And Rogues (Thieves) were incredibly useful because they were the capable of doing things like disarming traps, opening locks, and listening.
Don't forget climb (scale walls?) and move silently.
I prefer 5e casting. No AOOs. No SR. Concentration is not an action. Everyone has spont or arcanist casting. Built in meta magic to some spells (stronger in a higher slot). No caster level. Same DC for all spells.
But
DCs cap at 19, all save or sucks are multiple saves.
You can only concentrate on one spell that requires concentration. This prevents many spell combos
Fewer spell slots and no bonus spell slots.
5e curbed the power of casting while making it more fun to use.
That's another important part of the equation.
General systems bloat over the years have drastically increased the amount of spells.
These spells aren't all just 31 flavors of fireball. It's this ridiculous utility bloat.
Magic used to be powerful and it had some neat tricks, but the modern magic system has become both the cause of, and solution to, most of the problems in the game.
This situation we run into now where, "Oh, it's a problem. I'll just spend 30 minutes to fill an unprepared slot and then wave magic at it so it goes away," didn't even used to be possible in a lot of cases.
This is precisely the reason why doing away with the prepared casting classes does so much to bring the magic system back into balance.
Interesting thought...
Make casters no longer be able to memorize spells more than once per day (GASP!)
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Okay, what do you think is more fair? 60% don't have a problem with the disparity? 40%?
Why bandy about totally unverifiable percentages in the first place?
But if we're going with gut math, I don't know anybody who plays Pathfinder or D&D and thinks that the martial/caster disparity isn't a thing, so I'll see your 40% and go all in. I don't play with a representative sample of all Pathfinder players everywhere, so I don't pretend that my own subjective 100% is accurate, but in my experience, the more experience a player has, the more likely they are to realise that their beloved martial character isn't at the Wizard's right hand, or even eating at the same table.
They're the help.
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These may not be complete, but the unspoken rules seem to be as follows:
(1) Casters must never steal the spotlight. If you can end a combat with a spell combination, don't. Instead, cast most of your spells so that the martials look good -- even if it's not really necessary to have them along, you must always pretend it is. This means that you don't save up explosive runes traps, and you don't use armies of simulacra, and you don't send planar bound critters to do all the fighting -- because gentlemen just don't do those things.
(2) Follow the railroad. Artificial timelines and endless series of combat encounters are what make martials look good, and they're also the most easily avoided situations, once casters start really using their spells. So don't. Don't use divinations, don't bypass encounters, don't change the playing field. Ignore the temptation to solve problems through solutions other than combat.
(3) If casters forget the first two rules, the DM's job is to remind them. Arbitrarily add restrictions or drawbacks to spells, or threaten out-of-rules consequences for using them, or, in extreme cases, declare outright that every dungeon is in an antimagic field. Give the martials all kinds of narrative abilities through "role playing" that the rules don't actually give them, and minimize the same for the casters.
(4) Every episode needs a contrived underwater element to make Aquaman seem like a full member of the Justice League. It's the DM's job to contrive to make the martials look good, regardless of how much that damages suspension of disbelief.
(5) Ignore that the game is based on mechanical underpinnings. Play Magical Tea Party as much as possible. The DM should fudge dice rolls at will, or even ignore them outright. The DM should alter stats mid-encounter as needed, or alter monster tactics (usually choosing to make them do really dumb things like run up next to the fighter and stand there to get full-attacked). Above all, the DM should always ignore actual written rules in favor...
This. So many times over. Whenever a PC doesn't obey the Polite Code for Gentlemanly Magicians, the rest of the party becomes their sidekicks at best or their pawns at worst. It's not even malicious, full casters just naturally assert control over their surroundings.
Regardless, the spell slots and ability to memorize spells is the class feature, not the filled slots. You want to presume an equipmentless fighter, you get to presume a wizard or sorcerer with empty spell slots.Remove a wizard's spellbook from them before they've prepared their daily spells and they'll be more useless than a naked fighter. Both classes are SOL though.actually unless they used all their spells from yesterday i'm pretty sure they keep them.
could be wrong though.
also we deviated from the core expectations specifically to show that they were gear dependent.
Your passive aggression is turning into regular aggression, also that counter point has been debunked. Prepared spells are retained indefinitely until cast, wizards have a multitude of ways to work around losing access to their spellbooks, and cantrips and school abilities are things that exist.
Next argument, please.
Casters can't memorize spells more than once per day anyway. Once a spell slot is expended, an 8 hour rest is required before more spells can be memorized, and it can't be within the same 24 hour period as the last time spells were memorized. If you memorize spells on Tuesday at 8am, and burn them all up by 9, you can't rest 8 hours and start over at 5. You have to wait till Wednesday.Interesting thought...
Make casters no longer be able to memorize spells more than once per day (GASP!)
But you can leave slots open to fill them by memorizing later.
Yes, but that's not the same as preparing spells more than once per day. A given spell slot can only be prepared once. The time it gets done is really irrelevant to how many times you're preparing spells per day.
It is not, however, irrelevant to your ability to wreck house with utility spells, especially if you've got the Fast Study discovery.