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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jester David" data-source="post: 6129508" data-attributes="member: 37579">And now we’re changing an entire subsystem of the game, either changing rituals for the wizard or making divine rituals different, because theoretical bloat is bad and it might be hard for new players.I don’t buy either reason. First, balancing the entire game around new players is silly. There aren’t that many and they’re not new for long. After a few months of playing the same character they’re no longer a new player, they’re just a player. Keep options simple at low levels and you’re fine. Plus, as mentioned, new players don’t live in a vacuum. They have other players and the DM who are able to help, plus the internet. And the new players coming into the game are coming from gaming backgrounds of video games and much more complicated board games. Picking from a short list of spells is easy.Additionally, making them permanently pick a power is actually harder. If they have access to the full list they skim names and pick a couple spells to read that sound interesting and pick from those, knowing they can read the rest later. They’re not locked in.But, making them choose pushes them to make a permanent decision, which encourages reading all the spells to avoid making a poor decision. And there will always be inoptimal choices. The game should try and avoid trap spells but sometimes they happen.Second, pulling out those spells to become rituals just means you need to make more spells to maintain the requisite amount of choice (otherwise most clerics look pretty identical aside from domain). So its adding bloat to the base game. It also makes cleric spellcasting strictly offensive as much of their utility is now ritual based. This has the double effect of changing the tone & feel of the class while also making their spells are more samey, which requires more reading to distinguish between spells. But what if we don’t add new spells? Well, that really cuts down on options. For example, at level 3 we have Create Food and Water, Daylight, Dispel Magic, Meld into Stone, Prayer, Protection from Energy, and Speak with Dead. Remove Curse should likely be there as well. If we take out the rituals we’re left with Daylight, Dispel Magic, Meld into Stone, and Prayer. Take away one as a domain spell and you’re left with three spells. If you learn spells at the same rate as the wizard you automatically know 2/3rds of the spells that level. Which really isn’t that much different from having access to all the spells on the cleric list, as the difference is one to three spells. And as I said before, this is a pretty big change to the class(es) that is only needed if:a) we get endless splatbooks of new spellsb) DMs don’t restrict said spellsWotC has said they want to get away from a) and you’ll certainly have table variation on b).</blockquote>

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