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Beastmaster Ranger: âIâm awesome, I can have an animal petâ
Beast Barbarian: âAh wow I can get those animal traits myself!â
Moon Druid: âHold my beer.â
Ardling: âHold my beer⊠permanently!â
Wizard: âI have delved the forbidden libraries, labs, and vats and studied the stars and crystals for unspeakable power.â
Witch: âNerd. I just charmed my way into doing it by making a deal with an entity that could just do it.â
Sorcerer: âYou mean like me? Because I can just do it. I came out the gate drawing Mozart.â
Cleric: âI am the third oldest class in D&D, created to put draculas in the ground, wreak havoc on the battlefield and turn the undead, bashing skellies like roaring dawn.â
Paladin: âUh. I think itâs me youâre looking for; divine warrior of mount and blade.â
Celestial Pact: âIâm literally oathbound to the divine beings.â
Divine Soul: âWell, actually, Iâm chosen by birth with the blood of the angels.â
Aasimar: âj0â
Modern D&D has a coolness overlap problem where youâre constantly getting upstaged by some even purer expression of the trope.
This is made even worse with 5eâs frontloaded multiclass system. Like, a level 11 witch is a fantastic conduit of the arcane that can mess you up with three beams of d10+5 each. But a sorcerer dipping two levels in witchery for agonizing blast can spit six beams of the same power. Congrats, youâre getting schooled by a dabbler.
Jumbling it up can cheapen it. It becomes a matrix of all tropes Ă all tropes.
Itâs also the result of the weaksauce compromise proposals. Like, thatâs why there are so many half-hearted dragon types (draconians, dragonborn, draconic bloodline, half dragons etc etc). Because people wanna play dragons and D&D wonât let âem. Same for giants. âHow about an, uh⊠a half-giant? Goliath!â Meanwhile on the DMâs side, you place many communities of elves, dwarves, and orcs, but youâd rarely reach for a goliath or a dragonborn when building an adventure. Why would you? Youâve got the monster manual, youâve got the real thing.
Or it can happen through bad rules design. The sorcerer was created in 3e as a replacement for Vancian prepping. In 5e, no class does Vancian prepping; all classes work kinda like the sorcerer. (To be specific, 5e uses the magic system from the old Wizardry games, where each spell level has its own pool of points, called âslotsâ in 5e.)
The sorcerer no longer has any reason for existing. So in the playtest process for 5e, they decided to go way out there and replace the sorcererâs spell slots with mana points like Final Fantasy. Except it was a compromised mess that the playtesters rejected (you can find it in the DMG as an optional system), and they pulled back on the sorcerer, making it a wizard variant with a smaller repertoire, some sprinkled metamagic, and a more multiclass abusable stat (cha, which the sorcerer has always used).
In classic APL vs Lisp fashion, Iâve seen two solutions to all of this:
This is what many OSR games do and I see the appeal. All three of the magic systems in 5e have the potential for cool worlds. A world of wizards like The Dying Earth, a world of warlocks like Hellraiser, a world of sorcerers like X-Men. Making a setting where only oneâno matter which oneâof these classes exist can get pretty hardcore. If I were making my own game, Iâd wanna make it simple, too, so the core concepts can really breathe. Iâve got mad respect for D&D settings, like the 5e port of Talislanta: The Savage Land, that go this route.
This is more of a stories-upon-stories approach, your Gaiman, your Moorcock, your Claremont. The world is ancient with many past civilizations layered like a palimpsest. Tropes reflecting each other like a hall of mirrors, the same idea arising again and again in new forms, and the old expressions reawakening themselves to reassert their place on the throne.
The rebuilt world getting torn down again, from Futurama
This is what the DMG suggests:
The World Is Ancient. Empires rise and fall, leaving few places that have not been touched by imperial grandeur or decay. War, time, and natural forces eventually claim the mortal world, leaving it rich with places of adventure and mystery. Ancient civilizations and their knowledge survive in legends, magic items, and their ruins. Chaos and evil often follow an empireâs collapse.
They go on to affirm that youâre free to explore worlds that arenât set up this way.
This solution is great if youâre running a maximalist campaign like my #boatmode game on the Crowded Sea. I can slot a Dagwood Bumstead layercake like Arden Vul and it fits right in, even enriching and adding nuances to the other elements in our game world.
Peter wrote in:
With regard to magic in particular, I tend to think not in terms of sorcerers, wizards, etc. having different mechanics for the sake of raw power. But instead representing different modes of access to represent a different general feel:
I never said you canât make it work; I outlined the two most common solutions. I use the âlayer it upâ approach in my own campaign and I feel it works well.
Itâs just that... I remember seeing (this was a tweet or something, some rando, I donât remember) and it was a dad beaming with pride over how his son, this was in 2014 when the PHB had just came out, his son was like âdad, dad! look at this Beast barbarian, you can become sort of like a bear!â and I was like đ because I knew that three classes later thereâs a moon druid thatâll upstage that class in the arktomorph department. (And itâs not nearly as accessible because that kid would need to know that âStarting at 2nd level, you can use your Wild Shape to transform into a beast with a challenge rating as high as 1â means that you can start bearing it outright.)
Itâs not even about mechanical expression, itâs about the trope space. These three:
Thatâs already enough to upstage one another in a dysergic rock-paper-scissors loop from hell where no-one is allowed to be cool. Too little overlap in some ways and too much overlap in other ways.
I know that you can create worlds where magic gets to mean something again; in one of my own homebrew worlds, the schtick was that the world had used primal and divine magic, but âglitchâ magic was a new incursion from another world. It had been a nature-vs-civilization world (with dinosaurs! but not monsters, those were products of glitch) for centuries and now glitch came in as a third alignment (the three alignments in the setting were civilization/nature/glitch). Sorcerers had gotten glitched by accident, wizards stole knowledge from the glitch (going into incursion zones and stealing documents), and traitors (âwarlocksâ) had made deals with the glitch beings. I had rules for how you risked getting increasingly âglitchedâ if you used your magic against nature or civilization. I put a lot of work into disambiguating the three approaches to glitch magic (four, since bards could dabble in it too). Paladins were banned in this setting.
I had another setting where I disambiguated clerics and paladins by making cleric power something available to everyone who had put in the effort. Your Quint, Belmont, van Helsing, Blade types who had made it through the school of hard knocks on nothing but faith and bitters. Paladins on the other had were literally one of twelve knights of the realm. Your PC was up there among Roland, Astolfo, Rinaldo etc. Golden gun in hand, and plenty of grace to fall from.
In my current setting I pretty much merged wizards and sorcerers in the diegesis, and heavily nerfed/houseruled their mechanics to map to specific elements or pairs of elements, while shaâirs (who deal with djinns and efreets) have a very different societal role and are based on the warlock class.
Iâd tend to make some equivalent to each of those bullet points and then use mechanics to make them function slightly differently in ways i hope emphasize the themes.
Seems to me that thatâs exactly what the 5e team is doing. Iâm just nostalgic for a fantasy where magic wasnât something they handed out at the gas station in three different ways with a side of fries. Where it was something you had to carve out for yourself of the oscillations of the Nth dimension with a sharpened spoon and tenacity.
