Why is the Vancian system still so popular?

[Bedrockgames]

Dungeon- and building-based adventures are inherently ruinable to begin with, the Pick of Earth Parting just makes it a lot faster and doable by a lone non-caster. If D&D focused more on outdoors adventures, it probably wouldn't be as much of an issue, but soooo much of the game is focused on confined spaces.

I think part of the issue though is the Gm believing the adventure has been "ruined" simply because the players found a way around many of the challeneges. One thing I learned a few years ago is to reward clever parties accordingly. If they figure out how to beat your adventure in one move, let them. Just like if the players figure out a way to kill your big bad guy in one or two rounds, let them do so.

 

[Incenjucar]

I think part of the issue though is the Gm believing the adventure has been "ruined" simply because the players found a way around many of the challeneges. One thing I learned a few years ago is to reward clever parties accordingly. If they figure out how to beat your adventure in one move, let them. Just like if the players figure out a way to kill your big bad guy in one or two rounds, let them do so.

Eeeeh... it basically forces you to put something vulnerable at the end of the adventure, or to keep constant pressure going, to keep PCs from just wrecking the joint. Put me within a mile of a river and a shovel and I'll patiently ruin anything you've got planned.

Kobolds never expect an inland tsunami.

 

[paladinm]

Hey here's a thought.. We've talked about having both custom and "canned" classes.. Do we need to have the same for spells/powers/whatever? You can choose from the standard list of "canned" spells (that cost spell points) and/or roll your own and pay the sum of the costs of the effects.

Hmm.. what would the cost be for Cthulu's Dark Tenticles of Death and Despair?

(Yes, I'm kidding)

 

[Ranes]

Vancian is the worst form of magic system, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Apologies to Winston Churchill.
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[EmbraCraig]

I think part of the issue though is the Gm believing the adventure has been "ruined" simply because the players found a way around many of the challeneges. One thing I learned a few years ago is to reward clever parties accordingly. If they figure out how to beat your adventure in one move, let them. Just like if the players figure out a way to kill your big bad guy in one or two rounds, let them do so.

I think part of the issue stems from players feeling the need to "beat" the GMs adventure (and assume that killing everything is the way to beat it) - might be that there was valuable information that he had put in that tower to actually keep the game going beyond that one session. Might be there were prisoners to rescue that could have branched the story in another direction. Might be the wizard at the top of it who you thought was the BBEG was actually mind controlled by a high level aberation that could have formed an entire new meta plot for the next part of the campaign... guess you'll never know, though.

Of course, folks are now going to accuse me of being a railroading GM for suggesting that giving clues in one session that give the players a direction to go on in their next session is a good thing. You call it railroading, I call it giving a campaign direction... rather than having the players randomly wandering the countryside, killing and pillaging things.


But that's off topic really - so about vancian magic - I don't like it as I've experienced it in Pathfinder.

I'm playing a cleric in my current game - first caster I've played after being a fighter and other simpler classes. Being relatively new to playing a caster in that edition, it takes me about a half hour to actually decide what spells I want in a day every time I get access to a new spell level. And I really don't like the whole rock/paper/scissors casters - if you've got the right spells prepared, some encounters become completely trivial (yep, the caster feels awesome... the guy with the sword and the heavy armour feels pretty useless at the time).

So that'll come under the "Rewards System Mastery" column to some people I guess - I see it more as "assumes or requires system mastery". I don't see that as a good thing - if a new player rocks up to a game and wants to play a Wizard because he thinks they're cool, I don't want to have to say "Probably better not... have you thought about swinging a hammer around? That can be fun too. Yes, those people are playing casters. They've done their time, so they're allowed to have more fun than you"

As they level up, Fighters make choices and stick to them. Rogues make choices and stick to them. So do Rangers, so do Barbarians, so does every other martial class. Why should casters have the right to be ideally suited to any situation, just as long as they know what's coming?

("Hey guess what guys? I've got divination prepared today, I know exactly what we're doing tomorrow!")

 

[Aenghus]

I want to vote against ludicrous 1e type drawbacks to spells like a small chance of death, or aging and a system shock roll with again a small chance of death. In practice these drawbacks are often ignored or applied inconsistently and hence unfairly, or the spells with too high a potential price aren't used by most players. After all, there are plenty of ludicrously powerful spells that don't have any drawbacks.

I've never seen a referee actually just wipe out an entire party from a bad teleport roll - (in 1e teleports which went seriously wrong could teleport the whole party up into the air or into the ground). They would fudge the roll to be off target or give them a possibly survivable fall, rather than kill off the whole group.

I think catastrophic mechanics like this are bad in general. Much better to have less serious drawbacks that the non-suicidal PCs will consider risking, and that don't need to be fudged constantly.

In a high fatality rate game with a pile of premade PCs, catastrophic drawbacks can be a crazy sort of fun, as replacement PCs are readily at hand and continuity isn't an issue, but this style of game doesn't appeal to me the vast majority of the time.

 

[StreamOfTheSky]

I want to vote against ludicrous 1e type drawbacks to spells like a small chance of death, or aging and a system shock roll with again a small chance of death. In practice these drawbacks are often ignored or applied inconsistently and hence unfairly, or the spells with too high a potential price aren't used by most players. After all, there are plenty of ludicrously powerful spells that don't have any drawbacks.

I've never seen a referee actually just wipe out an entire party from a bad teleport roll - (in 1e teleports which went seriously wrong could teleport the whole party up into the air or into the ground). They would fudge the roll to be off target or give them a possibly survivable fall, rather than kill off the whole group.

I think catastrophic mechanics like this are bad in general. Much better to have less serious drawbacks that the non-suicidal PCs will consider risking, and that don't need to be fudged constantly.

Yes, this. Absolutely this.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Eeeeh... it basically forces you to put something vulnerable at the end of the adventure, or to keep constant pressure going, to keep PCs from just wrecking the joint. Put me within a mile of a river and a shovel and I'll patiently ruin anything you've got planned.

Kobolds never expect an inland tsunami.

Which is fair, but DMs always have more resources than players.

I mean, you dig a new trench, perhaps the kobolds don't expect it, but perhaps the local nixie population decides to wreak havoc with your plans, or the flooded dungeon becomes a flooded MacGuffin hiding spot now filled with quippers and locathah (or whatever), or some druid from downriver decides to go on and on about how you've suddenly starved hundreds of people since the river feeds lots of fields and now doesn't, or in a few days the colonies of giant ants living under the ground decide to move out -- and decide to collect villagers as food as they pass.

That's sort of top-of-the-head spitballing, but I know that in 3e (and still, but less adroitly, in 4e), I could get a really solid night of gaming out of that.

"I flood the dungeon" or "I wreck the tower," to me, is in part, the player telling me, "Not interested in that, thanks."

 

[Lwaxy]

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).

To prepare in advance is a huddle most of our players sbsolutely don't want. If they really want to try it out later, we made a feat that allows you to convert unused mana points into vancian style spells. Only the abjurer uses it though. I had a problem getting any casters in some of the groups except clerics, because neither the traditional wizard nor the spell limited sorcerer appealed to the players.

Also, having all the spells you know at your disposal at all times (well, unless you are out of mana) makes a big difference in believability. You don't see Gandalf saying he can't cast something because he does not have it prepared

We also see a lot more variance in spells used, which is the main reason players pick the points rather than Vancian.

But as I said before, the Vancian casters hold up, except maybe for the first 3 levels or so.

 

[Hussar]

Last time I played 3e, no one in the group had any interest in standard casters. I saw lots of things like Favoured Souls and warlocks and whatnot, but, (again, other than me, the horrid munchkin powergamer that I am) no one wanted straight up casters.

When I asked, the answer was, "We don't want to piss about trying to figure out what to memorize". Sorcerer style casters, where you pick your spells at level up, was fine. But, having a list as long as your leg of spells to choose from, just wasn't fun for them.

I think Vancian casting works best in earlier editions where your spell list was maybe a few dozen spells. Makes it a lot more accessible.

But, it's funny people bring up the idea of versatility. That's largely the problem. It's also a much larger problem in organized play. I've always maintained that 4e is the RPGA edition. I'd append that to say it's the organized play edition. It's the first edition to do organized play out of the box with few, if any, modifications.

Which, IMO, is one of the big issues that people have with it with their home games. Overpowered versatility can be a social contract issue and can be solved fairly easily (usually) by reasonable players and DM's. At an organized play event though, you have no social contract and thus these issues become very exacerbated.

Sure, it's great to have these funky spells in your home game. It isn't that hard for a moderately competent DM to keep them in check. Although, some of the more egregious spells really should be rewritten. But, I think the main problem is in trying to make the rules so fixed that you don't need a social contract agreement.

That works great in organized play or when playing with new strangers, but is WAYYYY too restrictive in a home game.