MOST such people probably take it up early on and stick with it as their primary focus. They're mechanically wizards. Nothing stops a person in that world from having a different life history.
Pidgeon-holing is an important part of D&D. In fact a class-based RPG *is* a pidgeon-holing system. What, you're a Wizard, ok you can do A, B and C, and you can't do X, Y, Z. Allow players to cross boundaries too much, and each specialty (cleric is a healer, rogue is great at sneaking etc, etc) becomes, well, non-special.
As for the whole 'but why can a fighter Raise Dead?' again this is 'game thinking'. To the inhabitants of the world there are just people with expertise and knowledge.
But I'm a real person, a player, not a character in the story. Pidgeon-holing is a big part of what makes D&D, well, D&D.
My fighter can only manage to acquire the Raise Dead ritual because functionally in the world he belongs to a group of people who have that knowledge and he finds a way to access it.
Although in a D&D sense it has more to do with devotion to a God, and less to do with technical understanding. At least in Dragonlance.
'Ordained Priest' theme to represent the commitment that he has to make to the temple and the other benefits of his holy orders or whatever.
I really have to find out what this Themes thing is.
And yes, I don't mind that it CAN happen, I worry that it would become the norm.
Also, giving Wizards more spells will probably upset the balance.
Unless it was a Vancian-blend.
AD&D 2e used a Vancian casting system. This meant a wizard might have 100s of spells in their spellbooks, but the beginning of each day the player had to choose which spells his character would memorize that day, and the wizard was limited by how many spells he could cast per day.
A vancian blend in 4e might allow a wizard to potentially have hundreds of spells (like in previous editions), but each in-game day perhaps the wizard would have to choose which spells he has access too on that day.
... in fact, I quite like this idea
I think the issue here is more a lack of a really super detailed look at the 4e wizard. I'm not going to do the math for this AGAIN in this thread. It has been done numerous times before in the older edition war threads. A 4e wizard at a comparable level to an AD&D wizard has at least an equal number of powers available to them. A casual glance at the rules might seem to suggest otherwise, but it is true. Your basic level 30 (roughly 18th level in AD&D terms) character has a baseline AEDU of 2/4/4/7, which is 17 powers. An 18th level AD&D wizard has 34 spell slots. The 4e wizard however has a considerable number of additional powers at his disposal. First of all he's also got another 11 spells in his spell book. There are NUMEROUS ways he can access those, including tomes, mnemonic staff, staff of wizardy, a couple of feats, several epic destinies, etc. There are also ways he can recover powers he's already used. He can also pick up a fairly substantial number of extra powers. His theme, if he has one for instance will add one, as will his race. He can pick up another with the Skill Power feat, and possibly another with an MC feat. You could also use the Mage class, which adds its encounter powers to its spell book as well, giving him another 4 spells to choose from. There are a few other tricks you could use as well. Many of your 4e character's innate abilities are also spell-like. He can detect magic for instance, and a lot of his other skill uses could simply be fluffed as "I wave my hands and open the lock with a simple charm" or such. Then there are of course the rituals we've already noted. Given that most AD&D wizards will only memorize a fairly limited subset of their spell book by default and leave the rest as 'spells of convenience' or for 'strategic spell casting', the 4e wizard is really very similar. He's got some arbitrary number of rituals that he likewise only casts outside of combat (generally, again certain characters can engineer some very limited in-combat ritual casting at high levels). All-in-all if you do a detailed comparison of the 2e and 4e wizards (and especially the 1e magic user) you'll find they are pretty comparable. The main difference is that the 4e fighter at high levels is equally powerful. Wizards haven't really been all that nerfed. It is more that some of the crazy game-breaking stuff tends to be had at epic tier and other classes are at parity, so the 30th level 4e wizard isn't the utterly dominating character that the 18th level 2e wizard is.
MOST such people probably take it up early on and stick with it as their primary focus. They're mechanically wizards. Nothing stops a person in that world from having a different life history.
Pidgeon-holing is an important part of D&D. In fact a class-based RPG *is* a pidgeon-holing system. What, you're a Wizard, ok you can do A, B and C, and you can't do X, Y, Z. Allow players to cross boundaries too much, and each specialty (cleric is a healer, rogue is great at sneaking etc, etc) becomes, well, non-special.
As for the whole 'but why can a fighter Raise Dead?' again this is 'game thinking'. To the inhabitants of the world there are just people with expertise and knowledge.
But I'm a real person, a player, not a character in the story. Pidgeon-holing is a big part of what makes D&D, well, D&D.
My fighter can only manage to acquire the Raise Dead ritual because functionally in the world he belongs to a group of people who have that knowledge and he finds a way to access it.
Although in a D&D sense it has more to do with devotion to a God, and less to do with technical understanding. At least in Dragonlance.
'Ordained Priest' theme to represent the commitment that he has to make to the temple and the other benefits of his holy orders or whatever.
I really have to find out what this Themes thing is.
And yes, I don't mind that it CAN happen, I worry that it would become the norm.
Within 4th ed you have your race, class, and optional backgrounds and themes. Race defines you as a culture to a great extent (Or can be set as a contrast for what you are supposed to be like, in some cases), class defines what you do, background defines who you are (and gives you a single mechanical bonus regardless of how many background you take) while a theme is how you do what you do and grows with the character. For example, an Alchemist rogue might be a rogue to find rare components for their mixtures and to use those mixtures to then be a rogue.
Some themes give powers, some give free feats or other mechanical fun stuff to represent the "how you do"part.
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Vanador: OK. You ripped a gateway to Hell, killed half the town, and raised the dead as feral zombies. We're going to kill you. But it can go two ways. We want you to run as fast as you possibly can toward the south of the town to draw the Zombies to you, and right before they catch you, I'll put an arrow through your head to end it instantly. If you don't agree to do this, we'll tie you this building and let the Zombies rip you apart slowly. Dimitry: God I love being Neutral. 4th edition is dead, long live 4th edition. Salla: opinionated, but commonly right. fun quotesShow
If you can't understand how someone yelling at another person would make them fight harder and longer, then you need to look at the forums a bit closer.
quote author=56832398 post=519321747]Considering DnD is a game wouldn't all styles be gamist?
I think the issue here is more a lack of a really super detailed look at the 4e wizard. I'm not going to do the math for this AGAIN in this thread. It has been done numerous times before in the older edition war threads.
I've read the argument for this in the past, and read more than one of those threads.
The end result is that I simply do not agree. My AD&D 2e toon with a 19 inteligence could have hundreds of thousands of spells in his library (for each level!). Yes he can only memorize a small subset of those, but I'm OK with that. To me, reasearching / acquiring new spells was half the fun.
And I *liked* that mages had verbal/somatic/material components for most spells. I was never a fan of at-will powers, such seemed the domain of Gods and certain creatures on a very limited basis.
And yes, I don't mind that it CAN happen, I worry that it would become the norm.
How could that happen? There will be at most a handful of people not abiding by the norm. Everyone else is under the DMs control. The only thing having a player be a Martial Ritual Caster will do is reinforce that the PC is exceptional.
Since he'll be the only one in the universe that managed to get utility magic + martial power mastered.
It's impossible for something to become the norm unless the DM makes it so.
Epic Dungeon Master
Want to give your players a kingdom of their own? I made a 4e rule system to make it happen!
In addition, a 4E dragonlance setting can pose certain conditions just like in Dark Sun. But if you prefer 2nd edition, over 4E, then just buy the appropriate dragonlance books and play.
I think the issue here is more a lack of a really super detailed look at the 4e wizard. I'm not going to do the math for this AGAIN in this thread. It has been done numerous times before in the older edition war threads.
I've read the argument for this in the past, and read more than one of those threads.
The end result is that I simply do not agree. My AD&D 2e toon with a 19 inteligence could have hundreds of thousands of spells in his library (for each level!). Yes he can only memorize a small subset of those, but I'm OK with that. To me, reasearching / acquiring new spells was half the fun.
And I *liked* that mages had verbal/somatic/material components for most spells. I was never a fan of at-will powers, such seemed the domain of Gods and certain creatures on a very limited basis.
Well, if you 'do not agree' with cold hard facts, there's really no point in continuing the discussion, is there?
Another day, another three or four entries to my Ignore List.
MOST such people probably take it up early on and stick with it as their primary focus. They're mechanically wizards. Nothing stops a person in that world from having a different life history.
Pidgeon-holing is an important part of D&D. In fact a class-based RPG *is* a pidgeon-holing system. What, you're a Wizard, ok you can do A, B and C, and you can't do X, Y, Z. Allow players to cross boundaries too much, and each specialty (cleric is a healer, rogue is great at sneaking etc, etc) becomes, well, non-special.
It is a matter of degree though. 4e is pretty good about niche protection. It is definitely far less rigid than AD&D was. The fighter is still hacking on things, the cleric is still healing things, and the rogue is still sneaking around jumping people. The role concept helps here too. The fighter holds the line and has strong class features that support that. The cleric has healing capacity that dwarfs anything a fighter could acquire no matter how much of his resources he spent on it. A rogue making a surprise attack on an enemy can do damage that no fighter or cleric will match, and has many utility powers and default access to a skillset that insures that he's quite sneaky etc. You CAN make a sneaky fighter, there's just not a whole lot of reason to want to use the fighter class to make that character, and once you do decide to be a fighter you're generally rewarded more by enhancing your built-in abilities than by branching out into some other territory.
As for the whole 'but why can a fighter Raise Dead?' again this is 'game thinking'. To the inhabitants of the world there are just people with expertise and knowledge.
But I'm a real person, a player, not a character in the story. Pidgeon-holing is a big part of what makes D&D, well, D&D.
Sure, up to a point. Consider it this way. Why would I as a player decide to have my fighter acquire Raise Dead? Surely the cleric can get that without spending a feat and will have a higher skill check in Heal in the vast majority of cases. Two possible reasons exist. Either there is for whatever reason no cleric in the party and someone needs this ritual, in which case 4e at least allows for the possibilty. The other case would be some sort of story consideration where I want it because it works with my character concept and ties in with the story somehow. Again the option is nice to have. Personally I've never seen a fighter take ritual casting in 3 years of play though, so the whole thing is more academic than practical.
My fighter can only manage to acquire the Raise Dead ritual because functionally in the world he belongs to a group of people who have that knowledge and he finds a way to access it.
Although in a D&D sense it has more to do with devotion to a God, and less to do with technical understanding. At least in Dragonlance.
Sure, but nothing really says that a fighter can't be as devout as a cleric is. That's an RP consideration. Sure, the 4e rules don't FORCE me to only take the ritual if my character is devout, but then again no edition of the game can really enforce devout behavior mechanically. I guess you could chuck the insincere cleric from his alignment and take his spells away. 4e doesn't enforce such a rule, but the DM certainly could if it matches with the sensibilities of the setting and he makes sure everyone knows about it ahead of time.
'Ordained Priest' theme to represent the commitment that he has to make to the temple and the other benefits of his holy orders or whatever.
I really have to find out what this Themes thing is.
And yes, I don't mind that it CAN happen, I worry that it would become the norm.
Themes first appeared in the Dark Sun setting. They also appear in the Neverwinter setting. There are additionally a number of themes that have been published in Dragon (so you can get them via DDI). They just added a couple new ones the other day for Oriental Adventures, which is this month's magazine feature. They don't cover all the possibilities yet, and some of them are fairly setting specific, but they do let you do some interesting extra things.
I wouldn't be too concerned about it. The truth is most players have a pretty good handle on basic character concept. It may be a bit mutable or fuzzy, but they usually are pretty clear about what falls totally outside that. 4e also 'enforces' a certain amount of separation simply by practical considerations. Your STR/WIS dwarf fighter build clanking around in plate armor CAN use his feats to take Stealth, Acrobatics, and Thievery. Even with training he's simply going to be inferior at those skills than basically every rogue ever. Combine that with the way class features support the typical functions of each class and you find that the party will stick to their archetypes pretty closely most of the time.
The exceptions to that are also instructional. AD&D in particular was a very hard game to use to create a specific concept unless there was an existing class that provided exactly that concept. You also didn't have the option to NOT have certain specific features. You got the whole package or none of the package, if your character didn't fit the existing pigeonholes you were just out of luck. Niche protection was guaranteed, but that too created problems. You HAD to have a cleric. There were no 2 ways about it, a party without a cleric was deaders. That is simply not true anymore, you can graft a bit of healing onto your fighter or druid or whatever (or play a warlord or bard, etc).
Another aspect of this is specific types of games. Suppose you want to play a game of intrigue and spying. In 4e you can build a whole sneaky party with a whole range of classes. Not EVERY build can be everything, but you can make a very nice sneaky fighter, sneaky cleric, sneaky wizard, etc. Now everyone can sneak and they don't need to either hit up the DM for a bunch of magic items to enable that, or rely on a wizard/cleric to magic them all to sneakiness, or just clunk around and force the DM to figure out how to make the plot not rely on sneakiness much. The cool thing is that yes, in this case the whole party is sort of poaching on the rogue's niche, but he's probably still best at it, and even if he's not THE BEST we come back to the 'game concept vs world concept'. I call my super sneaky fighter a rogue! He wears hide armor, wields a rapier, sneaks around, picks locks, pockets, and traps, so really is that a problem? He's just a rogue that uses fighter powers and is a defender in combat. He's probably STILL not as good at every rogue type thing as a rogue class character, but he can perform that function. Likewise I can use the ranger class to make a guy who's an expert archer and hasn't ever set foot outside a city in his life.
I think the issue here is more a lack of a really super detailed look at the 4e wizard. I'm not going to do the math for this AGAIN in this thread. It has been done numerous times before in the older edition war threads.
I've read the argument for this in the past, and read more than one of those threads.
The end result is that I simply do not agree. My AD&D 2e toon with a 19 inteligence could have hundreds of thousands of spells in his library (for each level!). Yes he can only memorize a small subset of those, but I'm OK with that. To me, reasearching / acquiring new spells was half the fun.
And I *liked* that mages had verbal/somatic/material components for most spells. I was never a fan of at-will powers, such seemed the domain of Gods and certain creatures on a very limited basis.
Well, if you 'do not agree' with cold hard facts, there's really no point in continuing the discussion, is there?
Well, in all fairness, this all starts to become hair splitting. There are a couple ways to think about it. IN THEORY he's right, his wizard in 2e is technically not limited to any specific number of spells in his book. OTOH in a practical sense it is a fairly dubious argument in that there are a total in 2e of what, maybe 500 wizard spells, counting every published source of spells in existence as of the day 3e came out. Having a 19 INT is also pretty unusual, so this is somewhat of a corner-case. Technically you could make up new spells and research them and have 100's of spells of every level (maybe 1000's, there's an issue at some point of time). Fairly put you can certainly have a LOT of spells as a 2e wizard. The question is how much practical value does that have in actual play? The existing spell list is quite extensive. It certainly doesn't cover every possibility imaginable by any means, but there is a level of diminishing returns there at some point. As I said before, once you have all the basics covered in terms of combat spells you'll probably just memorize the most effective ones and leave it at that. The rest of your spell library is relegated to either niche situations or 'strategic casting' where you sit in your tower and cast your esoteric spells without the need to consider what is memorized and what isn't. The 4e wizard likewise memorizes his most effective core combat spells, maybe once in a while picks an alternate option, and strategically casts his unlimited library of rituals while sitting in his tower. The end result is pretty much the same. I'd also observe that while 4e lacks an explicit rule for researching new rituals it isn't exactly a major challenge to invent one (lets say 1 week per ritual with a hard DC arcana check at the level of the ritual at the end of the week, or maybe it is 1 week/tier of ritual with an easy/medium/hard arcana check and the material cost is the same as the listed purchase price). I'd also note that your 4e wizard can always retrain a spell. He can only do it once per level, but he's certainly capable within that restriction of accessing ANY wizard power in the game that he can cast, with enough preparation.
Then there are the workarounds. As Salla noted back up thread a ways you can place ANY at-will or encounter arcane power into a wand. There is no real limit to how many wands you can make except your resources. If carrying around a large barrel of wands feels cheezy, well, refluff it as a big book full of spells. You can cast each one once a day or once an encounter for the at-will ones IIRC. The upshot is there are really very few limits to what your wizard can do if he puts his mind to it, and doesn't mind spending the resources.
As for having a distaste for at-will spells (or encounter ones for that matter) what can anyone say? If every way in which 4e differs in the slightest degree from 2e is going to be met with distaste, then clearly one should be playing 2e. It is all a matter of taste at that point. All at-will spells do for you is insure that you have SOMETHING interesting you can do in any situation. Wizards are pretty focused on their daily spells for their big guns, so IMHO again 4e isn't that much different from 2e, once you blow your dailies you're reduced to a lower level of effectiveness. Most any decent level 2e wizard has some sort of wand or something he can fall back on anyway, so it isn't as if having an 'at-will' spell type resource was foreign to 2e. It was just handled in a slightly different way. In fact since a wizard without an implement is a sorry puppy in 4e past 3rd level or so the difference there is actually pretty much moot. Neither the 2e nor the 4e wizard will be worth much once he's expended his big powers and has somehow lost his implement.
They were very rough drafts based on the stats from Dragons of Mystery and no doubt they could do with a bit of tweaking. None of them are optimised but they might be fun to play.
In our home (Greyhawk) campaign one long-running character converted from 1e/2e/3e is a fighter warlod hybrid with bard multiclass and ritual casting. In previous editions he was just a fighter who developed an obsession with history and legends. In 4e he has picked divination rituals as a specialty so his ritual powers are a bit like Giles in Buffy. I think you can justify a lot of builds by using the right mixture of fluff, themes, and feats. Plus with Kara-Tur themes out now, Dragonlance may not be far behind.
