D&D (2024) What's your opinion on the standardization of Spellcasters?

[Arilyn]

I really don't like it. It sucks the flavour out completely and adds yet more oddness to the game. How are bards tapping into the song of creation and pulling out spells that are identical to other arcane spells? How are sorcerers changing their spells? Why can't wizards tap into something? Why do they have to study so hard and pay money to scribe new spells? If wizards no longer have to do this, are they not just sorcerers too?

It's a clunky change that feels more like something that you introduce into a brand new edition, where you have more room to ensure the changes make sense.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I don't care.

- If everyone is listed as a Prepared caster and you don't want to go through the hassle... then you just make your initial spell selection and just never swap the spells out. You essentially make yourself a Known Spell caster if that's really important to you.

- The number of Prepared spells being set based on your matching spell slots is understandable from an gameplay ease-of-use point of view... but I do agree that it does make things weird for high-level casters-- where they still have to Prepare four 1st level spells despite probably never actually casting any of them except in the most dire of circumstances. In the 2014 method you can just choose to Prepare like one or two 1st level spells knowing you probably won't ever actually cast them in the day... and thus it lets you have more higher-level spell options that are more likely to be cast. Granted... this does mean that if we assume for the sake of argument that Rituals will maintain the current rules that you must have the spell Prepared in order to cast it as a Ritual, then the non-Wizards can make use of their Ritual casting by Preparing a lot of low-level ritual spells. Of course... this would also assume a caster would actually potentially cast all four of their 1st level slots in the day wherein they'd need to save their slots by using Rituals... but I don't know how likely that will be. (This was always the advantage of Wizards, who could cast ritual spells that they had in their spellbooks even without the spell being Prepared-- so they had all Ritual spells available at all times, and still had the four 1st level spell slots available for casting other spells.) But really, at the end of the day I do not know if the lower number of Prepared higher-leveled spells versus more 1st, 2nd & 3rd levels ones is really going to be that big of a deal-- and honestly I don't think this particular rule is going to stay in the game anyway.

- I don't consider it any big deal whether a class has an individual spell list that is written out strictly for the class (which usually consists of them only getting certain types of spells anyway) versus only getting certain schools of spells (which results in pretty much the exact same framework other than some spells being different for them in 2024 than in 2014.) Whether you have a hand-picked selection of spells available to you, or a list of spells from only certain schools, there's no real difference (except for those individuals who think "X class HAS to have spells A, B & C, otherwise THEY AREN'T TRULY THAT CLASS!). But to me those are the select few that you can't base your entire design paradigm around, because every single person in that group will choose a different set of spells they think has to be available anyway.

At the end of the day my feeling is this... true character individuality and uniqueness comes from the player and the backstory and personality the player gives to their PC-- basically how they roleplay. And game mechanics do not a unique or cool character make. After all... pretty much every single Fighter in AD&D looked mechanically exactly the same-- it was only the individual player and how they played their character that made all of these Fighters different and memorable and awesome.

Are there players out there that play the "best in slot" game, where they only take the best options every time a game mechanic choice comes up... and thus find themselves playing and seeing the exact same mechanics appearing over and over and over-- especially when they become available to more characters and more classes? Sure. But I do not believe the designers need to cater to them-- the players who could make wildly mechanically-varied characters if they wanted to just by making different choices... but never do because those options aren't "optimal". WotC cannot save those players from themselves.

If you want your PC to be different and unique compared to the other characters in your party? Just don't choose the exact same options everyone else does because you ALL have this need to only take "best in slot". Take the options you think would assist your character in being cool, rather than demand WotC not make options more widely available so that you all have no choice but to be forced to play differently because the rules won't let you overlap.

 

[Amrûnril]

I definitely don't like the shift towards prepared spells. It removes a major avenue for character differentiation within classes.

I don't feel as strongly about tying spell preparation to spell level, but I still think I prefer the older version. I do think tying spell slots to prepared spells on a 1:1 basis has a lot of potential to be confusing to returning players of older editions.

As for spell schools, in principle I like the idea of making these matter, but there are a lot of questionable classifications that get emphasized this way, and the current implementation feels like an obvious workaround, rather than being based on an independent desire to make schools matter.


The biggest change, though, isn't mentioned in the OP. Is the shift to shared Arcane/Divine/Primal spell lists part of the "standardization" the poll is asking about, or is this more focused on the changes to preparation?

 

[niklinna]

I'd like to get into a whole thing about this matter, but one of my main games right now is Torg Eternity, where you get a whopping three spells by playing a spellcaster. If you're from the magic cosm you can get five. If you play the one exact right kind of spellcaster (like, a specific cosm/race combo), you can eventually get as many as eleven from a very weird and particular list of spells. And you can't ever change them. (You can in fact get more in any of those cases, but the rapidly escalating XP/spell ratio makes it a bit crazy.)

Eh okay I'll get into it a little bit.

The whole point of spells as opposed to powers is that you cast them through ritualized action (however brief, and in D&D it's historically very brief!). The action can be so exacting or tax the brain so much that you forget bits (original Vancian magic), or you just have to really bone up every day to be sure you've got it primed and ready, but you should be able to do that retuning. The time scale of the retuning could still be a differentiator. Maybe most spellcasting classes can do it on a long rest, but Wizards can do it in a minute (X times per rest, whatever). Coming back around, though, a big part of the narrative behind Sorcerers and Warlocks is that they don't do spells through ritualized action, they are in fact inherent or granted powers. So that drains a good bit of the feel/fantasy as well as the mechanics from those classes. Then again, Sorcerers have that whole wild magic thing going* and why couldn't a patron grant a different power each day, just like a deity? Roleplay that stuff!

* What if sorcerers had to roll randomly for their spells each day? : Remember when even wizards (magic users) had to roll dice to determine what spells they had?

The slots to prepare thing is just weird and arbitrary. But then so is the concentration mechanic, however well-motivated it is in gamist terms. But slots prepared is a bit more complicated than number prepared, so it seems to go counter to the direction they're going. I don't know what their reasoning is behind this. It's definitely a nerf.

Three spell lists is too crude. Specifying a combo of list + schools winds up being more complicated than just having class lists, which again seems to go counter to the direction they're going. These are effectively just class-specific lists, except you don't even get the list that you can just look at, you have to go digging through multiple lists at best, individual spell descriptions at worst. I think Pathfinder 2 struck the right balance with its four lists, and with having Sorcerers/Witches get a list based on their patron. But dang is that system crunchy and full of undiagrammed feat chains/trees and "this feat gives you that spell so flip pages back and forth to find out what all you can do" (exactly the problem I pointed out with list + schools, hmm...).

I'll add that the supposedly simpler "you have these spells, unless you pick from this bigger list" is terrible textual organization and really muddies things. They should just have a separate section or sidebar with "the quick build".

There's much more to come down the pike though, so who knows?

 

[Charlaquin]

I think it’s a bit too soon to be saying they’re standardizing casting. We’ve seen all of two casters. It could be that this is only how experts prepare and cast spells, for example. It’s also possible that this first look at casting polls poorly and we don’t see it again.

For my part, I would prefer each casting class have unique casting mechanics. The Warlock is awesome because it actually does something different than every other caster. The Next playtest sorcerer was an entirely spell point-based caster and it was awesome. I’d love to see that make a comeback, while the wizard goes full-on classic prepare-each-use-of-a-spell-individually Vancian, the Cleric leans into Channel Divinity as its unique casting feature, the druid gets something else new… Of course I know none of that is going to happen in 5e (or 1D&D or whatever you want to call it). So, I guess the approach we see in the Experts UA is fine?

 

[MoonSong]

I think it’s a bit too soon to be saying they’re standardizing casting. We’ve seen all of two casters. It could be that this is only how experts prepare and cast spells, for example.

It isn't that farfetched:

• The rules we were given mention "prepared spells" for multiclassing without acknowledging known spells at all.
• In the video, Crawford mentions something akin to "our casters are prepared casters" while ambiguous, one possible interpretation is all casters are going to be prepared casters.
• In the lead up to Tasha's, UA featured the option to swap one spell known every long rest.

More important, if this is the way they are going, the sooner we figure it out and respond, the better. Would you rather wait for a year to find out for sure and waste precious time that could be better spent designing something that works?

 

[Charlaquin]

It isn't that farfetched:

• The rules we were given mention "prepared spells" for multiclassing without acknowledging known spells at all.
• In the video, Crawford mentions something akin to "our casters are prepared casters" while ambiguous, one possible interpretation is all casters are going to be prepared casters.
• In the lead up to Tasha's, UA featured the option to swap one spell known every long rest.

More important, if this is the way they are going, the sooner we figure it out and respond, the better. Would you rather wait for a year to find out for sure and waste precious time that could be better spent designing something that works?

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to speculate that other casters might use this same spell preparation system, if it polls well in this UA. But we don’t know if that will happen or not, and I think it’s more productive to give feedback on this UA based on what’s in it, rather than what we imagine might be in future packets based on what we’ve seen in this one. We’re 2 months into a 12-18 month open playtest process, at this point everything is still subject to change at this point.

 

[beancounter]

Such a rule severely weakens warlocks who only get 2 spell slots for most of their career.

 

[MoonSong]

I don’t think it’s far-fetched to speculate that other casters might use this same spell preparation system, if it polls well in this UA. But we don’t know if that will happen or not, and I think it’s more productive to give feedback on this UA based on what’s in it, rather than what we imagine might be in future packets based on what we’ve seen in this one. We’re 2 months into a 12-18 month open playtest process, at this point everything is still subject to change at this point.

I'm not that convinced. To me it is very clear their intention is to make all casters prepared casters. (Heck I've just checked the previous packet, and Mage initiate clearly reads "always prepared" instead of the "you know" language). While it is very good for rangers, and not entirely wrong for bards, the whole set up is very bad, clunky, hard to use and deprives bards of many iconic bard spells. (Not to mention it forces you to use the game warping healing word instead of cure wounds which I prefer. Of course if I wanted to run my bard as a healer which I don't really always want)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Honestly, I would be surprised if these kind of design aspects are even on the table for change.