Wizard vs. Sorcerer: Which one would you rather play? Which would you rather be?

[Azzy]

I'm generally more of a wizard guy, but I'd choose a divine soul sorcerer at the drop of a hat. Gimme the Magic Initiate feat (so I can get Find Familiar), and I'd be good.

 

[Satyrn]

I'll take bard. Either for the groupies, or so I can slay dragons.

Depends if I'm living on Earth or Middle Earth.

 

[cbwjm]

I'd choose wizard. Unlocking the secrets of the multiverse, it'd be rad.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I prefer sorcerers, and not just cause they're sexy. Their limited magic allows them to choose a schtick - such as cold or illusions - which I think is quite important to the appeal of any character in a game where you get superhuman powers. Characters that just take every good spell in the book - sleep, charm person, web, invisibility, ESP, fireball, fly, dimension door, teleport - are boring and predictable.

A successful rpg character in a game with 3-5 players or more must have many areas in which they do not excel, to leave room for the other PCs to do their thing. The D&D wizard does too much, and always has done.

 

[MoonSong]

Sorcerer has the cooler fluff. Wizard is generally a better class in 5e. I'd rather play a wizard and add story elements more similar to the sorcerer as it's easier to fix the story stuff up however I want than to change the mechanics.

If you really can, personally I cannot stomach the wizard fluff and I've never been able to ignore the mechanics in order to get the kind of characters I like to play. In no edition ever. The 5e wizard is less limiting than previous versions but that somehow makes it even worse of a fit, the worst part is that it dragged down the sorcerer with it.

But yeah, there is a lot of stuff I don't like about the wizard, I cannot really stand it on principle. I can tolerate it, but I'd rather stopped playing altogether than play one.

My problems with it are many, one, it feels like someone else's power fantasy, do you know how many times I've ever thought about how cool it would be to waste my childhood and teenage years studying in order to break the laws of the universe and use them to go on yet more studying? exactly, zero times, never ever.

Also as both an educator and a current student of the hard sciences I don't really appreciate the association with real life science, they aren't actually that related and I think that anything that misrepresents how actual science works makes more harm than good considering how many young people go out of their way to avoid math.

The class also feels too limited in background and personality type, it isn't as straight forward as you'd think for a purported "generic" spellcaster. It feels too plutocratic/aristocratic/bourgeois/undemocratic etc as it is connected with wealth and power by need, that or jump through hoops, that somehow end up with an even worse "look how special I am" outlook. (Contrast with "it just happened I was (un)lucky enough to have this", the ability to come from anywhere, anyplace regardless of circumstances)

Another thing that has made the class sour on me is the personalities it invites. Somehow being a very smart character is carte blanche to metagame, powergame, optimize and overall being quite disruptive, even jerkish at the table.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg (like maybe real world magic doesn't work that way)

I'd rather play a 3.x Sorcerer. Yes, it's inferior to the wizard in system-mastery/power-gaming theory, but you actually can build one to a fun/interesting/cool concept, and it'll only fight you at level-up. The wizard sabotages build-to-concept every single day. The 5e wizard is worse, that way, and the 5e Sorcerer has less going for it as an alternative.

If my only options were play a wizard or play a sorcerer?

I'd start my own campaign. 5e's way more fun for me to run than to play, anyway.

Yes, ironically the sorcerer somehow gets worse with every passing edition. Though Divine Soul solves a lot of stuff, not all of the stuff though, but is quite playable and finally gives the sorcerer something wizards cannot do or copy.

 

[Leatherhead]

It feels too plutocratic/aristocratic/bourgeois/undemocratic etc as it is connected with wealth and power by need, that or jump through hoops, that somehow end up with an even worse "look how special I am" outlook. (Contrast with "it just happened I was (un)lucky enough to have this", the ability to come from anywhere, anyplace regardless of circumstances)

Interesting. To me, Sorcerers reek of the "I was just born better than you" type elitism.

Yes, ironically the sorcerer somehow gets worse with every passing edition.

I blame Warlocks. Without the Warlock, Sorcerers could have been the "magic all day" class with spiffy innate, yet personally selected, magical abilities (like Devils sight).

 

[Tony Vargas]

Yes, ironically the sorcerer somehow gets worse with every passing edition. Though Divine Soul solves a lot of stuff, not all of the stuff though, but is quite playable and finally gives the sorcerer something wizards cannot do or copy.

Only two editions have passed since it's rather inauspicious inception, but, yeah, you're not wrong.

The 3.0 Sorcerer looked, to me, at first glance, a pretty pointless idea. It was little more than a wizard with an alternate daily spellcasting system. Yipee, I'd seen a /lot/ of alternatives to traditional Vancian over the years - it being, simultaneously, the most iconic and most despised sub-system in D&D - and the Sorcerer's 'spontaneous' casting hardly seemed that big a leap.

But, it turned out that the 3.x sorcerer was a fantastic class, not for casting spontaneously, not for having a lot of spell slots/day (though it helped), but, mainly, for it's most brutal limitation relative to the wizard: very limited known spells. It meant that when you created and leveled up a sorcerer you made character-defining choices that really painted a unique picture of this magic-using individual. A sorcerer who could cast Unseen Servant and Shield was utterly different from one that could cast Burning Hands and Charm Person. Just utterly different. And not really all that likely to converge as the game went on. A pair of wizards each with the same pair of spells in their books could confer for a bit and add eachother's spells to their books, becoming functionally identical characters.

It was the Sorcerer's lack of long-time-horizon flexibility that made it a great class. The fighter was similarly great for building to concept for a similar reason - those feats were very defining and not chosen that often & not changed each day - albeit, from the opposite direction, the 3.x fighter being /more/ flexible than ever before, and still much less so than the Sorcerer which owed it's uniqueness and value as a character-building option to being far more restricted than the traditional Vancian wizard and even, in the long run, than the magic-user before it.

In 4e they met in the middle. All classes were pretty fair character-building/defining tools. The Sorcerer not only didn't stand out, but it got boxed into the striker role.

Come 5e, the wizard brakes back out into omnipotent blandness, more flexible and thus less prone to customization and character-defining decisions, than ever before. The Sorcerer, still has the known spell restrictions that made it such a nice build tool in 3.x, but it also has hard-coded sub-class flavor that just takes the bottom out of that, completely - and it just doesn't stack up to the wizard, at all. Meta-magic is thematically appropriate, and it's not chopped liver, but it doesn't compete with the wizard's neo-vancian uber-flexibility including co-opting the Sorcerer's claim-to-fame spontaneous casting. Not the way spontaneous vs prepped and nice boost in daily slots used to. The 3e sorcerer was arguably behind the wizard on the power curve, Tier 2 not 1, whatever, but it was competitive. The 5e sorcerer feels closer to the futile horror of strict inferiority.

Interesting. To me, Sorcerers reek of the "I was just born better than you" type elitism.

So, like nobility, destined heroes, demi-gods, and just, in general, most of the protagonists in myth and fantasy literature. Yeah, you're right. That was also part of what made 'em such a good class.

I mean, Merlin, the other archetypal wizard besides Gandalf, was the son of an Incubus, his power was in part inborn. And Gandalf, of course, was a Maiar. Medea and Circe - also oft-cited archetypal wizards - were technically demi-godesses, having divine parentage (not that that was at all unusual in Greek mythology).

Prospero, though, he was a wizard-by-learning-only. So there's that.

 

[Greg K]

I want to say sorcerer. However, until WOTC releases a subclass that I, actually, like and would allow in a campaign, I guess that I will go with Wizard.

 

[Greg K]

So, like nobility, destined heroes, demi-gods, and just, in general, most of the protagonists in myth and fantasy literature. Yeah, you're right. That was also part of what made 'em such a good class.

I mean, Merlin, the other archetypal wizard besides Gandalf, was the son of an Incubus, his power was in part inborn. And Gandalf, of course, was a Maiar. Medea and Circe - also oft-cited archetypal wizards - were technically demi-godesses, having divine parentage (not that that was at all unusual in Greek mythology).

I really liked the 3e sorcerer. The whole WOTC in 5etying the Sorcerer into manifesting a specific set of abilities related to the parent ancestry (as they define it) is why I dislike the 5e sorcerer class (as of the moment). I don't recall either Merlin, in the stories with which I am familiar (e.g. T.H. White, Excalibur) growing demon wings due to his infernal heritage or Circe, due to her divine heritage growing angel wings. It is also why I disliked the sorcerer in both 4e and Pathfinder as well , but at least Pathfinder had the Arcane Bloodline.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The whole WOTC tying the Sorcerer into manifesting a specific set of abilities related to the parent ancestry (as they define it) is why I dislike the sorcerer class. I don't recall either Merlin, in the stories with which I am familiar (e.g. T.H. White, Excalibur) growing demon wings due to his infernal heritage or Circe, due to her divine heritage growing angel wings.

To be fair, the Greek gods didn't have angel wings, either (the Romans pinned some on Nike, I think it was, that's about it). But Circe was a daughter of Poseidon, and didn't have a fish tail, so point taken. By the standard set by Vancian magic, that's not so wide of the mark as all that, though - D&D being notoriously execrable at closely modeling anything for most of it's history. In 3.x, the Sorcerer and Fighter (with some MCing) probably represented the peak of player freedom to custom-build PCs that actually emulated archetypes and specific characters from genre. Not a very high peak, and the CoDzillas and Godwizards'd overshadow you, but still....

I agree that the 4e & 5e sorcerer implementations were too locked into their 'build' and sub-class flavors, respectively, while the 3.x sorcerer gave you a much freer hand at chargen. To that extent, I have to agree with MoonSong that it's gotten 'worse' over the eds.