even independent means of magical development, more associated with mobile cultures. I would probably frame the latter as actually the more laborious, as personalized education generally requires more intensive engagement from both the educator and the learner than systematized schooling, which is designed for reproducible, measurable results on a large scale rather than deep learning on a small scale. But I think what you describe still kinds of reaches the same destination, where settled cultures have a larger number of magic users. And I think 5e sorcerers having exclusive access to metamagic does a good job of hilighting that the more individualized system of magical learning cultivates a more diverse, flexible form of magic, albeit in fewer individuals. I also like that this can help take a step away from the less savory implications of sorcery as a hereditary trait.

Yeah, I think I’m stealing this.