D&D General What Should Magic Be Able To Do, From a Gameplay Design Standpoint?

[EzekielRaiden]

High Risk, High Reward.

Magic should be a powerful utilty thing, that comes with downsides, like it was in classic editions.

The fact it took basically a turn to cast in combat and if you got hit you couldnt cast it., that left you with low HP and risk, it should also be limited, and used wisely.
I feel the only issue with this designw as if you werent casting spells youd do nothing but be the worst character in the game, i feel cantrips filled the hole in this design well enough.

I feel since they removed this in 3e the balance and purpose of magic in dnd is completely gone, There is no reason to distinct the difference between martials and casters anymore, when there is no real downsides to being a caster.

I feel they worked best as unique heavy artillery units with limited ammo, but powerful and unique abilities, that are vunerable.
So much of DnD's design is built around that, that when you bring it back it makes sense.

Why do clerics have heavy armor? because they need to cast spells to heal allies in combat, they need high AC, why do bladesingers need high ac and martial attacks, becuase if they are fighting in the frontline if they are hit they cannot cast spells, so the AC is needed, and being good with weapons is a must, it why it works.

Without it is all wobbly nonsense, and just drags down the game.

The problem isn't that magic doesn't have costs. It's that it's trying to satisfy two radically different camps' desires, and the compromise between them essentially always leads to "magic is just the best"...which isn't helped by the fact that there are subsets of both groups who WANT magic to be just better than everything else.

The first group is like you, except they don't necessarily require that magic have steep costs. They want magic to be powerful, usually justified with naturalistic explanations like "why would anyone ever learn to be a Wizard if you can be just as powerful doing anything else" (a flawed argument, but not the point of discussion at present). They want that "powerful artillery" feel, but don't necessarily associate it with "being extremely fragile" etc. Their position is reasonable; they want magic to be a potent tool, since that justifies calling it "magic" in the first place.

The second group wants magic to be their whole bag. They see it as, more or less, the promise the game is making them by even offering a Wizard class, a "I have magic and magic and also magic and then some more magic, and finally a bit of recharge for my magic on top." They--quite reasonably--want to be doing fun, productive, engaging things most of the time. They aren't really attached to magic being powerful or not, they just want it accessible and useful: "I signed up for the class fantasy of being someone who uses magic to manipulate the world. Why should I be spending half or more of my time doing things that have nothing at all to do with that class fantasy?"

The problem is...when one side wants widely-accessible magic and doesn't really care that much whether it's strong or weak, and another side wants magic that is very powerful and doesn't really care that much whether it's incredibly rare or quite prolific...the only way to please both of them is to give magic that is both powerful and prolific. Further, neither side has any reason to accept a sacrifice: If the accessible-magic crowd accepts the steep costs, they're getting nothing they actually care about, and if the powerful-magic crowd accepts the reduced power, they're in the same boat.

IMO, at some point, D&D is going to have to embrace one of the two paths. It's going to have to decide once and for all that magic really is ridiculously good, but harshly punishing or restrictive in its use, thus turning off the sizable plurality (or even majority) who prefer accessible magic. Or, it's going to have to decide once and for all that magic is accessible, but only rarely achieves incredible power and influence...thus turning off the heavily vocal, and more importantly highly invested, minority who prefer the older way with its punishments, costs, or limitations.

They can't keep pushing this appeasement of both sides. It's going to bite them, sooner or later.

 

[TheSword]

The problem isn't that magic doesn't have costs. It's that it's trying to satisfy two radically different camps' desires, and the compromise between them essentially always leads to "magic is just the best"...which isn't helped by the fact that there are subsets of both groups who WANT magic to be just better than everything else.

The first group is like you, except they don't necessarily require that magic have steep costs. They want magic to be powerful, usually justified with naturalistic explanations like "why would anyone ever learn to be a Wizard if you can be just as powerful doing anything else" (a flawed argument, but not the point of discussion at present). They want that "powerful artillery" feel, but don't necessarily associate it with "being extremely fragile" etc. Their position is reasonable; they want magic to be a potent tool, since that justifies calling it "magic" in the first place.

The second group wants magic to be their whole bag. They see it as, more or less, the promise the game is making them by even offering a Wizard class, a "I have magic and magic and also magic and then some more magic, and finally a bit of recharge for my magic on top." They--quite reasonably--want to be doing fun, productive, engaging things most of the time. They aren't really attached to magic being powerful or not, they just want it accessible and useful: "I signed up for the class fantasy of being someone who uses magic to manipulate the world. Why should I be spending half or more of my time doing things that have nothing at all to do with that class fantasy?"

The problem is...when one side wants widely-accessible magic and doesn't really care that much whether it's strong or weak, and another side wants magic that is very powerful and doesn't really care that much whether it's incredibly rare or quite prolific...the only way to please both of them is to give magic that is both powerful and prolific. Further, neither side has any reason to accept a sacrifice: If the accessible-magic crowd accepts the steep costs, they're getting nothing they actually care about, and if the powerful-magic crowd accepts the reduced power, they're in the same boat.

IMO, at some point, D&D is going to have to embrace one of the two paths. It's going to have to decide once and for all that magic really is ridiculously good, but harshly punishing or restrictive in its use, thus turning off the sizable plurality (or even majority) who prefer accessible magic. Or, it's going to have to decide once and for all that magic is accessible, but only rarely achieves incredible power and influence...thus turning off the heavily vocal, and more importantly highly invested, minority who prefer the older way with its punishments, costs, or limitations.

They can't keep pushing this appeasement of both sides. It's going to bite them, sooner or later.

Or you do what 5e has done. Allowing it to be both powerful a limited amount of time (reduced high level slots) and accessible in less powerful ways (cantrips) While finding other ways to place limitations.(concentration, action economy)

 

[Lanefan]

I do. I want a Fighter of mid-level able to make a line attack against everyone in their path as they dash with unprecedented speed, I want Rogues to have BitD style 'Of course I already payed off the guard' cutbacks.

Mid-level?

Then what have they got left to look forward to at high level?

The sort of things you're describing here might be fine for capstone-level stuff but not mid-level.

If you don't want this, then when you do play a martial simply don't use any abilities that break your precious verisimilitude and believability.

Or get the DM to tone down the system wuch that those abilities don't come into play until much higher level.

 

[TheSword]

Personally, I think it should not stand in for science--for exactly the same reason that, IRL, magic and science were effectively twins...and one did not survive. Specifically, the fundamental difference between "magic" and "science" as they came to be defined in the Renaissance and early modern period, very much was the difference between esoteric secret knowledge and public-accessible data. Magic required initiation, or at least some kind of special knowledge to "unlock". As what we call "science" (originally, "natural philosophy") grew stronger and bolder, what we call "magic" became taboo--seen as (at best) obscure and implausible fringe theories, rather than rigorous study. There's a reason Newton both seemed to value his alchemical and prophetic/Bible-interpretation studies...and kept them secret from most others, so that his work was only known to a select handful until decades after his death.

And this difference is clearly reflected in how Hermetic-style "mages" treated their knowledge, vs how "natural philosophers" treated theirs. Natural philosophy--and its descendant, "science"--created a culture of "publish or perish", of wishing to be widely known as a luminary or visionary staking out new territories on the field of knowledge, beating back the darkness of ignorance. Hermetic-style practitioners, which are pretty much the source of "wizardly" magic, absolutely did not want this. If you made any true "discoveries", you kept them to yourself, you inscribed them in secret tomes, maybe you shared them with one or two other people whom you trusted and with whom you had an occult correspondence--in the hope they would do the same with you. Initiation, obscurantism, mystery--the whole point of magic was to be impenetrable to anyone who was not "enlightened".

Science was, and has always been, much more "democratic" and "republican", in the ancient senses of those words: a thing for all peers (all men of learning, not just those who have been inaugurated into a secret society), and very specifically the Public Thing (res publica) to which any could contribute.

It's perfectly fine for the D&D Wizard to stand with a foot in each world on this one. As noted with Newton, and many people both before and after him (consider Darwin's obsession with fairies!), there were practitioners of "science" who were 100% also practitioners of "magic". But the two really are different, despite being (effectively) fraternal twins.

I think whether magic was shared/published or not is kind of irrelevant to why science won out over superstition. Science works, Magic doesn’t. Probably had more impact.

In a world where magic does work, and can be used reliably it absolutely can be used as a stand in for technology - that is certainly the approach that the big D&D settings used.

 

[TheSword]

I do. I want a Fighter of mid-level able to make a line attack against everyone in their path as they dash with unprecedented speed, I want Rogues to have BitD style 'Of course I already payed off the guard' cutbacks.

If you don't want this, then when you do play a martial simply don't use any abilities that break your precious verisimilitude

I have no issue with mechanical rules which allow people to represent foresight or planning. In WFRP4e the party’s halfling has a talent that lets him add a non-encumbering item to his inventory and deduct the cost of it from cash on the fly. It represents always having that useful item tucked away for a rainy day. Great rule.

My expectation for non-magical effects is that it could be delivered by a live action character in a non-magical way. I have zero problem with a John Wick fighter killing ten people in ten seconds with pencils, fingers and window frames. I do have a problem with a Neo fighter leaping off a 100 foot building and smashing into the ground with such force as to damage 10 people around him - rippling the ground with the shockwave. That’s just personal preference though.

To clear, I have no problem with martial’s using magic - Neo as a rune knight breaking space and time. Or the Witcher controlling minds and throwing up force shields. I just like it to be recognsied as magic.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Or you do what 5e has done. Allowing it to be both powerful a limited amount of time (reduced high level slots) and accessible in less powerful ways (cantrips) While finding other ways to place limitations.(concentration, action economy)

I am of the opinion that this mix failed miserably at achieving the intended goal. Fairly sure I had already expressed that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think whether magic was shared/published or not is kind of irrelevant to why science won out over superstition. Science works, Magic doesn’t. Probably had more impact.

In a world where magic does work, and can be used reliably it absolutely can be used as a stand in for technology - that is certainly the approach that the big D&D settings used.

No, it isn't. Because there's very specifically this whole "wizards jealously guard their spellbooks" thing, something that has been part of D&D's magic thematics (rather than mechanics) since literally the very beginning and is still maintained with the modern Wizard. There is nothing--at all--about the 5e Wizard that emphasizes academia, discourse, publication, or sharing; they don't even have a single mechanic for spell research, not even in 5.5e. There are many things that work in the opposite direction: the fact that spellbooks are encoded, the existence of special-fancy "tomes" that empower one's magic, the repeated strong association between a particular spellcaster and their particular spells (e.g. people do not iterate on Melf's acid arrow, they just...reuse that one spell, because it was already discovered and eventually it filtered out into common use).

The culture of magic in the D&D rules--not just the settings, the way the classes are actually written--is very much Renaissance magic, with all the ways it actively opposed "science" as we understand it.

 

[TheSword]

I am of the opinion that this mix failed miserably at achieving the intended goal. Fairly sure I had already expressed that.

Yeah, just pointing out that there is a solution to the tension you described. I totally appreciate that solution doesn’t go far enough for you, but some of us feel it did the job.

 

[TheSword]

No, it isn't. Because there's very specifically this whole "wizards jealously guard their spellbooks" thing, something that has been part of D&D's magic thematics (rather than mechanics) since literally the very beginning and is still maintained with the modern Wizard. There is nothing--at all--about the 5e Wizard that emphasizes academia, discourse, publication, or sharing; they don't even have a single mechanic for spell research, not even in 5.5e. There are many things that work in the opposite direction: the fact that spellbooks are encoded, the existence of special-fancy "tomes" that empower one's magic, the repeated strong association between a particular spellcaster and their particular spells (e.g. people do not iterate on Melf's acid arrow, they just...reuse that one spell, because it was already discovered and eventually it filtered out into common use).

The culture of magic in the D&D rules--not just the settings, the way the classes are actually written--is very much Renaissance magic, with all the ways it actively opposed "science" as we understand it.

This is such a setting dependent conversation. I think you have to separate D&D the game system from the Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Eberron or your own setting.

A game system packages magical effects into discreet parcels called spells that do specific things for balance reasons and simplicity reasons. But not every spell in D&D needs to already exist in your gameworld. The spell research and development was subsumed into the class development because it’s an onerous burden on the DM to be expected to add the spells into the adventure. Something that may not always be practical. Instead the wizard is now constantly developing spells as they progress. Thank goodness as well, as the old system was very cumbersome. If my adventure takes place in the tunnels of the Underdark, a magic/class system that requires enrolling at university or reading how-to books isn’t very practical.

Even taking this aside though, I think you are taking your experiences and applying them to all settings which probably isn’t very representative. If we take one of the core settings - Forgotten Realms - there are numerous Magic institutions and guilds promoting the development of magic. Take the Watchful Order of a Magists and Protectors for instance which teaches magic and has a spell library. As well as other organisations like the Church of Mystra, The Church of Oghma. Magic spells are readily available commercially as scrolls to be copied into spell books. Spellcasting services are available for hire even in villages.

I’m pretty sure wizards guard their spellbooks because they’re quite valuable and they’re screwed if they lose them. I don’t think I’ve seen jealous be part of it since 2e. I’m pretty sure in 3e there were suggested prices for copying a spell from another wizard. I assumed that identify is needed because a spellbook is written in the way your mind understands it. The spell translates it but it is translatable.

 

[cbwjm]

I’m pretty sure in 3e there were suggested prices for copying a spell from another wizard. I assumed that identify is needed because a spellbook is written in the way your mind understands it. The spell translates it but it is translatable.

In 3e, they had rules for borrowing another wizard's spellbook.

All throughout dnd history it, I recall see spell scrolls or the copying of a spell as a reward for aiding a wizard. Almost every setting had some sort of wizard guild where you could learn magic, trading spells wasn't anywhere near as proscribed as the 2e core books suggested. I think they just didn't want players to trade spells amongst themselves.