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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celtavian" data-source="post: 6658110" data-attributes="member: 5834">Did it ever occur to anyone that a huge part of the D&D player base that enjoyed playing casters like magic being this way? A larger percentage than WotC anticipated? A larger percentage than cared about the caster-martial disparity? WotC fell into the classic trap of the silent, satisfied customer that likes how things are versus the vocal customer that finds cause to complain. The caster-martial disparity complaints and WotC's design response to those complaints in 4E was a classic example of this phenomenon. They had a bunch of folks unhappy about wizards and other casting classes overshadowing martials. They had a large silent group of caster players happy with magic as it was. They decided to attempt to appease the people complaining about casters and boom the silent customers suddenly became the ones complaining. That other half of their customer base that sat silent in the caster discussions suddenly went, "What the hell did you do? This is absolutely intolerable." With another game that kept casting as they liked available they migrated in herds to the new game probably shocking the crap out of WotC after hearing about the caster-martial disparity for so long. It wasn't until the mistake was made they realized they just pissed off the caster portion of their player base.I still wonder to this day if anyone at WotC that was part of the 4E design team said, "If we do this to the magic system, won't we alienate the caster player base?" Not really. I played a lot of 2E wizards and wizard multiclass characters allowed to gain a lot of xp due to the gold xp system of that edition. 2E wizards were quite powerful, more powerful than 5E wizards. Not quite as powerful as 3E wizards due to no metamagic or DC boosting powers. 2E wizards had a lot of save or die effects. A few no save effects. A lot of powerful offensive and defensive abilities and the were fighting creatures with far fewer hit points. About the only thing they had real problems with were magic resistant creatures. A creature with a high MR like a Mind Flayer was a huge pain for them. You had to get creative defeating them.The 5E wizard is somewhere between the 2E wizard and the 4E wizard. Less powerful than 2E due to spell design, legendary resistance, and concentration, but more powerful than 4E by quite a wide margin because of spell versatility. The 2E and 5E wizard are not comparable at similar level. I did like 4E's ritual system. I'm glad they kept a little bit of it for 5E. Ritual magic was both conceptually and mechanically interesting. I liked that 4E addition, though I had seen it in other game systems. It was nice to finally see it in D&D.My group would have probably played 4E if they had not done what they did to the casting system. I actually found a lot of what they did with martials interesting. I liked martials having other interesting options that tried to replicate fictional powers of martials. But what they did to casting was something I did not feel like playing. My entire enjoyment of casting classes was spell versatility used to devise interesting strategies for victory. I loved this aspect of D&D. 4E completely robbed me of an aspect of the game I had enjoyed for a few decades. I tried to enjoy the new wizards and casters, but it was so limited in scope I couldn't enjoy it. I felt nothing like this amazing mystical master when playing a 4E wizard. Regardless of whether caster players speak up or not, they're looking for a particular experience. That experience isn't necessarily power in terms of raw power to kill something. They're looking for the power to manipulate, to strategize, to overcome puzzles with magic in the same way a scientist uses science to overcome something. This aspect of spell versatility is extremely important to caster players. Any magic system that doesn't allow a caster player to spend extensive time thinking up an interesting spell strategy is going to fail to satisfy an extremely large number of caster players. In all my years of playing D&D, caster players are the guys that spend the most time reading the book poring over spell lists dreaming up spell strategies to unleash. Spell text is extremely important to them. Spell strategy is their fun. Any edition of D&D that takes that way from caster players will never be popular amongst the large number of caster players in the game.</blockquote>

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