Both of these, I agree, would be good things. If you took the fighter and the thief and merged them into a single class with the abilities of both. The ability to function at their level both in and out of combat. Because Vancian means that if expecting a fight the wizard can prepare for the combat focus of the fighter - and if not expecting one he can prepare for the non-combat focus of a thief. Call him the "professional" or something. As things stand, this flexibility is a way Spellcasters are Special. As if they need more than the ability to warp reality to make them special.
I don't dislike those aspects of casting. I dislike them paired with the classic D&D class system that doesn't normally allow this sort of flexibility. Now whether this is a problem with Vancian Magic or one of the D&D class system is open to debate. (I'd say it's a flaw in the classic D&D class system, myself).
It's definitely the class system, not the Vancian system. In 3e, every class that has some sort of resource management system is better than classes that don't, because for some reason the designers thought that getting something in the Special column of your class table (Smite +1/day!) was equal to getting multiple things (5 spells! 2 maneuvers! 15 power points!).
This isn't true. 3e definitely made the problem more severe. But the 2e mage, with specialisation is hugely more powerful than the 1e mage who doesn't get these bonus spells. And even in 1e, the commonly thought overpowered variant classes like the Cavalier were made, according to Gygax himself, to try to add some balance. Also the AD&D endgame is much, much lower than the 3e one. In AD&D you got castles and towers round level 11 or so - and that's when much of the adventuring stopped - and when the fighters got armies to make up for the wizard's spells continuing to improve. Talking about 20th level wizards - 20th level wizards could easily make reality beg for mercy in 1e. Fighters were men with sharpened bits of metal no matter what level.
I should have been more clear, by AD&D I was referring to 1e. 3e is the system that made both the "too many spells" and the "too-fast preparation" problems real problems, with Focused Specialist and Collegiate Wizard and easily-crafted wands and Doman Wizards and all that on the one hand and 1-hour preparation on the other. 2e didn't have the too-fast preparation problem, and the number of spells available, both known and per day, were higher than 1e but still nowhere near 3e. If we went back to the 1e version as I suggested, both problems would be solved.
0 - 50th level here.
But I see what you mean.
Yes, we use spell level = mana points needed, but each time you use a spell on a level above an exhaustion point count (which counts down of course) you pay up to 3 additional mana. There are a few more tweaks like more costs or inability of casting the same spell more than a specific number of times unless it is a 0 or 1st level spell and your highest spell (last learned if tie) usually takes up double the mana. Until they are really in the epic levels, we rarely see overpowered, sometimes we see underpowered in the lower levels. We don't have any power players though.
It is not that the Vancian casters or those using the above suggested "wizard and sorcerer in one" idea (4 PCs with that right now) can't hold up. It is just a different system.
If you have a spell point system with fatigue or other limiters, you're essentially capping people at X 9th-level spells per day, Y 8th-level spells per day, and so forth, with a limited ability to mix that up and a vastly larger number of lower-level spells. If you're going to do that, then using a Vancian hard cap plus either lots of lower-level spells or reserve feats and some sort of "overchanneling" like the Versatile Spellcaster feat accomplishes the same general concept with less complexity. Yes, spell points let you keep using the higher-level spells at an ever-increasing cost, but either you actually use those high-level spells with that frequency (in which case you're more powerful than an equivalent Vancian caster) or there's a marginal utility to those spells (in which case there's a self-imposed cap that makes it effectively Vancian).
I think a lot of the problems of Vancian casting can be mitigated by good class design. Why does a generalist wizard have to be best at everything? I say, if you want to be the magical jack of all trades, you have to accept being master of none. Sure, the generalist gets a few illusions; but he's quickly left in the dust by the Illusionist.
2e's reworking of 'specialist wizards' was IMAO a huge step backward from 1e. Though I grant that the 1e conception of specialists takes a lot more work to get right, I also think it's time well spent. Believe me, I don't carry a torch for 1e otherwise, I think 3e was a huge improvement, but in this one area Gygax was seriously onto something - the Illusionist had tons and tons of flavor.
Yeah, most of the time when I hear people who want to fix casters by restricting them to themes, the 1e illusionist and the 3e beguiler are held up as shining examples. Supposedly, before Gygax was kicked out of TSR he had planned to change the wizard into a bunch of specialist spells and leave the mage as a bard-like limited caster, which would have been a sight to see. I'd be all for going the forced-specialization route.
Rituals are even more flexible than Vancian spells. You can cast as many different rituals as you want in a day provided they are cheap enough in residuum.
In theory, yes. However, the problems with the ritual system are their time and gold/residuum cost. As presented in 4e, they're not worth it at all the vast majority of the time because of one or both of those factors ("Quick! They're almost here!
Arcane lock the door! What? 10 freaking minutes? Never mind, grab some debris!" and "Sooo...I could
knock the door down, at the cost of 10 minutes and 175 gp, orrr...I could blow the thing off its hinges, because they'll hear me chanting anyway...decisions, decisions....") and they aren't as well supported.
Also, as I mentioned above, they don't give you any tactical flexibility or creativity at all, which the Vancian system does. Being able to cast several spells in quick succession lets you get creative with combining them, casting them as rituals one at a time does not.
Yeah, I suspect that if 5e's Vancian system was essentially 4e's power list(minus all the encounters and at-wills) for casters and you got 3 daily slots that you could fill with any of the 6 dailies you started with in your spellbook, that a lot of people wouldn't like it.
I suspect people would be complaining that it didn't offer true choice or that it didn't resemble the Vancian system they remember. I suspect that the Vancian system isn't what people like, it's overpowered spells.
It's not the overpoweredness of AD&D/3e spells people like, it's the variety. If 5e was 4e powers in a Vancian framework, I wouldn't like it because those spells would likely be incredibly boring and same-y and all combat-focused. Give me
grease,
silent image,
reduce person,
fly,
fire trap,
wall of force,
delayed blast fireball,
telekinetic sphere--and those are just SRD spells--not yet another way to damage someone and push them a bit, or teleport tactically, or create a crowd-control zone. Lots of people played crowd-control wizards in 3e, and that's a fun and effective way to play, but 4e (and now probably 5e) have said "If you want CC or blasting or very limited abjuration, you can contribute in combat, if you want illusions or enchantment or very limited necromancy, you'll have a few watered-down tricks in combat and not much out of combat."
If you sort 3e spells by power and cut off the top half of them, you'll
still have plenty of fun, creative, flexible, and noncombat-capable spells. You can shape the world, fool people, build wards and traps for later, pick up a few minions, and do lots of other things. If the designers think you can't use illusions in combat, tough noogies for them, they shouldn't give you a few powers that deal psychic damage and call them illusions and then make you spend an arm and a leg to get basic rituals, like Hallucinatory Creature which, at level 12, finally lets you make the moving image of a creature at the cost of 10 minutes and 500gp where a 3e caster could have been doing that several times a day from level 1.
Back in 1e, all the overpowered 3e spells had drawbacks, and plenty of them.
Wish had no "safe" options and aged you,
polymorph could kill you,
animate dead could be dispelled,
fly didn't have the safe descent, and so forth. Yet people liked the 1e system just fine, because it wasn't about options, it was about creativity and breadth of effects.
[/rant]
Incenjucar said:
Yeah. This is a pretty serious flaw in the game, for me.
Thank goodness for Invokers, but they need to bring back things like the Illusionist and then branch out into more creative areas. Sorcerers need to stick around, but be given a more visceral association with magic.
It's not actually a problem if there's one Wizard class, as long as you can build him into whatever kind of style you like. In theory, the 3e fighter could be built as a legionnaire, a mercenary, a knight, a bodyguard, and bunches of other things, and even do a passable job of duplicating the ranger, knight, nonmagical monk, and so forth; the fact that none of those classes were really capable of doing what they said they were is beside the point. Likewise, it's not a problem having one Wizard class as long as you can build him as a pyromancer, a summoner, a diabolist, an oracle, a warlock, or anything else.
The difference between versatility in
build and versatility in
play is an important one. You want a single class to be able to do many, many things well when you
build a character of that class, so you have interesting options and not all characters of that class are too similar, but you want to limit their options when you
play a character of that class to keep things within one theme.
1e and 2e were very good at the latter as far as casters were concerned, with their cap on spells known, difficulty in learning new spells, and such, but not so good with the former, since you didn't have any class features to differentiate "illusionists who happen to cast a summon once in a while" from "summoners who happen to cast an illusion once in a while" from "wizards who can both summon and create illusions." 3e was the opposite--build any kind of wizard you want, good; play any kind of wizard you want with the same character, bad.
If the 5e wizard can be built to be anything under the sun involving magic, but you can build the 3e/4e warlock, 3e dread necromancer, 1e illusionist, and more with it to play with, I'd be perfectly happy with a do-anything wizard class.
