The Importance of Vancian Spellcasters in Pathfinder / Golarion

[Darksol the Painbringer]

I've seen numerous people talk about this in other threads, but haven't really made a discussion thread specifically for it. So, here we are.

How important do people feel it is for Pathfinder as a game and/or Golarion as a setting to specifically have prepared Vancian casting? Is it crucial to the game or setting, or do you think that the game or setting could be done (or be better off) with a varied or completely different system?

(Yes, mechanics talk is fine too.)

[Tridus]

I think it's important that something resembling it exists. That is: Wizards/Clerics have access to a wide variety of spells, can only use so many at one time, and have to generally speaking decide that when preparing for the day, barring scroll/staff usage.

It's been an iconic part of the game for a very, very long time, and by losing it entirely I think you're losing something. That said, there is no requirement that it work exactly the same way, and something like the often discussed arcanist casting (where you pick a set of spells but don't have to assign them to individual slots during prep, so you can cast two Create Food spells without specifically preparing two of them) would make the classes generally more accessable and less prone to being so swingy power wise, without taking away from the setting.

Mostly it just solves stuff like "oh I only prepared one Restoration today and two people got crippling effects, so I guess we're done adventuring for the day despite having all these free slots".

(I also don't think this is the same conversation as the mechanics discussion in the other thread.)

[Mathmuse]

In my Iron Gods campaign, Iron Gods among Scientists, the PCs recruited 0th-level NPC Val Baine into their party. Due to adjustments for the Local Ties campaign trait, she was a 17-year-old student wizard of Kellid ethnicity who was longtime friend of one PC. Joining the party made sense, because the party's mission was to find her lost father and the party could use a 4th member. Therefore, I raised her to 1st level. She could have become a wizard, since she was already studying that, but the party needed another martial character and the players hoped she would be a barbarian.

We had started the campaign after I purchased the Advanced Class Guide, so we had hybrid classes already. I would have compromised on a wizard/barbarian hybrid, but that combination did not exist. Instead, I made Val a bloodrager with an archetype that gave her cantrips. In roleplaying, however, she thought she was a wizard/barbarian hybrid and prepared her cantrips every morning from her spellbook. It wasn't until 4th level, when she gained 1st-level spells, that the difference between spontaneous caster and prepared caster became clear.

For the story and flavor of the class, the spell list is more important than the spell preparation method. I was able to roleplay a cantrip-casting sorcerer/barbarian as a cantrip-casting wizard/barbarian without anyone, not even the character herself, able to tell the difference.

[thejeff]

I don't think in setting terms there's really any need for Vancian casting. I don't think you'd have to change Golarion in any significant fashion if you removed it.

You'd need to keep some kind of scholarly wizardry, because there are various such schools in the lore. I'm not sure there's really much of a setting role for spontaneous casting as such.
Arcanist casting could probably cover everything that's needed there on the arcane side.
Ditching both prepared and arcanist style and keeping only spontaneous would be odd, at least if sorcerers kept the untrained innate power approach. What are the famous magic scho, at least on the arcane sideols for then?

On the divine - I think you'd want to keep the distinction between the dedicated clerics working their way up to casting and the more directly annointed oracles, but there's no reason that needs to reflected in casting style, rather than in other abilities, at least on the arcane side.

I mean, I've got no problem with keeping Vancian, but I hadn't really thought about it from the setting point of view. And I agree with Raylyah - we don't need another thread arguing the mechanics, but the setting aspect is interesting.

[Pan]

I like vancian because it promotes creative problem solving and rewards a combat as war style gameplay. I dont think it is vital for PF or Golarion, its just my strongly preferred casting method.

[Helmic]

When most people think Vancian casting, they think picking which spells to use that day. If they haven't played in a while and are operating on just pure memory and nostalgia, they're not going to remember revolver spells, where you need to load each spell individually into each spell slot and shoot them like bullets.

You can swap Vancian out for Arcanist/neo-Vancian and most people wouldn't even notice, they'd just be having a lot more fun than they remembered having before.

Hell, that's even the direction Dark Souls ended up going. They went from Vancian slots (you load the same spell into multiple slots to get extra castings of it) to an FP system (you still attune only a few of the spells you know, but you can then cast them freely so long you have the resources for it).

There's no more a lore reason to keep it exactly the same than there is a lore reason for Fighters to continue not doing things other than full attack. At some point you're devolving into CinemaSins level nitpicking where you're coming at it with the very flawed idea that all forms of inconsistency are bad and fixate on minor details while missing the big picture. I can't imagine many plot-relevant scenarios where slotted spells impacted the story in a meaningful way that couldn't be trivially retconned to do the same thing with Arcanist casting.

Oh no, the big bad forgot to prepare a second casting of Feather Fall and died when pushed off the cliff! Except now it's just the big bad forgot to prepare Feather Fall at all, ran out of spell slots, got counterspelled, whatever myriad unimportant details that all still result in the big bad dying because they forgot about something that the heroes used against them, which is the important part.

Everyone already did this when they converted their stuff over frthan.5 and Paladins magically stopped sucking. If you guys were able to do that while plugging your ears and telling Jeremy Scott to f*%% off about how it's not lore kosher while he throttled the everloving s%++ out of a service bell, you can probably overlook the extremely minor details for the sake of a much needed improvement to how Vancian casting works mechanically.

[Talsharien]

I think that the system needs vancian, with a spell point option for those that don't want to play it. I have gm'd with both and prefer a spell point system, but also understand why some prefer vancian. Give us the option is what I say.

[KujakuDM]

Pathfinder is a D&D Legacy game. It should follow certain things within that paradigm to keep in line with what people get in saying that.

It would be like removing a core race and moving it to the monster manual, not like any D&D game would do that! /sarcasm

[Claxon]

I just don't like the "fire and forget" thing with Vancian casting.

I'd much prefer homogenizing casting as only the Arcanist style casting, with an option in the "arcane casting class" (which would essentially be both the wizard and the sorcerer) to then choose academic study or blood magic options that enhance their abilities in various ways.

Essentially, there would be only one class and you would select how your abilities manifest and what powers it grants.

[Rysky]

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

[Pan]

Honestly, I think all the "objectively more fun" bellyaching will be moot. I am sure Paizo will release an arcanist along with witch and oracle at some point.

[pjrogers]

Rysky wrote:

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

Please! Please! No! Knineticists are my absolute least favorite thing in PF1e. I dislike them even more than trip specialists with reach weapons (which is saying a heck of a lot).

[MaxAstro]

Lore wise, it's important that preparing spells be a thing for wizards because there is a lot of established stories where that happens.

However, I don't think any of them feature "I only prepared this spell once instead of twice" as a meaningful plot point, so I don't think you'd do any damage to the lore replacing pure Vancian casting with Arcanist casting.

Mechanics-wise, oh goddess please get rid of pure Vancian casting it's so bad.

I actually have a little bit of worry about how exactly Paizo will implement Arcanists if they do keep pure Vancian for wizards. In PF1e, Arcanists are balanced by a level delay. PF2e seems to have "no level delays for casters" as a core tenant of how the magic system works, and an Arcanist without a level delay would just be a better Wizard.

[Helmic]

Yeah, I think most of the "Gotta have Vancian, it's tradition" folk are imagining it being replaced by spell points. Arcanist is Vancian except slightly tweaked to be much more smooth during play. I bet a lot of folk call 5e casting Vancian casting, it's hard to notice the difference just reading the rules until it dawns on you that it never specified you were preparing the spells into slots, just preparing them in general

Also, just having an Arcanist as an option isn't good enough. I want clerics and druids to be actually fun to play too. Revolver spells eat up so much time during play, especially with new players.

Maybe that's the trick to get the PF1 vanguard to swallow the pill. Keep Vancian casting, kill revolver chamber spell slots. Same idea, different phrasing.

[Pan]

Helmic wrote:

Also, just having an Arcanist add an option isn't good enough. I want clerics and druids to be actually fun to play too.

That is a fair point. Hopefully, oracle and shaman can help with that.

[Helmic]

pjrogers wrote:

Rysky wrote:

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

Please! Please! No! Knineticists are my absolute least favorite thing in PF1e. I dislike them even more than trip specialists with reach weapons (which is saying a heck of a lot).

What's wrong with Kineticists? They're fun. They'd just be regular Sorcerers who took a certain option. I don't see a structural issue with them.

[MaxAstro]

Revolver spell slots is definitely what I mean.

I actually like prepared casting. Picking out my spells is fun. Having to guess exactly how many I will need is the part that kills me. Arcanist was a revelation when it came out.

[pjrogers]

Helmic wrote:

pjrogers wrote:

Rysky wrote:

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

Please! Please! No! Knineticists are my absolute least favorite thing in PF1e. I dislike them even more than trip specialists with reach weapons (which is saying a heck of a lot).

What's wrong with Kineticists? They're fun. They'd just be regular Sorcerers who took a certain option. I don't see a structural issue with them.

They have their own unique set of rules that has virtually nothing to do with how any other class operates. They're like something designed for one game system and then dropped into another.

[Helmic]

pjrogers wrote:

Helmic wrote:

pjrogers wrote:

Rysky wrote:

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

Please! Please! No! Knineticists are my absolute least favorite thing in PF1e. I dislike them even more than trip specialists with reach weapons (which is saying a heck of a lot).

What's wrong with Kineticists? They're fun. They'd just be regular Sorcerers who took a certain option. I don't see a structural issue with them.

They have their own unique set of rules that has virtually nothing to do with how any other class operates. They're like something designed for one game system and then dropped into another.

Huh? Isn't that a little desirable, as a class option? It's not that complex, I don't remember it being problematic in play. If you had a specific criticism similar to our issue with revolver chamber spell slots adding complexity and a host of problems inherent to it being the default of the system, I'd be interested in hearing it, but otherwise it seems inconsistent with the position that Vancian casting needs an additional out of place revolver chamber spell slot system.

[oholoko]

pjrogers wrote:

Helmic wrote:

pjrogers wrote:

Rysky wrote:

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

Please! Please! No! Knineticists are my absolute least favorite thing in PF1e. I dislike them even more than trip specialists with reach weapons (which is saying a heck of a lot).

What's wrong with Kineticists? They're fun. They'd just be regular Sorcerers who took a certain option. I don't see a structural issue with them.

They have their own unique set of rules that has virtually nothing to do with how any other class operates. They're like something designed for one game system and then dropped into another.

I always felt like kineticists were kinda of Wilders done right xD

[RazarTuk]

pjrogers wrote:

Helmic wrote:

pjrogers wrote:

Rysky wrote:

I think I would have liked for Sorcerer to be like/have some Kineticist options, being able to spam things and pump themselves up.

Please! Please! No! Knineticists are my absolute least favorite thing in PF1e. I dislike them even more than trip specialists with reach weapons (which is saying a heck of a lot).

What's wrong with Kineticists? They're fun. They'd just be regular Sorcerers who took a certain option. I don't see a structural issue with them.

They have their own unique set of rules that has virtually nothing to do with how any other class operates. They're like something designed for one game system and then dropped into another.

This all gets interesting with spherecasting. I maintain that Spheres of Power will be incredibly easy to port to PF2e, what with how feat-focused they both are. The difference is primarily that 2e has class-specific feats, while spherecasting amounts to copious numbers of 2e archetypes.

How this relates to kineticists is that kineticists fit fairly well into spherecasting. The entire concept is that you get a handful of free abilities, talents that improve those base abilities, and a handful of spell points for casting more powerful abilities. Add Draining Casting, Emotional Casting, Rigorous Concentration, Somatic Casting I, Fortified Casting, and Empowered Abilities, and you basically have a less janky version of burn.

Level + Con spell points, 1 nonlethal plus 1 per 5 levels any time you use a sphere ability, everything has a thought and emotion component, risk spell failure in medium and heavy armor, use Con as your casting ability, and gain a small bonus to caster level when you start running out of spell points.

MaxAstro wrote:

Revolver spell slots is definitely what I mean.

I actually like prepared casting. Picking out my spells is fun. Having to guess exactly how many I will need is the part that kills me. Arcanist was a revelation when it came out.

Yep. The anti-Vancian crowd isn't necessarily against spell slots. We just all can't stand having to guess exactly how many times we'll want to cast any given spell. It made sense at first, coming out of war games. Letting a wizard-class character cast the same fireball twice sounded as absurd as letting an artillery-class unit fire the same cannonball twice. But especially from a lore perspective, you can tell basically all the same stories with Arcanist casting, which the entire industry is moving to.

[thejeff]

RazarTuk wrote:

Yep. The anti-Vancian crowd isn't necessarily against spell slots. We just all can't stand having to guess exactly how many times we'll want to cast any given spell. It made sense at first, coming out of war games. Letting a wizard-class character cast the same fireball twice sounded as absurd as letting an artillery-class unit fire the same cannonball twice. But especially from a lore perspective, you can tell basically all the same stories with Arcanist casting, which the entire industry is moving to.

You know, I've heard that analogy a lot in this debate and at first I nodded along, but it doesn't really make sense.

Doing the same thing again and again is what artillery does. Not the same cannonball of course, but the number of cannonballs is the number of slots you've got. It's not like the usual artillery piece in a war game has a dozen different action attacks and has to choose up front how many of each it will do in its 5 possible shots.

I wasn't playing war games back then, but what I've usually seen in later ones is either artillery or casters in fantasy war games fire one kind of attack or spell per unit and generally can just keep doing it - they're assumed to have sufficient ammunition to keep going. Maybe a cooldown so they can't fire every turn.

I'd take the early designers at their word and assume they were actually basing on Vance's stories because they liked those, not because wizards were cannons. And past the first few years of OD&D, RPGs quickly outgrew old school war games and new players wouldn't have been thinking of them as artillery pieces.

[pjrogers]

Helmic wrote:

pjrogers wrote:

They have their own unique set of rules that has virtually nothing to do with how any other class operates. They're like something designed for one game system and then dropped into another.

Huh? Isn't that a little desirable, as a class option? It's not that complex, I don't remember it being problematic in play. If you had a specific criticism similar to our issue with revolver chamber spell slots adding complexity and a host of problems inherent to it being the default of the system, I'd be interested in hearing it, but otherwise it seems inconsistent with the position that Vancian casting needs an additional out of place revolver chamber spell slot system.

I'd like to have a degree of consistency in how the various classes operate. I think that makes for an easier to teach and understand game.

For example, I'm pretty much OK with the other occult classes because the logic and operation of psychic magic builds upon the existing magic/spell system. On the other hand, the kineticist and how it operates comes totally out of left field.

[MaxAstro]

@thejeff Old school war games of the kind that eventually became D&D absolutely tracked how many cannonballs a given piece of artillery had.

We are talking about people who thought that the "polearm vs different kind of polearm to-hit modifier table" was a good idea. :P

[thejeff]

MaxAstro wrote:

@thejeff Old school war games of the kind that eventually became D&D absolutely tracked how many cannonballs a given piece of artillery had.

We are talking about people who thought that the "polearm vs different kind of polearm to-hit modifier table" was a good idea. :P

I'm willing to believe that. (Did they also have rules for moving cannonballs from one piece to another or for bringing resupply?)

Those rules would still tend to be "This piece can fire 4 times". Not "Pick 4 total of the following two dozen options (duplication allowed). Your completely realistic cannon can fire those 4 shots."

The analogous wargame wizard would be one who could fire 4 fireballs, not one who could pick 2 attacks from the 2nd level spell list and 2 from the 1st.

And strangely, there's a source for that type of magic and they even named it after that source.
I really don't think the wizards are artillery analogy explains any of this.

[pjrogers]

thejeff wrote:

I'm willing to believe that. (Did they also have rules for moving cannonballs from one piece to another or for bringing resupply?)

Just to demonstrate my grognard cred, I would refer you to the La Bataille series of games which has rules for artillery ammo and resupply.

[RazarTuk]

thejeff wrote:

And strangely, there's a source for that type of magic and they even named it after that source.

I really don't think the wizards are artillery analogy explains any of this.

The wizards as artillery analogy is meant to explain why they went with Vancian casting, as opposed to producing some other magic system, like spell points.

[thejeff]

RazarTuk wrote:

thejeff wrote:

And strangely, there's a source for that type of magic and they even named it after that source.

I really don't think the wizards are artillery analogy explains any of this.

The wizards as artillery analogy is meant to explain why they went with Vancian casting, as opposed to producing some other magic system, like spell points.

Yeah, I get that. I just don't think it does.

Partly, I guess, because I don't think it's really necessary. I guess if the idea is completely counter-intuitive to you, you might grasp at an analogy that explains why someone might have gone with it.

I just don't see the parallel being close enough at all to justify it.

Honestly, it might simply have been because Vance had one of the few settings around at the time with magic coherent enough to be a "system". Try building a game around the casting in Middle-Earth. Or in Howard's Conan stories. Remember you're doing it without any existing examples of fantasy games to work with.
Vance at least had neatly packaged spells and a built in limitation in terms of only being able to prepare a few at once. And they still had to invent the idea of organizing those into different levels of spells and add in that you could have certain numbers of each level, not just a certain total.

[D@rK-SePHiRoTH-]

The legacy argument doesn't really hold up when you think that "the" D&D left the old vancian behind and despite that (or, actually, thanks to that) it's at peak popularity

[Igor Horvat]

5E did pretty good job in balancing "stiff" Vancian casting and "free flow" mana point usage.

While I would prefer full mana point system with fixed number of prepared/known spells(depending on class), it has only problem of forcing 5min work day even more as you can burn ALL mana on highest level spells, so instead of having 30 or so spells across 10 levels(PF2 current) you would just have 3-5 10th level spells to cast.

That is why I like 5E casting, it gives lots of freedom of multiple variations of spells in the same level and across different spell levels by means of auto-hightening.

[amethal]

KujakuDM wrote:

It would be like removing a core race and moving it to the monster manual, not like any D&D game would do that! /sarcasm

None of the editions that I know of. The closest would be 4th edition, that had Gnomes in Players Handbook 2 rather than Players Handbook 1.

Of course, "OD&D" did just fine for a couple of decades with just humans, elves, dwarves and halflings.

[KujakuDM]

The removal of Gnomes in the first PHB set the precedent for how many people saw 4e at first. They made an entire marketing video about it. And as far as I can remember, they made no mention of the fact that it would be added in PHB2. Though (in my opinion) they should have moved dragon born from 1 into 2, and gnome back.

Whatever the reason for it, they expressly were making a statement by removing them.

"This is not D&D as you know it."

Same thing they did by removing different Angels and using, "Angel of XX" creatures.

[thejeff]

The "This is not D&D as you know it" statement first made by removing Half-Orcs in AD&D 2E.

[Athaleon]

Wizards / Prepared Casters canonically using Vancian (or Arcanist "soft Vancian") casting while Sorcerers / Spontaneous Casters run entirely on Spell Points could be fun.

[necromental]

Put me at +1 for arcanist casting being the base. That way I would actually play prepared casters. Also I don't see any continuity problem there. Spontaneous casters should get a boost in casting stamina either through spell slots or spell points.

[Pandora's]

I think it's important for Pathfinder as a game to not have prepared casting, Arcanist-style or otherwise. It's the biggest contributor to the caster/martial disparity and causes other narrative and encounter design problems.

It turns out that when some characters can effectively switch out their entire ability set on a daily basis and other characters can't, those with the vast diversity can take over the game a bit. It's hard enough to make non-magical abilities feel valuable alongside magical ones without the magical options also being switched out daily to best suit the current situation. Abilities like Quick Preparation make this effect even worse: any problem that can wait 10 minutes can usually be solved with magic. Non-casters need not even pick up their character sheets.

The enormous nerfs to magic in the playtest were related to prepared casting, I think. Powerful magic abilities will often be disruptive in terms of adventure design. Flight spells mean that most movement-impairing hazards are obsolete. Teleportation renders travel time moot. Death Ward trivializes many forms of undead. These are effectively silver bullets. That isn't all bad; it makes player playing the spellcaster feel awesome and allows the party to easily solve certain types of problems they might not like dealing with. Picking spells like this allows you to choose which types of problems you will be best at solving. As long as there are other kind of problems, the spellcaster gets to have their time in the limelight and there are still other interesting obstacles for the party to be challenged by. The spellcaster can apply spells in creative ways to create partial solutions to some of these other challenges.

The problem with trading out abilities is that you can have disruptively powerful solutions to most types of problems, at which point little else can challenge the party and the spellcaster is doing far more than anyone else because they're hitting nearly every problem with silver bullets. Why go through hours of real-time effort when you can instead say "let the wizard prepare new spells and cast X" and solve the problem in 5 real-time minutes? The typical answer to that is time-pressure in the adventure, but that doesn't always hold up in practice and unnecessarily limits the kinds of stories that can be told, which is really suboptimal in a story-telling game. If you allow abilities like Quick Preparation, even time pressure won't work.

The power level of spells in the playtest is what happens when you try to make spells not so disruptive. All that versatility isn't a problem if the solutions aren't all that effective at solving problems. Turns out that feels really dissatisfying and they're rolling those changes back. If they end up with silver bullet spells again without removing prepared casting, we'll end up with all the same magic-related problems that PF1 had. Remove prepared spellcasting and you can get away with vastly more powerful magic and have a much more functional cooperative game, which is an enormous win-win in my book.

[RazarTuk]

If high-level casters are allowed to flagrantly break the laws of reality, while high-level martials aren't allowed to do anything that's remotely impossible in our world, then no casting system can solve or be blamed for caster-martial disparity.

And for clarity, I'm not talking things like magic missile. I'm comparing something like Wall of Force to, say, becoming such a good swimmer that you gain a burrow speed. (As in swimming through dirt)

[Rob Godfrey]

thejeff wrote:

MaxAstro wrote:

@thejeff Old school war games of the kind that eventually became D&D absolutely tracked how many cannonballs a given piece of artillery had.

We are talking about people who thought that the "polearm vs different kind of polearm to-hit modifier table" was a good idea. :P

I'm willing to believe that. (Did they also have rules for moving cannonballs from one piece to another or for bringing resupply?)

Those rules would still tend to be "This piece can fire 4 times". Not "Pick 4 total of the following two dozen options (duplication allowed). Your completely realistic cannon can fire those 4 shots."

The analogous wargame wizard would be one who could fire 4 fireballs, not one who could pick 2 attacks from the 2nd level spell list and 2 from the 1st.

And strangely, there's a source for that type of magic and they even named it after that source.
I really don't think the wizards are artillery analogy explains any of this.

dependa on the war game ofc, but grape shot vs cannister shot, chainshot vs barshot, stone vs steel cannon balls, as well as 'huge handfuls of bolts and nails and other stuff' were all ammo types, and all took up space and behaved differently

[Pandora's]

RazarTuk wrote:

If high-level casters are allowed to flagrantly break the laws of reality, while high-level martials aren't allowed to do anything that's remotely impossible in our world, then no casting system can solve or be blamed for caster-martial disparity.

And for clarity, I'm not talking things like magic missile. I'm comparing something like Wall of Force to, say, becoming such a good swimmer that you gain a burrow speed. (As in swimming through dirt)

This is a lesser cause of the disparity, though one I acknowledged. Being able to completely obsolete mundane abilities in a narrow area of specialization is far less problematic than being able to do it in nearly all non-combat situations.

[Wolfism]

@pjrogers One of the nice things about having the sorcerer have kineticist style casting is that it would be integrated into the system from the very beginning instead of added on at the very end of a systems lifespan without a lot of support.

[Bluenose]

RazarTuk wrote:

If high-level casters are allowed to flagrantly break the laws of reality, while high-level martials aren't allowed to do anything that's remotely impossible in our world, then no casting system can solve or be blamed for caster-martial disparity.

And for clarity, I'm not talking things like magic missile. I'm comparing something like Wall of Force to, say, becoming such a good swimmer that you gain a burrow speed. (As in swimming through dirt)

I remember someone doing a series of blog posts analysing various youtube videos in D&D 3.x RAW terms. Parkour, free climbing, swimming in armour, that sort of thing. It was illuminating to realise that at levels where casters were raising the dead and traveling to other planes, a monk could match the mobility of enthusiastic amateurs.

[Loreguard]

While of course, modules and APs of current Golarion adventures of course list casters with specific spells prepared, so changing them to a neo-vancian would change that. However, that isn't necessarily more of a change than would already occur with the switch to P2 rules, making a guess.

As far as the novels go, I'm not certain they really stuck to true strict Vancian standards in the novels. Of course they never seemed to define what spells they were memorizing, so they seemed in novels to generally have the spells memorized that they would need. You just don't know if they planned that well, or if it might have been a little loose, like a less strict Vancian method might produce.

What I'm trying to recall is if any book had someone cast a spell that they did memorize, but specifically present that they couldn't cast it again, because they didn't prepare another one. This is the sort of cannon that could get broken by switching to a less Vancian preparation model.

One way to potentially get past such concerns would be if Old School Vancian still existed, as an option... that way some heroes/villains could still be constrained by it, but make the Arcanist/Neo-Vancian being a growing option or tradition.