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

[Minigiant]

I hope they have tried harder on the other two pillars. For my part, A5e has covered them far better than the official game ever has, and I see no reason to go backwards as I see it.

They couldn't try harder.

The community both won everything to remain the same and be different at the same time.

Some people wanted big change.
Some people wanted things to say the same just fixed.
And some people want a big change but still see the same thing and fix it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

They couldn't try harder.

The community both won everything to remain the same and be different at the same time.

Some people wanted big change.
Some people wanted things to say the same just fixed.
And some people want a big change but still see the same thing and fix it.

You're right, they did their best with what they had to work with. WotC's fans can't decide on what they want the official game to be, and WotC doesn't want to push outside of fan desires (much).

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I remember humorus post from Order of the Stick forums, that basically went:

Calling a Wizard "Sorcerer" is telling someone with PhD they only got it thanks to a natural talent. Calling a Wizard "Warlock" is paramount to accussing that person with PhD of getting it by sleeping with the dean.

 

[Kinematics]

Personally, the mechanics for the Warlock fit better into my mental image of how a Sorcerer should work than the standard casting mechanics. Hardcoded invocations that don't consume spell slots (playing into the idea that the Sorcerer embodies magic innately, rather than casts spells), with a handful of things that can manipulate magic (eg: Agonizing Blast vs Empowered Spell). The actual Pacts are definitely more Warlock, though.

It would be interesting to rebuild the Sorcerer on the Warlock chassis.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

FWIW, I think classes are more effective at their role in the game when they ARE diegetic. The more you can focus a class on a specific story, the more powerful a tool it is to help define your character, and the more likely it can help answer the core question of "what does my character do?"

D&D 5E refuses to commit hard enough to make classes diegetic though.

The only edition which really did commit in that way was 4E. Plenty of D&D-inspired games commit on that level too (indeed it's pretty common). On example is Earthdawn, which was an early attempt to basically fix all of D&D's major flaws (most of which persist to this day, albeit 4E was notably similar to Earthdawn to the point where work was started on a licenced 4E version of Earthdawn), and which made its classes very much diegetic and real things that people in the setting knew about - levels too! Every other D&D edition than 4E wants to have its cake and eat it, or for only certain classes to be diegetic, and usually only at certain times.

 

[Minigiant]

D&D 5E refuses to commit hard enough to make classes diegetic though.

I think once the designers of five weeks decided that they weren't going to create new classes unless a setting they wanted to print required a class they abandoned diegetic classes.

A sorcerer who gets their power from having a dragon ancestor or being around Dragon magic should have spells in Magic that is based around dragons and the entire class and subclass should be tied to that. But when the goal is to have someone say they want to play a fire Mage and just say play a red dragon or a gold dragon sorcerer it muddy and weakens the flavor as well as the mechanics.

One thing I kind of liked from 3rd edition was the idea of domains spells list.

If domain spell lists were more generic and other classes could dive into them it would be cool.

Like if a red dragon sorcerer didn't just learned spells they just got the spells from the Fire, Draconic, and Sorcery domains and could not learn spells outside of them without special help that would be cool because it would tie into the fact that they got their magic from being someone tied to a red dragon.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think once the designers of five weeks decided that they weren't going to create new classes unless a setting they wanted to print required a class they abandoned diegetic classes.

When did they decide that? I know they did, I just don't remember when. Because it kinda looks like in the DNDnext playtests, they sort of were looking at diegetic classes, but by the time 5E came out, we had a bunch of bland non-diegetic classes mixed in with others that seemed like maybe they should be diegetic but weren't really committed to it.

 

[Minigiant]

When did they decide that? I know they did, I just don't remember when. Because it kinda looks like in the DNDnext playtests, they sort of were looking at diegetic classes, but by the time 5E came out, we had a bunch of bland non-diegetic classes mixed in with others that seemed like maybe they should be diegetic but weren't really committed to it.

There was some point where somebody said that they would not create new classes unless the setting required.

At that point, you can tell that believed that every single kind of character was one of the 12 core phb classes plus artificer. And that artificer only got in because everyone was so popular and required an artificer class. And it kind of felt that they were going to go for the Scion class only because certain settings had psionics as a minor or major aspect to it. But those settings ended up not coming out at the time so they just boiled that stuff back into other classes mainly the sorcerer.