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

[Corinnguard]

where magic and tech exist both side by side and combined with each other,

And to the point where they are almost indistinguishable from one another.

 

[GobHag]

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.

But I don't and think that's cool as naughty word. So I want a fighter that can do that, I want it baseline, mid-level at most. And if you don't like that a Fighter can make shockwaves without casting a spell/using magic... just don't do it, stay in your verisimilitude bubble.

 

[GobHag]

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.

By Line attacks I mean things like 'Move up to your speed in a straight line, bypassing any creature. Make a single attack roll against any number of creatures you pass through or within your reach'

At higher level it might be that:

-No sell any amount of damage

-Literally just teleport a short distance when in shadows

-Steal someone's skills.ability just through sheer capability

- AoE disarm, like 60 ft+ range

-Not high level, but I think rogues and rangers and monks should be able to air dash

-Auto-crit/Auto-hit

-Even somethig purely mechanical as before each attack they can make a half-speed move

-Counter spell attacks with arrows as a reaction--an opposed roll if the fighter wins it's countered

-The fighter melee attacks have a 15ft range baseline.

-If you succeed a ref/str/con save against a spell or effect made by another creature, make a counter attack ignoring range.

-As long as you make one continue movement action, you don't fall to the ground in the air or sink.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Howso? I specifically cited the actual mechanics of the classes, regardless of what setting they appear in. There is no edition where the Wizard class has had actual "I am part of an academic community" mechanic. No mechanic for actually doing spell research beyond "DM Says", which isn't relevant here because anybody could try magical stuff in the right contexts (thank you, Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser)--one of the exceedingly rare places where magic wasn't given special favoritism (contravened only by DM....interventionism).


Sure, the old ways were clunky and cumbersome etc., etc. But the point stands: You are claiming that the Wizard represents things like

• Participating in a community of scholars, who perform studies and, most importantly, share and credit their discoveries
• Focusing on cataloguing and clear, consistent categorization and formal structure (for pre-20th-century science), or on rigorous method, statistical analysis, and reproducibility (20th-century science and beyond)
• Performing actual research practice, such as iterative development, proposing hypotheses and testing them, or generalizing from a set of observational data to develop an abstract theory that explains why the data takes the form it does

None of these things are present in the Wizard, nor have they ever been present in the Wizard. Not one part of the above is even remotely manifest in any version of the Wizard, except the "DM Says" spell research of early-edition D&D.

In every thematic way, the Wizard--in every edition, including my own preferences!--has nothing whatever to do with doing "science" as we understand that word, nor even "natural philosophy" as the Ancient, Medieval, or Renaissance mind would. It has, beat for beat, nearly every single trope associated with Renaissance-era occult-obsessed "magi" trying to understand the hidden, secret truths of true reality lying behind the mundane skein we know.


Sure. Those institutions allegedly exist. Nothing whatsoever about being a Wizard interacts with them. At all. Ever.

It's like saying that because universities existed in the medieval era, that the Rosicrucians couldn't possibly be a secret society. Seriously, this is totally irrelevant. The game does not represent, and has not ever represented, the Wizard as actually belonging to academia as we understand that term. Instead, it is almost exclusively represented--in both the descriptions and the mechanics--as being a whole bunch of people who jealously and zealously guard their discoveries, who would prefer that their discoveries be lost forever rather than allowing others to learn them without equal or greater compensation. It's got far more in common with a "library" where people only donate books to the library because they get greater rewards than keeping the books for themselves, and every participant is constantly looking for a way to get a leg up on all the others.

Settings can protest up and down that no no no, there's TOTALLY a real scholarly community, and they totally do actually work collaboratively, and they have a culture of sharing and proving sharable stuff etc., but this alleged community never actually results in spells being widely shared. It never manages to convince any high-level Wizards to start publishing their research and getting peer review etc., etc. There's nothing equivalent to academic journals, which have been the backbone of "science" since long before it was called by that name. If such a community exists, it is inexplicably locked in medieval stasis.

Having "suggested prices for copying spells" is precisely the opposite of a community of sharing and prestive-via-primacy, and instead reflects a community of secrecy and prestige-via-collection. Rather than being a community of collaborative researchers one-upping one another by proving their intelligence via documentary evidence, it's a community of begrudging textbook collectors, who don't want to allow anyone to copy their collection unless they're adequately compensated for doing so, and one of the great motivators for a Wizard is to delve deep into forgotten places in order to find the lost spells of the ancients.

If we had even a single representation of doing research (not just "I know some more skills" but actually the empirical method in some way or other), or of collaborating with a scholarly community that expects to work together.

In Level Up, several of the social pillar abilities of the wizard class have to do with the academic world.

 

[Corinnguard]

In Level Up, several of the social pillar abilities of the wizard class have to do with the academic world.

Then there is Collegiate Culture in Level Up.

Collegiate | Level Up

a5e.tools

One of the Studied disciplines of Collegiate culture is Magic.

 

[CreamCloud0]

And to the point where they are almost indistinguishable from one another.

i mean, i would prefer if they are distinguishable from each other, but of equal overall value.

 

[Pedantic]

i mean, i would prefer if they are distinguishable from each other, but of equal overall value.

I've always struggled thematically with that take, not so much because of what it says about magic, but what it says about about technology. It's not reducible to a domain the same way magic is; tech is just combining known properties in useful ways. In settings where you try to put it alongside but separate from magic conceptually, you tend to end up just making into steel colored magic (or alternately you generally need to put magic behind a masquerade, or make it recent).

Magic is inevitably going to fuse with technology after a certain level of ubiquity.

 

[MGibster]

So, for instance, the party lacks a Rogue. A Wizard with the right spell selection could do that role. However, if the party has a Rogue, the Wizard's Player should work with the Rogue's Player to ensure the Rogue isn't overshadowed.

At least in 2024, if a Wizard casts Knock it makes a loud sound audible out to 300 feet. A Wizard can certainly open a locked door, but he can't do it without drawing a lot of unwanted attention. There's some balance there I think.

 

[Corinnguard]

i mean, i would prefer if they are distinguishable from each other, but of equal overall value.

Like in an Urban Fantasy novel. In the Allison Beckstrom series by Devon Monk, magic had been 'discovered' 30 years prior to the first book, Magic to the Bone. In this Urban Fantasy series, magic use came with a price (in earlier editions of D&D, this price would be considered nonlethal damage). To cast a spell, a caster had to perform a Disbursement ritual that would allow them to choose how they would pay the price for using magic (a headache, a head cold, sore muscles, etc.). They then would draw a magical glyph that only they and another caster could see and fill it up with magic drawn from the earth beneath their feet.

Another way, a caster could deal with cost of using magic was to have another person willingly serve as their Proxy. It was considered illegal to offload the cost onto someone else without their consent.

Anyhow, magic and tech was still distinguishable from one another for the most part in this setting. There was, however, a new discipline of magic called Flux Magic that sought to bridge the gap between magic and technology (there were other disciplines in the series. Faith, Blood, Life and Death).

 

[James Gasik]

At least in 2024, if a Wizard casts Knock it makes a loud sound audible out to 300 feet. A Wizard can certainly open a locked door, but he can't do it without drawing a lot of unwanted attention. There's some balance there I think.

Sure, but in a party without a Thieves' Tool user, you'd be making just as much noise and taking a lot longer to bash down the locked door!