So... Can I ask what makes Vancian so special? I'm not a big fan of it, and it feels I have to design the adventure with it in mind. Which is a bit of a pain, and it scales so I can't just use one size fits all at all.You can't understand Vance unless you read Vance.
And in particular for relevance to your question, that would be the Dying Earth series of books.
So, its special because its in books... That's not super relevant to a table top game's mechanics is it? I'm asking about the mechanics, not the literature. Doesn't always translate. People are saying they wouldn't play a game without vancian or its the only way, which sounds like an extreme opinion eh?
The stories in the original The Dying Earth brought us fire-and-forget casting, a number of spells, and the robe of eyes magic item, among a number of other things. The 2nd book, the novel-length Eyes of the Overworld, brought us the rogue (1e "thief") as a character class appropriate for protagonists. Those are 1e staples.
People forget, though, that by the time the 4th book (Rhialto the Marvellous) was written, Vance himself had re-imagined spells as simply coded instructions that were fed to genie-like "Sandestins," who then did the magic (this is how magic works in the Lyonesse novels as well). In Rhialto, the magicians are powerful enough to perceive and talk to the Sandestins directly, and have learned to command their obedience through "chugs."
In other words, even Vance himself was OK with changing the paradigms.
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If mechanics is the only thing that's relevant to you someone should publish a version of the game where everything is only labled in algebraic terms. Doesn't story, character,or background mean anything to you in how you experience the game?
It does, however I'm asking about mechanics. Mechanics are your game's foundation after all. Much harder to change mechanics than it is all the story telling.
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I feel that the Vancian level-based, sudden-amnesia system - however much it may gall us at times - does a lot to balance an RPG in which non-spellcasters are supposed to be viable. In fantasy literature, wizards tend to pull out a big destructive plot-altering spell only when subtler means have failed - they're a last-ditch measure. RPGs are built differently and gamers - forgive me - have a tendency to 'go for the nuclear option' far, far, far more often than characters in a work of fiction. Vancian magic restricts the heavy stuff to a few uses a day, helping capture the general feel of fantasy in which a team works together to overcome obstacles - as opposed to a gang of teamsters the sorceror hired to help him cart away all the armor and swag after he casts unquenchable rain of flaming scorpions on everything he meets.
There are a lot of other ways to balance it. I continually say an I win button x/day isn't real balance. The fact you can use it at all under any circumstance is. Plot devices like that should be left as ritualistic things unrelated to combat balance I think. Is it good design that a player can actually run out of things to do(wizard with 0 slots sucks)? or that one player can win combat single handedly without the others help because he happens to have the I win button? at higher levels you just have so many spells to spam, many of them being utility to solve problems, it becomes very difficult not to be overpowered. The exponential scaling doesn't help much, and comparing them to martials, who apparently have to be mortal in some peoples eyes, being able to hit people with swords all day doesn't feel quiet as amazing as ripping open a portal to a lower plane of hell to summon a 4 armed demon to do it for you.
Why not just balance it so its not overpowering in the first place... Wouldn't that make more sense?
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The entire idea of cast then forget is ridiculous in my eyes. "I said a word 3 times today! Guess I can't remember that word until tomorrow!" *shakes head sadly*
Who decided these arbitrary rules? Is there a purpose to why you forget them? How do these words erase themselves from your mind on use?
The principle is idiotic to say the least.
Yeah, like it's ridiculous that I have to scrape across the carpet for a while before I build up enough static to shock my wife -- it would be much more realistic if I could just shock people at will.
If you forget the terms "memorize" and "forget" (which haven't been in game use since roughly 20 years ago), the system becomes pretty easy to justify.
... Spell Points/Mana systems just exacerbate relative power inequities in the system. There can be no balance between classes when you have characters that can just go nuts at every encounter. Up thread someone pointed out that in Dying Earth, Vance's spells were "auto wins"; this is true of D&D in most circumstances. ...
I sorta agree and sorta disagree. The key is to find a point where they it is not possible to "just go nuts at every encounter." You don't have enough spell points or mana to go nova over and over again.
I actually think Dreamscarred Press Psionics system is done very well. We have only played with it a bit so far, but I am finding it works.
Our psion can very nearly auto win any one encounter if he really augments his powers (and some of them are definitely on par with PF spells). But then he is pretty much bone dry. So he has to be careful.
If the group decides we want him to nova the BBEG, then we have to carry him up until then. And it is sometimes very difficult to keep a caster type alive when he is using no powers. Even then he has to be very careful. We almost had a TPK once because the BBEG had a double.
If he doesn't want to be a nova bomb and contribute all the time, well then he has to use un-augmented low level powers most of the time.
I think it makes MORE sense for Clerics.
At least for Clerics it's DEITIES deciding you can't remember how to pick your nose today, and not just the extreme senility the supposedly hyper intelligent Wizards all have.
You're not "forgetting" how to cast anything. The components (somatic and verbal) are not the spell. I think this is the issue for you.
When a Wizard prepares a spell, he locks in a complicated structure of patterns, formulae, attitudes and specific energies that sit in his mind. When he casts the spell, the components trigger the activation and release the spell's energies according to the structure of the spell.
For example, lets take true strike, this spell only has a verbal component. If a fighter attempts to learn true strike by repeating the verbal component, it will never work. Even if that Fighter has 18 intelligence and the Wizard teaches him the words, and how to pronounce and accent the words perfectly, it will never work, because the Fighter hasn't learned the spell, and there is nothing for the words to "activate".
As to clerics, we could not disagree more. Deities grant you access to the entire portion of the list available, they do not prepare your spells for you, nor do all Clerics even worship deities.
I don't even like that cleric spells are called spells.
The stories in the original The Dying Earth brought us fire-and-forget casting, a number of spells, and the robe of eyes magic item, among a number of other things. The 2nd book, the novel-length Eyes of the Overworld, brought us the rogue (1e "thief") as a character class appropriate for protagonists. Those are 1e staples.
People forget, though, that by the time the 4th book (Rhialto the Marvellous) was written, Vance himself had re-imagined spells as simply coded instructions that were fed to genie-like "Sandestins," who then did the magic (this is how magic works in the Lyonesse novels as well). In Rhialto, the magicians are powerful enough to perceive and talk to the Sandestins directly, and have learned to command their obedience through "chugs."
In other words, even Vance himself was OK with changing the paradigms.
I'm pretty sure the sandestins were not actually required for many spells at that point.
I seem to recall a Prismatic spray being cast without aid from a sandestin. I could be wrong, but I think the sandestins were simply huge power boosters essentially, that were used by the particular crowd of magicians Rhialto hung around with.
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Who decided these arbitrary rules? Is there a purpose to why you forget them? How do these words erase themselves from your mind on use?
The principle is idiotic to say the least.
After you bake three cakes, and eat them, you still remember how to bake them. But you can't keep eating them without baking them.
Nowhere in the Pathfinder rules does it say anything about wizards forgetting their spells after they cast them.
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That would be I run out of energy to shock them with. That would be an energy based system. Vancian does not do that. Vancian says you "forget" I.e. you forgot how to shock your wife, not that you didn't have enough energy to do so.
The D&D system actually isn't saying that; you are saying that, because you're hung up on the long-obsolete fluff term, and not on how the system actually works in terms of game mechanics. I can say that each spell is an actual smurf that I summon in the morning and keep in my spell component pouch until I pull him out and he does his thing -- each one has a different talent, there's Fireball Smurf, and Charm Person Smurf, and so on. But I can only fit so many smurfs in the magic pouch, and the bigger, more powerful smurfs need bigger compartments to hold them, so I have to be a better tailor to use them. And once I take a smurf out and let him loose, he runs back to their village until I summon him again. That re-imagining is also modeled perfectly by the D&D "Vancian" magic system.
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You can refluff it, but the entire term is based on the fluff of Jack Vance. If you refluff it, its not vancian anymore and thus not a part of this discussion. My argument relates to vancian magic, which is the point of this thread.
The term "Vancian" has come to stand for the mechanics, not the fluff. If you mean it solely to refer to some text from a story, and not at all to refer to the D&D magic system, then you're using the term differently from pretty much everyone else in the world right now.
The D&D system actually isn't saying that; you are saying that, because you're hung up on the long-obsolete fluff term, and not on how the system actually works in terms of game mechanics. I can say that each spell is an actual smurf that I summon in the morning and keep in my spell component pouch until I pull him out and he does his thing -- each one has a different talent, there's Fireball Smurf, and Charm Person Smurf, and so on. But I can only fit so many smurfs in the magic pouch, and the bigger, more powerful smurfs take up more room. And once I take them out and let them loose, they run back to their village until I summon them again. That re-imagining is also modeled perfectly by the D&D "Vancian" magic system.
Vancian is, as stated above, not a d&d thing. The mechanics were copied by d&d off of fluff created by jack vance. Replace the fluff and its not vancian magic. My argument pertains to vancian magic. Your argument pertains to a mechanic modeled after vancian magic, but is not vancian magic because the entire premise of vancian is fire and forget. If you're not firing and forgetting, if you're not memorizing, its not vancian.
You can refluff it, but the entire term is based on the fluff of Jack Vance. If you refluff it, its not vancian anymore and thus not a part of this discussion. My argument relates to vancian magic, which is the point of this thread.The term "Vancian" has come to stand for the mechanics, not the fluff. If you mean it solely to refer to some text from a story, and not at all to refer to the D&D magic system, then you're using the term differently from pretty much everyone else in the world right now.
Agreed.
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He's asking specifically about vancian magic. Vancian magic is based on the premise of fire and forget TOZ. Vancian magic is fire and forget.
You can refluff it, but the entire term is based on the fluff of Jack Vance. If you refluff it, its not vancian anymore and thus not a part of this discussion. My argument relates to vancian magic, which is the point of this thread.
You're in the wrong forum for that. Vancian is also used to refer to the magic rules for d20 games. Unless the OP has specifically said he's only talking about the spellcasting decribed in Jack Vance's novel, it's safe to assume he is instead talking about the spellcasting system described in the Pathfinder RPG. Which is not literally fire and forget in the sense of forgetting the spell completely.
Vancian is, as stated above, not a d&d thing.
Again, to everyone else in the world using the term, "Vancian" has come to mean "The D&D Spell System." Regardless of the current fluff.
Mr. Sin asked a while ago why we like Vancian more, though I think it got lost in the last couple of posts.
Mr. Sin, I like Vancian because it is easier for me to keep track of. I've tried Spell Points and I've played HERO, where your Endurance is essentially a Spellpoint system. And overall, I found them harder to keep track of. Constantly adding and subtracting and scratching out numbers and keeping track of spells that constantly use points per round. It's not my jam. I prefer Vancian because it's just me tallying off spells as I use them. Easy, succinct, and simple.
The term "Vancian" has come to stand for the mechanics, not the fluff. If you mean it solely to refer to some text from a story, and not at all to refer to the D&D magic system, then you're using the term differently from pretty much everyone else in the world right now.
Just because they stole the fluff from someone else does not mean you can then alter the entire principle behind the thing and keep the original name.
Your smurf example is not Vancian magic because Vancian magic was a fluff created by Jack Vance, regardless of how WOTC took it and paizo changed it. The fact that people still call it vancian magic is disingenuous because of the fact that the entire principles of the original fluff have been removed. You're trying to alter the concept behind something and keep the name and then argue about new fluff completely separate from the original concept and I'm not letting that fly.
It was Jack Vance's work. If you're going to call it after him, it's his fluff. If not, then we're not arguing Vancian magic, we're arguing a mechanic modeled after it.
Mr. Sin asked a while ago why we like Vancian more, though I think it got lost in the last couple of posts.
Mr. Sin, I like Vancian because it is easier for me to keep track of. I've tried Spell Points and I've played HERO, where your Endurance is essentially a Spellpoint system. And overall, I found them harder to keep track of. Constantly adding and subtracting and scratching out numbers and keeping track of spells that constantly use points per round. It's not my jam. I prefer Vancian because it's just me tallying off spells as I use them. Easy, succinct, and simple.
Subtraction is hard? What makes spell points so hard? I haven't even been suggesting them...
Subtraction is hard? What makes spell points so hard? I haven't even been suggesting them...Mr. Sin asked a while ago why we like Vancian more, though I think it got lost in the last couple of posts.
Mr. Sin, I like Vancian because it is easier for me to keep track of. I've tried Spell Points and I've played HERO, where your Endurance is essentially a Spellpoint system. And overall, I found them harder to keep track of. Constantly adding and subtracting and scratching out numbers and keeping track of spells that constantly use points per round. It's not my jam. I prefer Vancian because it's just me tallying off spells as I use them. Easy, succinct, and simple.
I'm not good at math, no. I still count on my fingers to do math. And it's beyond subtraction and addition, but also changing amounts of points spent for spells and such. I mentioned spellpoints because that's usually the counterpoint to Vancian magic.
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Just because they stole the fluff from someone else does not mean you can then alter the entire principle behind the thing and keep the original name.
But that's exactly what has happened over the last 40 years, through no fault of mine. Take it up with the Pure Language Police.
Vancian magic was a fluff created by Jack Vance, regardless of how WOTC took it and paizo changed it.
Your facts and timeline are garbled; TSR was quite a bit before WOTC.
The fact that people still call it vancian magic is disingenuous because of the fact that the entire principles of the original fluff have been removed. You're trying to alter the concept behind something and keep the name and then argue about new fluff completely separate from the original concept and I'm not letting that fly.
Does it bother you in the same way that "gay" no longer means "happy"? Are you "not letting that fly"? How are you going to stop the current use? By using magic (Vancian or otherwise)?
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Words change and evolve, and there's nothing you can do about it. I'm sure the Old English of the 1100's would look at Shakespeare with shame, with his fancy words he made up. Language will evolve, whether you like it or not.
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But that's exactly what has happened over the last 40 years, through no fault of mine. Take it up with the Pure Language Police.I don't care if its not your fault. It's still true.
Your facts and timeline are garbled; TSR was quite a bit before WOTC.Facepalm. I'm saying Wotc took it. As long as jack Vance's novels existed before D&D used them, then my statement holds true.
Does it bother you that "gay" no longer means "happy"? Are you "not letting that fly"? How are you going to stop the current use? By using magic?I still use gay to mean happy and I don't care who is offended because they cannot bother to learn the proper definition of a word. Yes, anyone who gives me flak about it, I tear their head off. Just like I'm doing to you now. I'm going to bite your head off until you learn to use it correctly or never use it in my presence again, just like everyone else who uses a word incorrectly.
Give you flak? Why would they give you an aircraft defense cannon? That seems rather expensive and dangerous.
Pathfinder uses spell points. They just have nine separate pools and every spell casts one point. :)
True, but they are so easy to just tally off!
I'm also not sure I can think of a fantasy series that actually used something identifiable as "spell points". Plenty use a system where you can use magic as you will but it gradually drains you, but it's usually more of a fatigue/exhaustion mechanic than something separate from your physical body. The closest thing to that in D&D would be hit points - not the bleeding wound part, but the slowing reflexes making it harder to dodge the lethal blow part.I can think of some fiction where you could supplement your physical energy with energy drawn from other sources, but the physical energy was still the base.
The tiredness and fatigue is the fluff representation of using up your spell points.
The fact still remains that once your spell points are gone (you're exhausted) you can't cast any more spells (barring "Oh he used his life energy to cast and almost killed himself!" scenarios).
If mechanics is the only thing that's relevant to you someone should publish a version of the game where everything is only labled in algebraic terms. Doesn't story, character,or background mean anything to you in how you experience the game?
If the fluff is the only thing that's relevant to you someone should publish a version of the game where there are no mechanics and it just tells a story. Don't dice rolls, classes, and special abilities mean anything to you in how you experience the game?
Now that we've gotten the utterly idiotic and trollish hyperbole out of the way for both sides, perhaps we could move the discussion to something more relevant.
Like: WHY does the spell system have to be Vancian? Either from a fluff standpoint OR a mechanics standpoint? Just because that's the way it's always been?
It's relevant because the Dying Earth books were the specific inspiration for D+D Magic, Even some of the spells originated there, such as "The Most Excellent Prismatic Spray".
See, though, why is this relevant? If the inspiration for my novel was drawn from <Insert Work Here> does that mean every story I write from then on HAS to follow the same influence exactly even 40 years later?
If the inspiration for my novel was drawn from <Insert Work Here> does that mean every story I write from then on HAS to follow the same influence exactly even 40 years later?
Personally, I don't believe it does... especially if even the author of <Insert Work Here> re-imagined his own stuff later on. However, I try and remember that author Lee Child got sick and tired of repeating John D. MacDonald's old formulaic "Travis McGee" novels, so he tried to kill off Jack Reacher (Child's latter-day McGee), so that he could try something else. The fans and the publisher all went up in arms, which means that three Reacher novels, two short stories, and a movie later, he's still churning them out.
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Give you flak? Why would they give you an aircraft defense cannon? That seems rather expensive and dangerous.Abort mission. His hubris field cannot be penetrated by normal ordnance.
hehe, I'm imagining Hubris Field as some weird Anime ability.
From what I hear the Unlimited Hyoubu Kyousuke's (which I really hope they dub because I also hear it's really good) main character basically has that as a power.
At least, he's extremely arrogant and nigh-godlike and evil and like telekinesis it seems.
Pathfinder uses spell points. They just have nine separate pools and every spell casts one point. :)
Actually, there are 10 pools, but one of them costs 0 spell points.
At any rate, everyone is off-topic.
I like D&D's current spellcasting system, whatever you want to call it, for Wizards just fine. It makes sense. I prefer a more fluid system for spontaneous casters (Words of Power are super for this), and I would like to see different options presented by Paizo. WoP was a great step, but it was somewhat half-done when they published it. Standard action summons, lack of most undead spells, as well as missing several other core utility spells is kinda unfortunate.
I am waiting for Paizo to release books not unlike the DMG II, which is basically a big book of variant rules. The DMG I even had a chapter dedicated to such a thing.
I really think prepared and spontaneous casters need completely different casting systems. They feel way too similar. I couldn't imagine playing a spontaneous caster without using Words at this point. At the very least, give us a viable alternative for it. Right now if you cast spells it's level-based or bust. A well-worked alternative to allow for creativity and individuality to show through would be a Godsend.
Just as a quick aside - I can write fluff. Poor fluff, but fluff. My friends can write fluff. I can BS fluff in a pinch. I cannot however, make working mechanics for a game this convoluted. Give me mechanics. I will create fluff, if need be. If I need fluff, I get fluff the other way. It's called The Inner Sea World Guide.
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As to your statement on mechanics. I actually wouldn't mind that. I don't NEED someone else to come up with my fluff for me. I can do that myself. As long as it does what I want it to do and does it effectively I'll fluff it as I see fit to get my end goal.That's all well and good for you. I wouldn't touch such a game with a ten foot pole, because what gamers dismiss as fluff are what I consider the soul of the game.... the reason for playing at all.
He didn't say he'd play without fluff. Just that he didn't need someone else to make fluff for him. That in no way infers they don't want fluff or story in their game.