Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6829486" data-attributes="member: 6775031">It's hard to be cool and magical, when magic isn't cool anymore because it's so commonplace. At-will magic would have been incredibly impressive in AD&D, in the context of powerful spellcasters who could only prepare a handful of spells each day. At-will magic isn't impressive at all in the context of 4E or 5E, where every wizard can cast all day, and each spell is strictly less impressive than an equally-accomplished swordsperson just wailing on a guy. Even though modern wizards look super powerful at first glance, the change in context means they really aren't so much.(A similar issue occurred with healing. One of the goals of 4E was to kill the heal-bot archetype, which was widely considered to be unpopular but mandatory. A healer in 4E was supposed to be more versatile, because basic healing was a swift action and everyone had healing surges to pick up the slack. Unfortunately, due to the change in context, the actual healing spells stopped being impressive at all - the basic implementation was only allowed the potency of a swift action, and the actual spend-an-action Cure spells couldn't fix anything that wouldn't heal naturally overnight anyway.)It's all because players thought they knew what they wanted, but failed to account for the required changes to context that would bring them about. And so we're stuck with at-will magic that hits roughly as hard as punching someone in the nose. And that's unlikely to change anytime soon, because most players lack the foresight to understand that limiting their magic would allow it to be more impressive - you would never be able to sell them on going back to X spells per day, because they would understand the loss of at-will magic but wouldn't understand how much more magical those spells would seem.</blockquote>

Verification