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.
And I'm saying that this isn't true. At 9th level or so they
have to change the game and give the fighter a castle and followers simply because the wizard is too powerful and versatile. Even in 1e. And Gary has gone on record saying he made the apparently overpowered Unearthed Arcana classes like the Cavalier to try to balance them with casters. (Or more specifically he agreed with this when Raven Crowking stated it as his reason).
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.
Me too.
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
The majority of the time, no they aren't. They aren't the 6 second re-writing of reality with trivial cost that old spells were. But with a creative player checking his ritual list they can be extremely useful. As a player I've avoided encounters and disrupted and forced a re-write of sessions using rituals. And as a DM I've had it done to me. But what this took was actual genuine creativity rather than the caster's fingers and using a spell for exactly what they are designed for. To me that's creativity far more than digging through your toolbox to find exactly the right tool.
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.
I'm going to question your assertion. 4e
has many of the spells on that list. Grease (and yes it doesn't give all the ramifications any more than B/X), several variants on Fly, and Wall of Force. And a decent although even less powerful silent image encounter spell (which is just as well as I broke silent image - although at least it wasn't Phantasmal Force). I'm pretty sure Fire Trap is a ritual. Which means that the only spells I can't think of an analogy for are reduce person and telekinetic sphere - and the latter is an 8th level spell.
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."
Necromancy I agree with. However there is no orthodox build that says "you'll have a few watered-down tricks in combat". Every build that's officially supported (and this emphatically includes Illusionists and Enchanters - both in Essentials by name) is fully combat capable. And there are enough utility powers for both to be effective.
That said the Mage presented in Essentials is a vastly superior implementation of the wizard concept to the Wizard presented in the PHB.
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.
The only two spells on the list you presented that are left, however, are Delayed Blast Fireball, and Fire Trap. The rest are (with the arguable exception of Wall of Force) definitely top half.
You can shape the world, fool people, build wards and traps for later, pick up a few minions, and do lots of other things.
As long as you allow rituals to build things for later (and sometimes shape the world), you can do every single one of those things in 4e. You have the flexibility you crave. You just don't have the raw power.
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.
And the 3e caster was broken sideways. Silent Image is not just abusable but trivially so - think of the effect of a one-way fog cloud. But the basic illusion power you're looking for is presented in HoFK (i.e. the new replacement for the PHB) and is a second level encounter power, IIRC taking a minor action.
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.
Within one theme and a set power level. "Can re-write reality however he wants" is a theme.
1e and 2e were very good at the latter as far as casters were concerned,
1e and 2e were
barely passable to the point that EGG himself deliberately raised the power of non-casters. And wanted to break the wizard into pieces. Calling them "very good" is taking things far too far. 4e, especially post-essentials is much much better at this.
1) Player Agency - Excepting 4E, under all previous editions, the vancian was the most flexible and customizable.
And that's one reason I believe Vancian should die. Either that or the flexibility and customisation of
all non-casters needs to be massively raised.
I do find it funny that someone listed Gandalf as an example of how D&D does a bad job with casters. Given that the first D&D article about Gandalf (back in, what, Dragon #4) described Gandalf as a 4th-level druid based on the actual spells he cast in AD&D.
The prosecution rests.
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.
There's a difference between "figuring your way around" and "snapping your fingers and making the challenges irrelevant using things trivially presented to them by the game".
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.
Me too. I
like backlash systems like WFRP 2e and WFRP 3e where casting a spell is
always a risk - just not a catastrophic one.
Yeah, I'm cool with that. The issue is space. Magic, which mostly meant Vancian magic, takes up about 50% of the space in the 1e and 3e PHBs. I think Vancian casters just have too many spells.
Yup. To me pre-4e D&D has always been about casters and sidekicks - just the pagecount and level of detail is enough to show this. And I don't think most people intentionally sign up to play sidekicks in D&D. In Ars Magica this isn't a problem as the game tells you what you are getting in for. But nowhere in D&D does it explicitely say that much more time, care, attention, and agency is given by the rules of the game to the players of spellcasters.
The problem is, you have to build the whole game around that. You have to have numerous encounters over the course of a day, to balance non-casters with casters.
...
So it makes D&D quite a limited game, that easily breaks if you change any of the assumptions. And that's bad because I think a lot of people do want to change those assumptions, though possibly I'm just projecting my own desires.
Agreed. The encounter model of D&D
works in a dungeon. But precious few environments are as dangerous as the artificial nature of an adventuring dungeon. Having people preparing for the night and expecting a ninja assault because they've
only had three major fights for their life in one day to me breaks settings. You can't run anything Lord of the Rings-esque outside Moria, Mordor, and the big battles. Any sane world just isn't that dangerous.
Of course this is a problem with the recovery rate rather than the parts of casting that are called Vancian and a lot gets fixed if wizards only get to recover their spells in a lab or library, or priests in a temple. If you need a few days of solid preparation you keep all the advantages of vancian casting while destroying this problem,
