D&D 5E Why does Wizards of the Coast hate Wizards?

[tetrasodium]

Yeah, well, as was said, this is the first time I've ever seen anyone argue that wizards are getting the short end of the stick. The fact that they are the only class that can cast ANY of their rituals at will makes the whole spellbook thing FAR, FAR more versatile than any cleric or druid who, while having rituals, have to burn a memorization slot in order to use it.

The relatively minor expense of a spellbook is hardly going to keep wizards from having extensive spell books.

That's not actually the way it started. Long story short.... People pointed out that cantrip versatility should be swap 1 cantrip/rest rather than per level since the sorcerer & such was getting the ability to swap 1 spell/rest without needing to maintain a spellbook & the sidebar made explicit that also allowed cantrips. Once that was said, the MMO forum style nerf requests started coming out saying that wizard was already too good and can suck it.... Since then there has been a lot of "no that's absurd" and at least one literal nerf request that wizards should have their spells prepped capped at the number of spells known by an 11th level bard I believe it was.

It's surprising to see someone call the cost of maintaining a spellbook "relatively minor"(seriously, compared to what?) given that wizards tend to devour coin with no end in sight long after the rest of the table moves beyond the trivialities of money other than the occasional healing potion purchases.

 

[Ashrym]

In 40 years of playing in this hobby, in my experience by 5th level at least one Magic Weapon has been found, and one adversary is wearing Plate Mail.

So I disagree with the assertion that 5e assumes the PCs buy their Plate Mail. It does not suggest that limitation in the DMG. Respectfully that assertion is quite subjective.

As an aside when 5e came out I rolled all treasure randomly, to kick the systems tires as it were, and with some lucky rolls for a treasure hoard, at 3rd level; a set of Mariners Plate was in a well defended hoard.

The hoard was not taken, but in those hoary days of 2014, when the game was new....I’m sure I am not the only DM that had something similar happen.
( as an aside Plate Armor is probably too much AC even at 5th lvl in 5e)

A quick glance at the published official adventures would also support that by 5th lvl plate mail looting opportunities exist.

As for stating that Wizards do not need to scribe spells into their Spellbooks....that is true,
but that undercuts the soundness of your argument regarding the unalterable uber -ness of wizard versatility.

In this case the Wizard has a practical spell book/ list maximum of 44 spells, versus the 102 so spells on the Druid spell list in the PHB. The Cleric has about the same number, just using column size as a comparison( i’m not counting). The Paladin has 55 spells on their list.

Assuming the Bard and Sorcerer have between 80 to 100 spells on their respective class spell lists, this means that a non scribbling wizard is significantly LESS versatile than a UA Bard or Sorc, on the basis of aggregate number of spells to chose from practically on a day.

As things currently stand, a Wizard must scribe 12 spells to have more spells in their spellbook, than a half-caster Pally has on their spell list. The UA rules put Bards and Sorc in the same category as Divine Casters.....way more spells to chose from than the wiz has in their book.

So, no Wizards are the only class that is expected to pay gold for a class feature.

Sorry, the Aggregate Spell list numbers shreds the versatility arguments that people have been bandying about.

5e hasn't been around for 40 years, however, and previous editions pointed out that those heavier armors were custom fit, which was why they were so expensive. A person couldn't just take them off any old corpse. 5e leaves that up to the DM.

Random armor in treasure is luck vs expectation. It's not a good measurement.

Some published adventures do have armor relatively early, but you are assuming the characters did not already spend the money on that suit before 5th level. Armor was only an example, however. Druids spend money using their herbalism kit and I pointed to the cost for awaken in your other thread.

It doesn't matter how many spells are in the spell list. No class has access to the entire spell list at any given point in time. Even going with swapping an entire spell list over time 2 5th-level spells is still going to be 2 5th-level spells even if they are different spells.

 

[Todd Roybark]

Glad I can expand your horizons Hussar. Please see above were I am arguing for ribbon like abilities for the Wiz. That said, I’m not in agreement with your qualitative assessment of Wiz Ritual power.

Many Ritual spells are pretty situational, a wizard having Skywrite and Comp Lang in their spellbook is rather impotent when adventuring indoors and the inhabitants speak common.
Casting Magic Mouth and mocking Halaster in the Underhalls, while fun and probably good for getting Inspiration from the DM, is not likely in normal circumstances to win battles, but can be useful.

Ritual Spells, moreover, tend to be lower level, so in my experience Bards, as they advance retrain poorly aging spells for ritual spells....a cleric preparing Detect Magic at 1st level might cramp ones style, but by 10th level when one could prepare 13 -15 spells, the hit is not that bad.

The Ritual Caster feat turns anyone with a 13 Int OR Wis into Wiz style ritual casting, and that cleric w/ 8 INT can still by RAW select Wiz as the class to which the feat applies.

I’m not saying Wiz Ritual Casting is bad, it is a nice feature, but not as strong nor as unique as your are intimating.

As for spellbooks, nothing is cheap nor easy about them. DMs ( or other players) messing with PCs spellbooks is as old as the game. Effectively this means a Wizard is going to need a Traveling Spellbook and a Master Spellbook. Glyph of Warding can not be used to protect a carried spellbook because once one moves 10’ away from the location the spell was cast, it fizzles into the ether.

The Wiz has to fret over their diary until 4th level spell Leomund’s Secret Chest, which has a 5000 gp component cost (& a situational chance to disappear into the Ethereal Plane).
So that ‘minor expense’ is about 3 times more than 1500 gp the Warrior is not paying for when the warrior loots plate mail.

How about some ribbon spellbook defense powers for the Wizard?

 

[Ashrym]

Glad I can expand your horizons Hussar. ✌ Please see above were I am arguing for ribbon like abilities for the Wiz. That said, I’m not in agreement with your qualitative assessment of Wiz Ritual power.

Many Ritual spells are pretty situational, a wizard having Skywrite and Comp Lang in their spellbook is rather impotent when adventuring indoors and the inhabitants speak common.
Casting Magic Mouth and mocking Halaster in the Underhalls, while fun and probably good for getting Inspiration from the DM, is not likely in normal circumstances to win battles, but can be useful.

Ritual Spells, moreover, tend to be lower level, so in my experience Bards, as they advance retrain poorly aging spells for ritual spells....a cleric preparing Detect Magic at 1st level might cramp ones style, but by 10th level when one could prepare 13 -15 spells, the hit is not that bad.

The Ritual Caster feat turns anyone with a 13 Int OR Wis into Wiz style ritual casting, and that cleric w/ 8 INT can still by RAW select Wiz as the class to which the feat applies.

I’m not saying Wiz Ritual Casting is bad, it is a nice feature, but not as strong nor as unique as your are intimating.

As for spellbooks, nothing is cheap nor easy about them. DMs ( or other players) messing with PCs spellbooks is as old as the game. Effectively this means a Wizard is going to need a Traveling Spellbook and a Master Spellbook. Glyph of Warding can not be used to protect a carried spellbook because once one moves 10’ away from the location the spell was cast, it fizzles into the ether.

The Wiz has to fret over their diary until 4th level spell Leomund’s Secret Chest, which has a 5000 gp component cost (& a situational chance to disappear into the Ethereal Plane).
So that ‘minor expense’ is about 3 times more than 1500 gp the Warrior is not paying for when the warrior loots plate mail.

How about some ribbon spellbook defense powers for the Wizard?

Comprehend languages is a fairly common pick. It's not useful until it is, lol. Magic mouth is actually pretty good because it's versatile.

Skywrite not so much.

I find ritual casting isn't necessary, but it is nice to have.

Glyph of warding is abusable.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think this is right. Being able to use the best armour is a class feature for several classes, especially fighters. But armour has to be acquired, with the default method being gold piece expenditure.

In 40 years of playing in this hobby, in my experience by 5th level at least one Magic Weapon has been found, and one adversary is wearing Plate Mail.

So I disagree with the assertion that 5e assumes the PCs buy their Plate Mail.

There's no assertion about an assumption. There's an assertion about a default. Just as PCs can encounter adversaries who wear plate mail and let the fighter take that as a bonus, so they may give extra money to the wizard as a bonus to let him/her scribe extra spells. If the plate mail comes out of the fighter's share of treasure, then we are back in the situation I described.

Well, just how many levels of spells can you scribe for 1500 gp?

At 50 gp per level, I make it 30. Or one of each spell level from 1st to 7th, with 2 levels left over.

How much does a set of plate looted from the big bad cost?.. oh wait, it doesn't & it was a ridiculous claim trying to suggest that every other class has expenses on par with the wizard's never ending gp black hole known as a spellbook & you knew it so you asked spell level rather than spells.

How much does money looted from the big bad cost? Nothing. So why is one a black hole and the other not? Of course the wizard's ability is open-ended but I wouldn't call that a "black hole" - it's an in-principle unlimited ability to power up the character!

Are you seriously comparing the need to eventually buy the best mundane gear for a build in the phb to finding scrolls & filled spellbooks then scribing them to a spellbook all the way to level 20?

<snip>

Even if a wizard does find a spellbook, there are good odds that it's going to be minimally scribed with just whatever spells were found in the npc's prepped spell list (if that) & because NPCs tend to have similar spells prepped in many cases the book is likely to have a lot of duplicates resulting in a book with 5-10 spells where 3-10 of them are likely to be in one of the spellbooks found previously.

Of all the things I've heard said about D&D wizards over the years, I think this is the first thread where I've seen it argued that the ability to build the power of your PC without any in-principle limit, by expending a player-side resource (gp) which also can grow without any in-principle limit, is a disadvantage.

 

[pemerton]

Assuming the Bard and Sorcerer have between 80 to 100 spells on their respective class spell lists, this means that a non scribbling wizard is significantly LESS versatile than a UA Bard or Sorc, on the basis of aggregate number of spells to chose from practically on a day.

This seems the wrong metric. Isn't the limit on versatility for bard and sorcerers, under the variant you're talking about, the number of long rests that are actually taken in play?

As others have already posted upthread, for a wizard the versatility per given long rest is much greater. I think a game would have to have atypically many meaningful long rests for the bard or sorcerer using this variant to out-flex the wizard. Perhaps if you anticipate playing such a campaign don't use the variant?

 

[Todd Roybark]

Ashrym, magic armor has always resized, and it sounds to me you are referring to 1e Unearthed Arcana introducing Field and Full Plate armor in 1985, about 6 years after the release of the DMG, the repair rules applied to those armors. If there was armor repair guidelines in the 1e dmg, they were easily overlooked, if even present, and almost no one, certainly not Gary Gygax ever used All the rules in the DMG.

In 5e a 3rd level Defense trained fighter with a shield is going to blow the bounded math for AC for many monsters. Add in Shield mastery and more mayhem ensues.

But that is all a distraction.

All casters pay material component costs, but Wizards potentially pay learning costs that nobody else does....(Ritual Caster feat costs excepted).

If Raise Dead and Awaken are just simple swaps, then your games treat magic much more mechanically then mine. Which might explain our different views. ( And of course completely cool and valid, I appreciate the engagement in this thread). Awaken is one of the most dramatic and impactful ways for a player to directly impact and change/add to the collective narrative of any campaign.

permeton, a 4th lvl spell takes one Long Rest to scribe. A 9th lvl spell takes 2 Long Rests....so any group with a Wizard, and playing by RAW, is going to have downtime and plenty of it.

 

[neogod22]

Say that when spell versatility is limited to a spellbook with very expensive spells scribed into it & stop acting like the sorcerer isn't getting something amazing by not being limited to a spellbook at the trivial cost of only being able to swap one spell or cantrip from their entire class spell list per long rest. You are frustrated that sorcerers don't get something people with the ability rarely ever do (change large many prepped spells at the same time)

The more I read this forum, the more I feel like, the next time I run a game, Spell Versatility will not be an option for anyone. Everyone can get Cantrip Versatility though.

 

[pemerton]

permeton, a 4th lvl spell takes one Long Rest to scribe. A 9th lvl spell takes 2 Long Rests....so any group with a Wizard, and playing by RAW, is going to have downtime and plenty of it.

But what is the significance of purely notional versatility of warlocks and sorcerers during such downtime? I mean, the players can all imagine them cycling through the spells on the list but what impact does that have on play?

This is why I referred to meaningful long rests.

EDIT:

Meaningful long rests are a constraint that operates in the real world. They relate to the amount of actual play that occurs at the table.

Whereas down time and spending gp are purely in-fiction resources that don't inherently map to any cost at the table. If the GM of a game establishes fiction where these things are scarce then the wizard will clearly be weaker; conversely, where the GM is liberal in respect of them then the wizard will be stronger.

It's hard to compare a real-world constraint with a "constraint" that is really a function of the GM's choices about the content of the fiction. Presumably the variant rules are based on the designers' best guess as to how these things unfold in a typical game.

FURTHER EDIT:

Is this the concern: the player of the sorcerer or warlock knows (i) that at some future point a spell load-out of XYZ will be needed, and (ii) by spending long rests via downtime or whatever s/he can rebuild his/her PC with a XYZ load-out?

I assume that the variant design rests on a premise that predicting needed load-outs isn't super-feasible in this way (eg because the GM can use the passage of in-fiction time to justify changing the in-fiction situation to make the XYZ load-out less useful than it might otherwise have been).

But maybe in a relatively highly-optimised game in a relatively static situation (eg classic Tomb of Horrors) the variant does make warlocks and sorcerers better than they should be. Again I can only assume that is not the sort of game the designers regard as typical.

 

[Todd Roybark]

Well it could go like this:

1 Wizard spends one day scribing a 4th level spell
2 Same day Ranger tracks baddies to weird abandon looking building
3 Rogue finds out the building is called The Temple of a Thousand Locks
4 Flame Sorcerer swaps out Aganazzars Scorcher for Knock

In X-men terms it is like Cyclops deciding to be like Beast one day. Important things happen at many gaming tables during ‘ downtime’.

More importantly, many Sorc players like the class because of the limited Spells Known....it is simultaneously a challenge to make a themed spellcaster, while being very easy to just pick up and play as the spell selection is relatively static.

So the Sorc needs to be a little more like a Swiss Army Caster, in order to be fun?

Not in my experience.