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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9040529" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Tell me if I'm wrong, but the way I'm understanding this is, let's say my character is TEH ICE WIZZARD (the Blizzard Wizzard, if you will).  I ONLY CAST ICE!  All of my spells are cold themed- "My magic missiles are razor sharp homing icicles!").Now, upon leveling up, I have the choice between a mediocre ice spell (sadly, in real D&D, that's most ice spells) and an awesome fire spell (second verse, same as the first).  If I stay on theme, I'm going to be performing worse than if I had made the sacrifice of flavor vs. power.  If I don't, I'm more versatile and more powerful.Generally, if I want to be a themed character, I want to stick with that theme, obviously.  But not all themes are well supported. At some point I would ask my DM if I could learn "freezing orb" instead of fireball or something like that (one of the few cool things in the Wizard playtest is the ability to do just this!).But assuming they aren't on board with this (for whatever reason), or they can't do it (public play), generally what I do is quietly retire the character because their concept isn't working.  I'm perfectly capable of not optimizing, and having fun with lower power options, but often, I worry about pulling my weight in the party, and if I don't think I'm doing that, I'll ask about changing characters.As an aside, I think this is actually something we lost when specialization stopped meaning anything for most casters; it's a lot of fun to be like "ok, so I'm an Enchanter, what can I do without boom boom magic?".  But now, there's no reason for even an Enchanter to not stock a fireball just in case.  I miss some of the radically limited specialists in 2e like the Elementalist Wizards (had an Air Wizard once, all I can say, good thing I could use Fire as well!) or the Dualists from the Cormanthyr book (you specialize in 2 opposed schools of magic and can cast basically nothing else.  My highest level 2e Wizard is an Enchanter/Invoker and making do with a limited color pallet, so to speak, is a fascinating process).</blockquote>

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