doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
No, in a medieval style world too. Doesn’t require advanced society or advanced magic. It’s a craft.
And yet the rich weren’t blacksmiths with any frequency.
D&D 5E What Would Your Perfect 50th PHB Class List Be?
MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
If it is a craft, what does the wizard sell? What does the wizard provide that is so needed in society that a peasant could make a living by doing that for the masses around? In a dungeonpunk setting like Eberron, the answer is clear, but tell me, what does a wizard sell to the masses in a Middle earth or even Greyhawk that means a living and justifies the expense of training an apprentice?
To the masses? That's not where the easy money is, is it?
Helldritch
Hero
Wizards sell knowledge. They provide advice to the powerful as well as the poor. When an event apparently magical happens, the wizard is there to explain things.
The wizard is the artillery in the fantasy wolrds. A single fireball in a military formation can kill up to 50 soldiers! A Meteor swarm is even more devastating.
The problem with any RPG is that we often forget that the common man exists. It is not because our characters fight cosmic threats that all of a sudden everyone is high level. A single 9th level wizard can kill hundreds of peoples with total impunity. A potion of flying, improved invisibility and that wizard will be stoppable only by another wizard. That is raw power.
And that power does not limit itself to warfare. Divination spells can help a ruler obtain information that would be otherwise unobtainable. If anything is worth paying for, it is these reasons.
And that wizard could be an alchemist too. Maybe that wizard is powerful enough to create magical items for a price.
Spell casters have a lot to offer; especially at mid and high levels.
This is the main point that I'm pushing you on. It's easy to imagine a lot of deviations from the standard medieval fantasy in which wizarding is not the domain of elitists and the power-mad. Your interpretation makes sense and is reasonable, but many others are as well.
Perhaps the time is significantly greater, but that's never really been quantified, at least not in 5e. Places like Xanathar's say "It takes years of study, instruction, and experimentation to learn how to harness magical energy and carry spells around in one's own mind." (p. 58) And that could mean 30 years of study, but maybe 7 is reasonable, or maybe it's highly variable. The DMG (p. 23-4) encourages individual DMs to come up with their own answers for things like this. And, without seriously nailing down the all the assumptions of a secondary world, it's hard to have meaningful arguments about its plausibility.
Well, take a look at the material components of various spells, even at the lowest levels.
- comprehend languages--a pinch of soot and salt
- find familiar--10 gp worth of charcoal, incense, and herbs
- illusory script--a lead-based ink worth at least 10 gp
- jump--a grasshopper's hind leg
- sleep--a pinch of fine sand, rose petals, or a cricket
- witch bolt--a twig from a tree that has been struck by lightning
Sure, that would occur in some cases, but remember that the elite are also the people who created and uphold the status quo. It's them that would need to be enforcing wizardly persecution for it to succeed; most of them will be invested in the persecution of wizards such that they don't practice wizardry themselves. Most aristocrats are not gonna be analogs of Elizabeth Bathory or the Marquis de Sade, in terms of shirking moral convention.
And yes, you could say that all the aristocrats in a setting are cynical hypocrites who break their own rules--but then we're recreating the Darksun setup, which is entirely different to the hypothetical--I dunno, Dragon Age setup (don't hold me to that)--which I suggested earlier. And, again, each of these types of settings can be verisimilar and internally consistent.
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But hey, you have a strong view of what wizards are. That's cool. It makes sense and probably leads to fun games of D&D. I've disputed it enough and will stop doing so from here.
I am, however, still curious what part of my first post reads as being about eugenics. Please let me know, if you can be asked. Ty.
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Hard agree.
And I feel like that insight is particularly relatable to a lot of D&D DMs, especially of the type who are invested enough to post on forums or maybe write blogs.
There's a snippet of an old Blog of Holding Post that feels beautifully on the nose to me regarding this subject.
"Being a low-level wizard might be kind of like being a grad student. It takes years of study, and might lead you to a respectable career some day, but no one’s really jealous of you right now."
Yeeesh.
I can see that being cool. But imo, for some of those classes, it's backwards.
In the Venn diagram that contains transmuter and artificer, transmuter is the bigger circle--maybe to the point that most artificers are a species of transmuter (but see below, they should probably all be called alchemists). Similarly, in the Venn diagram that contains bard, enchanter, and illusionist, bard is the smallest circle. Lots of enchanters and illusionists can exist that are entirely disinterested in music and inspiration.
I am sympathetic to your point of view--more niche protection--but not necessarily the particulars. Specialist wizards correspond to other classes only rather loosely, and it's hard to make all those boxes fit into each other.
If the game went that way, necromancer NEEDS to be a class. It's one of the few things that shows up in Tolkien--the necromancer of Dol Guldur--as well as in the sword and sorcery cannon--for example, CAS's Necromancy in Naat. Perhaps illusionist is also a strong enough archetype, it does make sense as a discrete specialty. But I think of conjurer and abjurer as being fairly weak.
Half of the specialty wizards feel pretty tenuous to me. Necromancer, Enchanter, Illusionist, and Diviner make some sense beyond D&D. The others, eh...
Incidentally, some etymology:
- Abjure—Latin, “abjurare” to swear away, i.e. to renounce or repudiate
- Conjure—Latin, “conjurare” to swear together
- Divination—Latin, “divinare” to predict
- Enchant—Latin, “incantare” to utter an incantation, from “cantare” to sing
- Evoke—Latin, “evocatio” to call forth also Invoke—Latin, “invocare” to call upon
- Illusion—Latin, “illudere” to mock, i.e. as with an act of deception
- Necromancy—Greek, “necro” corpse + “manteia” prophecy
- Transmutation—Latin, “trans” across + “mutare” to change
Also, I think it would be better to just call transmuters alchemists (Greek, “Khemeia” the art of transmuting metals + Arabic “al” the). It has a lot more direct caché in broader fiction, and the current subclass already has features called "minor alchemy" and "transmuter's stone" (i.e. philosopher's stone).
Ya, as per my earlier reply to @Remathilis that'd make sense to me.
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doctorbadwolf
Heretic of The Seventh Circle
You don’t see the constant demand there would be just for some of the wizard’s utility cantrips and level 1 ritual spells?
Or for scrolls and potions?
Most D&D worlds have a bit more of a middle class than existed in the early Middle Ages, as well. A wealthy middle class spends money on a lot of conveniences.
Magic items that cast low level utility spells. Just a ring of Unseen Servant, cast the spell a few times a day, would be worth saving up for, even pooling money in a small farm town, but mold earth? Incredible value. You can achieve fairly advanced irrigation and redirect rivers with that cantrip, not to mention fortifications. An apprentice with just that cantrip can earn himself and his master a craftsperson’s wage, easily.
Exactly, yeah.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
A little late here, but the main reason I find is that the arguments used to justify pruning classes early on (when you have 12 or whatever) generalize, and most people who use those arguments are aware of this.
That is, a first-pass "let's trim the classes" argument is fundamentally saying, "If two classes have sufficiently similar structure or focus, they should be combined into a single unit and represented by subclasses." And they (usually correctly) note that there are certain similarities between the various classes, e.g.:
Barbarian, Paladin, and Ranger are all similar to Fighters, and the latter two particularly resemble EKs, which were already folded into Fighter as a subclass.
Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock, and now Artificer are all similar to Wizard, just with a different mechanic for knowing spells and, for the first three, a different spellcasting mod.
Paladin has similarities to Cleric because they both worship gods and fight.
Ranger has similarities to Druid because they both do naturey things and fight.
Monk is similar to Fighter because both use some amount of physical grit.
Etc.
Applying the argument above, people then say, "Well, the Paladin is clearly very similar to the Cleric, Barbarian would work just fine as a Fighter subclass, Ranger is just a 'Druidic Knight,' Artificer makes perfect sense as a type of Wizard and the differences between Wizard/Bard/Warlock/Sorcerer aren't important to me. So let's clean it up! We now have Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Rogue, Wizard."
Except then the question becomes, if Bard, a songmaster and performance artist, was a reasonable fit to squish into Wizard, then why isn't Druid, a wild mystic and shapechanger, a reasonable fit to squish into Cleric, since we already have Nature Domain Clerics and both of them cast divine magic? And why does Monk--literally a pugilist, someone who fights with fists and feet--get kept out of Fighter when Barbarian and Paladin didn't? So we cull the list again, because the same arguments we used to get down to 6 encourage further downsizing, and don't feature any rational way out that doesn't feel arbitrary. So now we have Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard.
But wait--we already folded multiple different spellcasting traditions into both Cleric and Wizard, and we've already said it's fine that one casting class can use different spellcasting modifiers...so, given that "divine" vs "arcane" is a distinction without a difference in 5e, why are we keeping Cleric and Wizard separate? Clerics already get bonus proficiencies from their Domains, so we can just fold up all the fighty-stuff into subclass-domains that are equivalent to subclass-schools. Now we're down to Fighter, Magic-User, Rogue.
A lot of people will stop here, because three "feels good." But, as before, there's no strict reason why we have to stop--and, rationally, again the same arguments apply. If classes as disparate as Monk and Barbarian could be folded into the Fighter, why is Rogue different? It's not like Rogues practice some secret art Fighters could never learn, and they already had an innate parallel in the EK/AT concept. Why not just mush the two together? It's just one more class, after all, and you could even re-use several subclasses (like Shadow Monk or EK) with simple variant rules. Boom, now we've got the two-class setup.
From there, you get to a thorny question, and most people will stop there: Should classes even exist at all? Why do we separate casting and fighting? We have casters that fight (War/Bladesinger Wizards, War/Storm Clerics, Moon Druids, etc.) We have fighters that cast (Paladins, Rangers, EKs, etc.) Clearly we aren't actually that committed to separating the two from one another. Indeed, we continually make options for either side to dabble in the other. If we're already going to the effort of overhauling this much of the system, abolishing all but two classes, does "class" even really carry much meaning anymore? Each of these "classes" now has dozens of subclasses, each of which heavily modifies the base. If we're going to go to the level of figuring out how each of these dozen things can be validly compressed into just two...why not go the other way, and break every class up into its component pieces, and let people CHOOSE what they want to play?
Barbarian, Paladin, and Ranger are all similar to Fighters, and the latter two particularly resemble EKs, which were already folded into Fighter as a subclass.
Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock, and now Artificer are all similar to Wizard, just with a different mechanic for knowing spells and, for the first three, a different spellcasting mod.
Paladin has similarities to Cleric because they both worship gods and fight.
Ranger has similarities to Druid because they both do naturey things and fight.
Monk is similar to Fighter because both use some amount of physical grit.
Etc.
Applying the argument above, people then say, "Well, the Paladin is clearly very similar to the Cleric, Barbarian would work just fine as a Fighter subclass, Ranger is just a 'Druidic Knight,' Artificer makes perfect sense as a type of Wizard and the differences between Wizard/Bard/Warlock/Sorcerer aren't important to me. So let's clean it up! We now have Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Rogue, Wizard."
Except then the question becomes, if Bard, a songmaster and performance artist, was a reasonable fit to squish into Wizard, then why isn't Druid, a wild mystic and shapechanger, a reasonable fit to squish into Cleric, since we already have Nature Domain Clerics and both of them cast divine magic? And why does Monk--literally a pugilist, someone who fights with fists and feet--get kept out of Fighter when Barbarian and Paladin didn't? So we cull the list again, because the same arguments we used to get down to 6 encourage further downsizing, and don't feature any rational way out that doesn't feel arbitrary. So now we have Cleric, Fighter, Rogue, Wizard.
But wait--we already folded multiple different spellcasting traditions into both Cleric and Wizard, and we've already said it's fine that one casting class can use different spellcasting modifiers...so, given that "divine" vs "arcane" is a distinction without a difference in 5e, why are we keeping Cleric and Wizard separate? Clerics already get bonus proficiencies from their Domains, so we can just fold up all the fighty-stuff into subclass-domains that are equivalent to subclass-schools. Now we're down to Fighter, Magic-User, Rogue.
A lot of people will stop here, because three "feels good." But, as before, there's no strict reason why we have to stop--and, rationally, again the same arguments apply. If classes as disparate as Monk and Barbarian could be folded into the Fighter, why is Rogue different? It's not like Rogues practice some secret art Fighters could never learn, and they already had an innate parallel in the EK/AT concept. Why not just mush the two together? It's just one more class, after all, and you could even re-use several subclasses (like Shadow Monk or EK) with simple variant rules. Boom, now we've got the two-class setup.
From there, you get to a thorny question, and most people will stop there: Should classes even exist at all? Why do we separate casting and fighting? We have casters that fight (War/Bladesinger Wizards, War/Storm Clerics, Moon Druids, etc.) We have fighters that cast (Paladins, Rangers, EKs, etc.) Clearly we aren't actually that committed to separating the two from one another. Indeed, we continually make options for either side to dabble in the other. If we're already going to the effort of overhauling this much of the system, abolishing all but two classes, does "class" even really carry much meaning anymore? Each of these "classes" now has dozens of subclasses, each of which heavily modifies the base. If we're going to go to the level of figuring out how each of these dozen things can be validly compressed into just two...why not go the other way, and break every class up into its component pieces, and let people CHOOSE what they want to play?
The big reason most people don't stop at 5-6 classes is because you had to be pretty ruthless about your condensing choices if you got that far, and that ruthlessness generalizes. You could probably stop at, say, 8-9 classes by doing the following simple things:
Paladin -> Fighter (or Paladin -> Cleric, whichever your preference)
Barbarian -> Fighter
Sorcerer -> Wizard OR Warlock -> Sorcerer OR Warlock->Wizard (whichever you think is easier to do)
Ranger -> Fighter
Artificer -> Wizard
At that point, you've eliminated all the "well it's kind of like a fighter, but it does X too" classes except Monk, and you've gotten rid of either Warlocks or Sorcerers, trimming down the "bloat" of charisma-based casters. You're left with Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Rogue, (Sorcerer ~or~ Warlock), Wizard. There's still several points where you could validly ask "why are these arbitrarily separate," e.g. why do you still have two different Charisma casters, why isn't Monk or Rogue getting folded into Fighter, why isn't Druid getting folded into Cleric, etc. But Paladin, Barbarian, Ranger, and Artificer are all commonly put up on the chopping block, and I swear people have a huge boner for either "Sorcerer is just a Charisma Wizard," "Warlocks are just Wizards who cheated," and/or "Warlocks are just Sorcerers who got their power directly."
Edit:
I should add to the above, there are two things that people often get hung up on in this, which drive things toward ever-greater reductionism (and which are part of why I oppose reductionism merely for its own sake). Those are "necessity" and "objectivity." (Note the quotes.)
Most of the arguments against the chopping-block classes will invoke necessity at some point--"you don't need Paladin if you have Cleric and Fighter." But you don't NEED any classes (or other specific rules), aka classless games exist. "You don't need it" generalizes all the way down. That's why you only start to see resistance to it at the 4-and-under mark: 4 is traditional, 3 is your last RPS stop, 2 is the last contrast. It's easy to ignore the costs of the necessity argument when there are a lot of classes, and (usually) the person recommending this either doesn't play or actively dislikes the classes they're eliminating--but, again, it becomes hard to say "no" to eliminative reasoning when you said "yes" to the exact same argument previously.
The other thing a lot of people are doing is trying to justify their pruning. Without a justification, many will ask either why the reductionist's preferences matter more (if speaking of the game overall), or why the reductionist is ignoring popular options. Now, the simple answer is "there is no reason, I just don't want them," but that doesn't really fly in discussion very well. So, for people engaging in a discussion about it, they'll cast about for justifications, for objectivity in their pruning. "Of course Paladin should be removed. It's just a weird Cleric variant!" Etc. But one can find "objective" justifications for removing any class, as long as one ignores enough costs and highlights enough benefits.
So...yeah. The arguments in favor of reductionism kinda form an express train to few-to-zero classes, and it's often hard to get off that train until you've stripped things down quite far. Stopping right in the middle feels ad-hoc and arbitrary; stopping early is easy, but has minimal impact, so there's not much reason to discuss it; and that just leaves stopping late.
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MoonSong
Rules-lawyering drama queen but not a munchkin
Sorry, I didn't notice you weren't @Jack Daniel
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