D&D General Why are spells grouped into "levels"?

[dave2008]

Numbered is definitely easier. I just thought named categories would sound cooler.

Well it is subjective of course, I think the casting spells from the 9th circle sounds pretty cool. Maybe it reminds me of Dante.

 

[dave2008]

Is it worth pointing out that 4e removed asynchronous character and spell levels? For example: wish was a 29th level spell that you could get when you were 29th level.

 

[dave2008]

I remember reading something by Gary Gygax where he laments the use of level for class, dungeons, spells and that they should have gone with something else but the damage was done. Something along those lines anyway. I sometimes use circle for spells. A master mage of the 5th circle is able to cast 5th level spells, for example.

Having read more of the thread, it seems using circle is fairly popular.

You mean this: 1e AD&D PHB

 

[dave2008]

Personally, I don't think characters should be discussing spell levels (by whatever name) any more than they should be discussing hit dice or armor class. That's probably why I don't like terms like "circle" - it does sound like something one is trying to make into an in-game term. I'm mildly surprised by the apparent number of folks who think this is a reasonable thing for characters to discuss.



If forced to choose a different term, I think I like "tier" best of all the suggestions so far.

I think "circle" sounds less gamey than "tier." It represent discrete areas of power in a natural-language way IMO (like Dante did for the layers of hell). Though I like @Charlaquin 's suggestion of "order" too.

 

[jmucchiello]

Baron Opal II said:
If we split spells into 20 levels instead of 9, that would be less confusing. But, that's too much work for me at the moment.

1000x this.

Actually, I think this is the wrong direction. Simplification would better. Reduce the number of spell tiers to three of four and give them names: Cantrips, minor magics, moderate magics, major magics, epic magics.

It's 5am. Not sure if I want to develop this further.

 

[Coroc]

Why do spells have "levels"? Why couldn't we have used ANY other term for them?

I have new players get confused about "I'm a 3rd level Wizard, why can't I cast 3rd level spells?"

Sure, this isn't really a big deal - but it would have been entirely avoidable.

Simple fix: Call them Spell Echelons (or just about any other term like "Rank", "Stratum", etc).

Cmon now people, four pages already and no one gives the right answer?

VECNA (=Jack VANCE) did it !!!


Really, he is the one responsible, so you guys talking bout circles were already in the right direction.
In the book "The dying earth" spells are sorted by levels aka circles. I guess Gary liked that and included it into D&D

 

[jmucchiello]

They would. However, I take the division of spells into discrete, well-identified "levels" as a convenience for game purposes, not an exact description of how magic works in the characters' world.

Do characters in your world(s) discuss the toughness of monsters using the term "Armor Class"?

I've never understood this. SOMEONE would have figured out that the apprentice wizards all seem to grok magici missile before invisibility EVERY TIME. Someone would have noticed that copying a spell takes n * 50 gold worth of inks and papers where n depends on how complex the spell is and that this correlates to how apprentice wizards seem to grok the spells in a certain order.

As for AC, the chaos of a melee makes static analysis of something like AC, a number with a variable number of input, possible. But two wizards comparing spells, "It seem these days, Rumford, I can actually cast fireball twice a day. It happened only recently though." I would think if there are academies of magic, there are people collecting data about how wizards gain power.

(And then they meet a warlock and throw their data away. )

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Why even number them?

1st level spells -> Novice spells
2nd level spells -> Initiate spells
3rd level spells -> Adept spells
4th level spells -> Journeyman spells
5th level spells -> Expert spells
6th level spells -> Master spells
7th level spells -> Grandmaster spells
8th level spells -> Archmaster spells
9th level spells -> Legendary spells

Or something along those lines.

Because that's confusing too. I get that those titles make an obvious ordered sense to you, but imagine you're someone completely new to pen and paper RPGs, even if you've played a lot of CRPGs or MMOs or the like (and the last CRPG or MMO I can remember to use a progression like that was 2001's Dark Age of Camelot), and you have no clue what "journeyman" is, who whether an expert is better than an adept, or if a grandmaster or an archmaster is higher, and so on. Circles means you're clearly talking about something different, and people get that pretty quickly, and they also convey that one is better than the other without newer people having to regularly consult a table to work out the ordering.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I've never understood this. SOMEONE would have figured out that the apprentice wizards all seem to grok magici missile before invisibility EVERY TIME. Someone would have noticed that copying a spell takes n * 50 gold worth of inks and papers where n depends on how complex the spell is and that this correlates to how apprentice wizards seem to grok the spells in a certain order.

As for AC, the chaos of a melee makes static analysis of something like AC, a number with a variable number of input, possible. But two wizards comparing spells, "It seem these days, Rumford, I can actually cast fireball twice a day. It happened only recently though." I would think if there are academies of magic, there are people collecting data about how wizards gain power.

(And then they meet a warlock and throw their data away. )

Even more than Wizards, who can potentially know/not know spells, any Divine caster clearly knows what spells that they can prepare, so at the very least they'd have a clear idea of the circle (or whatever) of certain spells, as they became able to cast a whole bunch more stuff as they became more skilled. They might have actually cast Raise Dead before, but they'd know that they could (or couldn't).

And Wizards in older editions, there were literally often prices (in sourcebooks if not the core books) you could pay people for spells (long before Eberron), which was based on the level of those spells (and any expensive components needed of course). So they again must have known which spells were more valuable.

In 2E this came up all the time - people were always talking about spells and what they could cast - very often in character. So anyway, yeah, there's no plausible way that spell "circles" or whatever we want to call them aren't a real thing. Yes some untrained hedge-personage who casts a few 1st and 2nd level spells might not know about them, but any properly-school Wizard or Cleric or whatever is going to know.

I think we had a different name than "Circle" for Divine spells. I want to say "Order", but that might be a retcon on my part. I bet if I found one of my really old beautiful character sheets, which I devised in my dad's Word in like 1993 (oh the fonts!), and printed on incredibly expensive cream letter-paper, which I'd made reflect the game I was running, it would say.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This was also the term used by Earthdawn.

Earthdawn was such a fascinating and slightly challenging game when it came out. I have a friend, who I still play with occasionally (he lives in the US which, ironically, makes it more challenging to schedule stuff than with my brother who lives in Australia), who was always telling me about new RPGs, and he comes over to the UK, and he's telling me "They made a game like AD&D but way better!" and it's not one of these dubious games like Palladium Fantasy (which was awesome but clearly not "better" than AD&D), but rather this masterfully produced deal that solves virtually every perceived problem with AD&D.

And that was Earthdawn, and that was I think true in a lot of ways. Earthdawn had some issues of its own, not least it's idiosyncratic choice of dice, but it was such a brilliant and daring game at the time. And yeah Circles was a perfect example - I was like "Oh wow, they used they right term!". There were so many things - like connecting threads to magic items (which 5E has with attunement, in a minor way!) solved both the problem of "too many magic items" and of "magic items don't evolve with you" (the latter being a frequent complaint in 2E in my experience, because it didn't match up with fantasy novels and so on, where someone might have a cool item for their entire career practically).

There was talk of an official 4E-Earthdawn at one point, I don't think it ever came to anything, but that would have been the merging of two gods into one, almost, because they shared so many traits and ideas (only ED got there 15 years earlier!). I think a 5E-Earthdawn matchup could also totally work (maybe even more easily), just adding stuff to 5E.

Anyway back on topic the spell levels, but I just thought that was a really interesting reminder, and respect to Earthdawn, even if we never played it half as much as it deserved (to paraphrase Bilbo).