Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 5882315" data-attributes="member: 17106">Beyond the traditionalism that others have noted, the Vancian system is preferred relative to the power system for other reasons. First and foremost, it applies only to spellcasters, whereas the power system applies to all characters. Sure, Vancian magic is hackneyed and arbitrary, but at least it made spellcasters feel like they were doing something out of the ordinary. Different characters having different mechanics is really important.Second, while you've correctly noted that while many people like Vancian plus at-will abilities, the "per encounter" business is a hangup for a lot of people, because defining an encounter is a conceptual problem.The flexibility of a Vancian wizard is also much greater than that of any 4e character, and while some complained, many players enjoyed strategizing using their endless repotoire of spells derived from twenty different supplements.Moreover, the power system fixes none of the substantive problems with Vancian magic. You still have enormous complexity. You still have abilities that never fail, backfire, or harm the user. You still have recovery of abilities over time as the major balancing factor.The real question to me is why Vancian is preferred over some point-based system, or one that (gasp!) isn't predicated on limiting magical use by some arbitrary resource that recovers over time but instead having substantive costs (or no direct costs, as the 3e warlock). That, I think, is a combination of traditionalism and stylistic issues.</blockquote>

Verification