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

[Micah Sweet]

no, they're saying the books says some sorcerers start with literally no latent magical spark at all at birth, but before their first sorcerer level they attain that spark by being gifted or touched by some magical creature or phenomenon.

Yeah, I see no value in changing that character fantasy and still playing a sorcerer. The entire class concept was built around inherent power. To me, what you're talking about is a warlock with the edges sanded down.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Need" is irrelevant. Necessity is never a reasonable standard, because we are talking about a leisure-time activity.

Nothing in D&D is a "need". It is, always, an elective choice. And this elective choice exists for a clear reason: because people want mechanics to have a story, and story to indicate mechanics.


They do!

And they also do other things too.

Otherwise, we wouldn't have gotten the complaint--I no longer remember who said it, but it was recently--that the little text blurbs at the top of every 4e power were inadequate.


But personal supernatural power need not--for the same reason that money inherited need not work the same way as money earned through labor need not work the same way as money discovered need not work the same way as--etc.

Your analogy went wrong the moment you tied it to an external physical object. Magical power is not always external, is rarely 100% physical, and isn't an object.


My point was simply to note the themes. None of them are being differentiated by how their magic works because Harry Potter is an obfuscated "Magic A" Is "Magic A" setting.

D&D is different. Different kinds of magic actually do work differently. Being granted power by exchange is actually, observably different from having power because it's literally in your physiological makeup. Many folks like this difference being represented in mechanics, because it means the mechanics have an innate story.

Honestly, I think the differences should be more stark.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Sorcerer makes much more thematically if all those bolded points didn't work, and it was more explicitly ancestral.

I agree with you on this. The original 5E14 Sorcerer made it seem like one got sorcery from two different ways... either they had the blood of a highly-magical creature (a dragon) within them and thus that highly-magical creature's blood allowed the person to manifest magic... or they could manifest magic somehow on their own without the blood of a highly-magical creature but it was completely unpredictable (the wild mage.) The point then would be that any future sorcerer subclass would be because a highly-magical being was in the player's bloodline. That of course got thrown out the window the moment they made the Storm Sorcerer (which had zero mention of any storm-based creature in the character's ancestry and who was described as being able to cast weather-base magic for no other reason than "just because"). Thereby rendering (in my mind) the thematic point of the Sorcerer class moot.

This is part of the reason why I don't like the Sorcerer class myself personally, but I also don't stop players from taking it if they ever want to have it nor constantly call on WotC to remove it. Its selection by a potential player might momentarily irk me from a conceptual point of view... but once we start playing the "branding" or "identity" on a lot of the classes falls away anyway because a character is more than just some word identifier the game gives them, so it is never really ends up mattering.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I agree with you on this. The original 5E14 Sorcerer made it seem like one got sorcery from two different ways... either they had the blood of a highly-magical creature (a dragon) within them and thus that highly-magical creature's blood allowed the person to manifest magic... or they could manifest magic somehow on their own without the blood of a highly-magical creature but it was completely unpredictable (the wild mage.) The point then would be that any future sorcerer subclass would be because a highly-magical being was in the player's bloodline. That of course got thrown out the window the moment they made the Storm Sorcerer (which had zero mention of any storm-based creature in the character's ancestry and who was described as being able to cast weather-base magic for no other reason than "just because"). Thereby rendering (in my mind) the thematic point of the Sorcerer class moot.

This is part of the reason why I don't like the Sorcerer class myself personally, but I also don't stop players from taking it if they ever want to have it nor constantly call on WotC to remove it. Its selection by a potential player might momentarily irk me from a conceptual point of view... but once we start playing the "branding" or "identity" on a lot of the classes falls away anyway because a character is more than just some word identifier the game gives them, so it is never really ends up mattering.

I like to combat that very real tendency by making sure the setting supports the identity. If you received your power via bloodline that matters and will be apparent through the setting.

 

[Corinnguard]

The original 5E14 Sorcerer made it seem like one got sorcery from two different ways... either they had the blood of a highly-magical creature (a dragon) within them and thus that highly-magical creature's blood allowed the person to manifest magic...

Pathfinder 1st Edition really went into this with its' Sorcerous Bloodlines. Maybe a little too much as just about any highly magical creature could sire a Sorcerer bloodline in that RPG.

 

[Aldarc]

Well, I hope you have successfully worked out your solution and have instituted it into your games. There's no better place for them!

I don't find answers like this to be particularly helpful.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't find answers like this to be particularly helpful.

What kind of help do you need? Help from people to get WotC to actually do what you want? That's not going to happen.

If you want something in the game... you put it in yourself. It's as simple as that.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Pathfinder 1st Edition really went into this with its' Sorcerous Bloodlines. Maybe a little too much as just about any highly magical creature could sire a Sorcerer bloodline in that RPG.

In the PF game I'm playing in, one of the players has a pair of human Sorcerers... a draconic and a fey. And their PCs have evolved throughout the campaign to become more of both. So the bloodline thing does lend itself to interesting stories if one follows it along. Unfortunately many 5E sorcerer origins are just arcane caster themes of spells and abilities than they are narrative hooks. They are really just a mechanical 'Spellcaster of X' where X is merely a theme to tie the ability and spells together than it is any story-based method for how the PC acquired magic. In this regard a Sorcerer and a Wizard can overlap... because there's no reason why a Wizard's "school" needs to be tied to the eight spell schools. A "school of air control" or a "school of arcane order" are just as viable as the "school of illusion" or "school of transmutation", which makes them functionally identical to a Storm Sorcerer or Clockwork Sorcerer.

But whatever... it is what it is. I stopped concerning myself with it from the beginning.

 

[Aldarc]

What kind of help do you need? Help from people to get WotC to actually do what you want? That's not going to happen.

If you want something in the game... you put it in yourself. It's as simple as that.

Wanna go to the moon? Do it yourself. It's as simple as that. Same sort of unhelpful energy but certainly easy for you to say to someone, and then when they say that they can't do it (for whatever their reasons) or that it's just what they want to see for the game, you can come along and just smugly blame them for their failures or unwillingness to try. As if the only way you can advocate for something new or an alternative approach is to create it yourself, which is utter BS. As I said, I find these sort of replies to be unhelpful and lacking real insight. Simple as that.

I'm not asking for any help. I was making a proposal for an alternative approach to the classes in question because I was asked by someone in this thread what I would do.

 

[Corinnguard]

In this regard a Sorcerer and a Wizard can overlap... because there's no reason why a Wizard's "school" needs to be tied to the eight spell schools. A "school of air control" or a "school of arcane order" are just as viable as the "school of illusion" or "school of transmutation", which makes them functionally identical to a Storm Sorcerer or Clockwork Sorcerer.

Level Up has a number of lesser schools of magic where you could, for instance, be an Air Wizard by simply collecting a number of spells belonging to the Air 'school' of magic.

Lesser Schools of Magic: acid, affliction, air, arcane, attack, beasts, chaos, cold, communication, compulsion, divine, earth, enhancement, evil, fear, fire, force, good, healing, knowledge, law, lightning, movement, nature, necrotic, negation, obscurement, planar, plants, poison, prismatic, protection, psychic, radiant, scrying, senses, shadow, shapechanging, sound, storm, summoning, technological, telepathy, teleportation, terrain, thunder, time, transformation, unarmed, undead, utility, water, weaponry, weather.