I don't really understand the rationale behind the Vecna statblock. He was a legendary wizard who became a lich and then a god. So why are there so few spells in his arsenal? A few at-will spells and some limited daily castings. Not even the spells list from a standard lich. It even has him attacking with a dagger as part of his standard move routine. I don't get it. Is this to try and make the character easier to run for DMs? It seems more like dumbing him down and turning him into an MMO bad guy with preset move patterns. Why take the magic out of a character who became a god of magic?
The TL;DR is that Wizards is moving away from giving monsters spells and instead trying to put more powerful and unique abilities in the stat block themselves. This makes running the monster easier on DMs since they don’t have to memorise tables upon tables of spells or flip back and forth to look up what a spell does.
It’s a sensible change overall, and one that fixes a pretty large barrier to entry for brand new DMs who are unlikely to have an intimate knowledge of what each spell does by name.
Although there might be 9,000 spells in the game, there are only, say, 5 that a Wizard would want to cast in a fight against a party of heroes. And he's not likely to get enough time to use more than a couple anyway.
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I don't really understand the rationale behind the Vecna statblock. He was a legendary wizard who became a lich and then a god. So why are there so few spells in his arsenal? A few at-will spells and some limited daily castings. Not even the spells list from a standard lich. It even has him attacking with a dagger as part of his standard move routine. I don't get it. Is this to try and make the character easier to run for DMs? It seems more like dumbing him down and turning him into an MMO bad guy with preset move patterns. Why take the magic out of a character who became a god of magic?
There is already a thread on this subject.
The TL;DR is that Wizards is moving away from giving monsters spells and instead trying to put more powerful and unique abilities in the stat block themselves. This makes running the monster easier on DMs since they don’t have to memorise tables upon tables of spells or flip back and forth to look up what a spell does.
It’s a sensible change overall, and one that fixes a pretty large barrier to entry for brand new DMs who are unlikely to have an intimate knowledge of what each spell does by name.
Although there might be 9,000 spells in the game, there are only, say, 5 that a Wizard would want to cast in a fight against a party of heroes. And he's not likely to get enough time to use more than a couple anyway.