The Gaming Den

FrankTrollman wrote:However, I am flat incredulous that hogarth or anyone who has ever played any reasonable amount of D&D in any edition has never had someone at their table complain that spell preparation was too complicated. Or too much work. Or whatever.

I know people who don't like playing spellcasters.
I know people who don't like playing non-spellcasters.
I know people who don't like playing rogues.
I know people who don't like playing non-rogues.
I know people who don't like playing dwarves.
I know people who don't like playing elves.
I know people who don't like playing females.
I know people who don't like playing males.

I don't consider any of those to be a problem with the rules, per se.

FrankTrollman wrote: I mean let's be honest, when you have a forum full of fail and neckbeards like enworld, they go on for fifteen pages about how spell preparation is cumbersome.

I've never played a single campaign where someone didn't go off on a rant about how spell preparation was too complicated.

-Username17

Hopefully not too off-topic: You make it sound like it's a problem that the EN World thread length is so long. Here at the Den, we've got many long threads about specific issues within D&D.

hogarth wrote: I've heard a variety of complaints about 3E wizards, but "clogging" hasn't been one of them. I doubt it would make it into the top 10 complaints, frankly.

This might change your mind on that

@Frank: I'm going to side with Hogarth here on the anecdotal evidence: I'm pretty sure that the sum total of the rants I've heard in person about spell preparation being too complicated adds up to about two sentences.

However, I've seen people forget to do it properly all the time.

hogarth wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:However, I am flat incredulous that hogarth or anyone who has ever played any reasonable amount of D&D in any edition has never had someone at their table complain that spell preparation was too complicated. Or too much work. Or whatever.

I know people who don't like playing spellcasters.
I know people who don't like playing non-spellcasters.
I know people who don't like playing rogues.
I know people who don't like playing non-rogues.
I know people who don't like playing dwarves.
I know people who don't like playing elves.
I know people who don't like playing females.
I know people who don't like playing males.

I don't consider any of those to be a problem with the rules, per se.

If someone wants to play a spellcaster for fluff, but the rules for doing so are so much more cumbersome than "easy" classes, that is a valid concern with the system. It shouldn't be that much more difficult to play as one fantasy archetype than another.

There is a defense to be made that some people in the same game will prefer different complexity levels, but look at it this way; if the Wizard is 8x as complicated as the Fighter, but both were balanced in outputs, then the extra complexity would be a nuisance and handicap to the Wizard player. So, to legitimize such widely varying complexities, the Wizard becomes 8x as effective as the Fighter, to "reward" Wizard players for their system mastery. This is how you get to Ivory Tower design.

Different archetypes should work differently, but the level of complexity shouldn't vary that much between classes.

Foxwarrior wrote: I'm pretty sure that the sum total of the rants I've heard in person about spell preparation being too complicated adds up to about two sentences.

i know plenty of people who say that its too much of a pain in the ass, and they will play a ___ instead. Oftentimes sorcerer/warlock.

If its a one shot game I will never roll a wizard, and always a barbarian.

When someone asks you for build advice do you list the feats his fighter should take. How about the spells his wizard should take. 9/10 feats (ratio), and 4 or 5 spells tops?

I had a glance at that ENWorld thread and I have one question: who exactly is doing the commenting in it?

Stubbazubba wrote: If someone wants to play a spellcaster for fluff, but the rules for doing so are so much more cumbersome than "easy" classes, that is a valid concern with the system.

Suppose you think the 3.5 Warlock class is too complicated and I think the 3.5 Warlock class is not complicated enough. Who's right? And more importantly, what logical argument can the person who's right use to convince the person who's wrong?

hogarth wrote: I've heard a variety of complaints about 3E wizards, but "clogging" hasn't been one of them. I doubt it would make it into the top 10 complaints, frankly.

Ok, Lago's solution is poorly thought out and insulting as usual, but you could make spell preparation easier without doing any of the mother-knows-best shit he wants to do. In 3e a mid level wizard is still expected to individually slot cantrips. The player knows that whether he puts Mage Hand or Ghost Sound in Cantrip Slot #3 will likely not matter, but he's still expected to do it. Just dropping the Cantrips line off the wizard's spell chart at level 5-7 would help reduce amount of work down to just the work that actually matters. Telling the player "you forgot how to Ghost Sound" is dumb but you don't have to do that. The player can still prepare it, he just has to want to enough to prepare it in a higher level slot where it competes with other spells he cares about.

This would also cut down on buff stacking because characters wouldn't have a ton of low level slots to fill with individually weak buffs. I completely understand if you don't see the need to reduce complexity just for its own sake but this would also deal with the barkskinned protection from eviled spider climbing lightning resistant troglodyte-shape Animal's Ability Score x 3 wizard.

So... something like this?

Level:	6 slots of this level	4 slots of this level	2 slots of this level
1	-	0th	1st
3	0th	1st	2nd
5	1st	2nd	3rd
7	2nd	3rd	4th
9	3rd	4th	5th
11	4th	5th	6th
13	5th	6th	7th
15	6th	7th	8th
17	7th	8th	9th

Yeah, that's the general idea. I think I'd do fewer slots total with some at-wills filling in the gaps, and a bit of tweaking to give something new at every level (something like 4/3/2 at odd levels, 2/4/3 at even levels) but otherwise that's what I was thinking.

When building high-level casters, I usually wish that was the rule.

You could have the low slots be at-will, middle be encounter, and high be daily, if you wanted. It would probably work better with jumps in spell level larger than 1, though.

Oddly enough, D&D Essentials had a pretty elegant system that was similar. You got a number of spell slots, and you couldn't prepare spells of the same level into the slots.

It didn't give you enough spells, because it's 4e, but the system was elegant and easy to explain. It also accomplishes the goals of power replacement to reduce player work load without insulting the player with actual power replacement.

-Username17

Parthenon wrote:I had a glance at that ENWorld thread and I have one question: who exactly is doing the commenting in it?

different people. you have to be a member to see the actualy names, or you can go to each posters profile type page and see the comments left for them and search through them to see who left a comment on each post int he thread....

Just limit casters to one spell of each level prepared at a time, plus let them throw darts "magically" at low level for their at-will needs.

So a 7th level Wizard has 4, 3, 2, 1 spell slots (plus whatever bonuses) as a daily limit, but can only prepare 1, 1, 1, 1 at any particular time. Short rest to prep a new set after the battle.

The NPCs become much easier to work with (and don't have quite so much advantage from being sedentary), the PC's choices are limited to 10 even at epic levels, it cuts back on nova-casting all your top level spells in the first fight, and, yeh. Why not?

tussock wrote:Just limit casters to one spell of each level prepared at a time, plus let them throw darts "magically" at low level for their at-will needs.

So a 7th level Wizard has 4, 3, 2, 1 spell slots (plus whatever bonuses) as a daily limit, but can only prepare 1, 1, 1, 1 at any particular time. Short rest to prep a new set after the battle.

The NPCs become much easier to work with (and don't have quite so much advantage from being sedentary), the PC's choices are limited to 10 even at epic levels, it cuts back on nova-casting all your top level spells in the first fight, and, yeh. Why not?

That's a shitty idea, because the entire point is that having a prepared Burning Hands written on your character sheet is a waste of space at 7th level. A better solution is to give people some specific number of slots (like 6) and let them prepare no more than a specific number of spells of each level into those slots. So the player might have 3 4ths and 3 3rds prepared. If one of the lower level spells is particularly interesting for the adventure (like Command Undead), then you can still prepare it. But it displaces a higher level spell.

-Username17

The point of having spell levels is to make people use different level spells, Frank. Plus, fuck you and your Burning Hands strawman again, it's a shitty spell at all levels, and has been for 12 years now.

There's nothing at all wrong with chucking out a Magic Missile spell at 7th level, nor Shield, Charm Person, Ray of Enfeeblement, Spider Climb, Grease, Cause Fear, .... That's versatility, choice, making people use their brains with a spellcaster.


Yes, 1 spell per spell level per fight makes casters less powerful. That's not a bad thing, even though it would make all your good work with the Tomes rather less relevant.

ModelCitizen wrote:Ok, Lago's solution is poorly thought out and insulting as usual, but you could make spell preparation easier without doing any of the mother-knows-best shit he wants to do. In 3e a mid level wizard is still expected to individually slot cantrips. The player knows that whether he puts Mage Hand or Ghost Sound in Cantrip Slot #3 will likely not matter, but he's still expected to do it. Just dropping the Cantrips line off the wizard's spell chart at level 5-7 would help reduce amount of work down to just the work that actually matters. Telling the player "you forgot how to Ghost Sound" is dumb but you don't have to do that. The player can still prepare it, he just has to want to enough to prepare it in a higher level slot where it competes with other spells he cares about.

That's one possibility. There's also the idea behind the (terrible) Shadowcaster from Tome of Magic, where you can cast all of your low level spells as much as you want after you get high enough level.

Of course, I'd rather just go one step further and not have prepared spellcasting at all (NOT because it's "clogged" with options, but because it's stupid), but that's too big a sacred cow for some people.

hogarth wrote: Of course, I'd rather just go one step further and not have prepared spellcasting at all (NOT because it's "clogged" with options, but because it's stupid), but that's too big a sacred cow for some people.

I'm a big fan of the idea that scholarly caster types can find or research new spells through play, and giving that option to spontaneous casters turns them into Beholder Mages.

Although I'd also like finding a new spell through play to be a bigger deal. 3e makes it way too easy between Magic Marts and spellbook looting. If learning a new spell were roughly on par with getting a minor permanent magic item it could be manageable on a spontaneous caster.

hogarth wrote:Of course, I'd rather just go one step further and not have prepared spellcasting at all (NOT because it's "clogged" with options, but because it's stupid), but that's too big a sacred cow for some people.

without some sort of factor to limit casters you would just have them cast anything anytime form their spellbooks and then everyone else would just sit back and watch.

some people DO like the resource management and D&D offered it to them...before it was taken away.

tussock wrote:The point of having spell levels is to make people use different level spells, Frank. Plus, fuck you and your Burning Hands strawman again, it's a shitty spell at all levels, and has been for 12 years now.

There's nothing at all wrong with chucking out a Magic Missile spell at 7th level, nor Shield, Charm Person, Ray of Enfeeblement, Spider Climb, Grease, Cause Fear, .... That's versatility, choice, making people use their brains with a spellcaster.


Yes, 1 spell per spell level per fight makes casters less powerful. That's not a bad thing, even though it would make all your good work with the Tomes rather less relevant.

That's a nice sentiment and all, but if you're trying to cut down on complexity, then what point does it have to keep all those spell slots? Especially when the option is there to slot in lower level effects if necessary. And how is spell selection not using your brain as a caster, but throwing down obsolete options is? What makes dropping Magic Missile or Charm Person or Shield such a big deal when you have Lightining Bolt, Charm Monster/Dominate Person, or Blur?

And fuck Magic Missile at 7th (or any level), it's barely a step up from Burning Hands. And it's a dumb thing to get mad about.

And the idea wasn't one slot a level, it was six slots you put any level into. This is also for 5th Edition and has fuck-all to do with the Tomes.

MAgic Missile is there because it exists to show a wizard can bring forth pwer. simple as that. ALL wizards should have the ability to instill a little wonderment or woe and fear by showing that they posses powers others do not.

in a high-magic setting then the most opponents would not be the least bit worried, but there could be pockets where people are unfamiliar with magic such that a simple Magic Missile, could change their outlook. which is the same for low-magic, because people just havent seen such power. this could have many avenues for the game amongst fear such as the Salem Witch Trials or respect or even worship in a sense as a divine gift...

and what wizard shouldnt be able to do simple little attacks with basic magic? its just a step above a cantrip and can actually do some harm if needed.

ModelCitizen wrote:

hogarth wrote: Of course, I'd rather just go one step further and not have prepared spellcasting at all (NOT because it's "clogged" with options, but because it's stupid), but that's too big a sacred cow for some people.

I'm a big fan of the idea that scholarly caster types can find or research new spells through play, and giving that option to spontaneous casters turns them into Beholder Mages.

Classes like the Warmage, Beguiler and the Dread Necromancer can "find or research new spells through play" and it's not particularly unbalancing.

hogarth wrote: Classes like the Warmage, Beguiler and the Dread Necromancer can "find or research new spells through play" and it's not particularly unbalancing.

They can learn new ones by going up in level. While technically the door is open for them learning additional spells on top of that, there are no mechanics for doing so. And I've never even heard of someone finding an extracurricular new spell as a Dread Necromancer.

-Username17

Yeah I honestly don't even think they can, because there's like no fucking mechanics for it at all, except for "Advanced Learning" class feature, which is super discrete and limited.