While I think that D&D /is/ collaborative story telling, I don't think Vancian magic helps tell the story. I've read most of the arguments people have made in favor of it. To me, it sounds almost like folks are trying to justify the system. I'm sure it worked well in Vance's books. I do not feel it does anything to improve the experience of D&D. I've played with Vancian magic in game, and I have used the subsequent systems as well. In my mind, it's no question that dumping Vancian magic made playing magic users a more pleasant experience.
That said, the pendulum needs to swing back the other way a bit. Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good. I am not sure where the happy medium is, but I'd rather have the overtuned wizards that we have now, than the undertuned and punished ones we had back in 2e. I say wizards specifically, because I am not convinced that the other spell casters are huge problems. It's the flexibility that wizards have to swap their loadouts super easy that I think cause the majority of the issues.
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Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
While I think that D&D /is/ collaborative story telling, I don't think Vancian magic helps tell the story. I've read most of the arguments people have made in favor of it. To me, it sounds almost like folks are trying to justify the system. I'm sure it worked well in Vance's books. I do not feel it does anything to improve the experience of D&D. I've played with Vancian magic in game, and I have used the subsequent systems as well. In my mind, it's no question that dumping Vancian magic made playing magic users a more pleasant experience.
That said, the pendulum needs to swing back the other way a bit. Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good. I am not sure where the happy medium is, but I'd rather have the overtuned wizards that we have now, than the undertuned and punished ones we had back in 2e. I say wizards specifically, because I am not convinced that the other spell casters are huge problems. It's the flexibility that wizards have to swap their loadouts super easy that I think cause the majority of the issues.
Yeah. There were so many little things that kept magic users in check. Besides the vancian part of the discussion, and memorizing a spell multiple times to cast it multiple times, and casting times which was brought up earlier. They needed more xp to level. They had to roll percentile die when they wanted to try and learn a new spell, and you failed, that was it, you could never learn that spell. They needed an int score of 10+spell level to cast spells of that level. So a 19 int to cast 9th level spells — at a time when asi didn’t exist and you basically needed someone to cast a wish on you to get above an 18. Or really to get any ability score increase.
Again, I don’t want to go back. But it does feel like they could be reined in a bit. Though, as I say that I’m thinking that I play in a group where I’m a wizard, we have a champion fighter (24 version) and I certainly don’t feel like my character outshines that one. Or any of the others in the group. Certainly, there’s times when I can solve a problem with a spell very easily, but there’s lots of times when they are outshining me. Could just be that I have a fantastic DM, which I do.
Yeah. There were so many little things that kept magic users in check.
Yes and no. Low level spellcasters were certainly absolutely terrible in AD&D. High level spellcasters were godlike, far more potent than they are in 5e.
With the exception of 4e (which treated magic so much differently than any other edition of D&D that it barely belongs in the same discussion), in every edition spellcasters were terrible at low levels (1-2 definitely, 3-4 maybe), okay at mid levels (5-8 or so), and increasingly overpowered and gamebreaking at higher levels, and the blame for this is solidly on the spellcasting system -- the phrase 'linear fighter, quadratic wizard' was coined way back in the 80s.
While I think that D&D /is/ collaborative story telling, I don't think Vancian magic helps tell the story. I've read most of the arguments people have made in favor of it. To me, it sounds almost like folks are trying to justify the system. I'm sure it worked well in Vance's books. I do not feel it does anything to improve the experience of D&D. I've played with Vancian magic in game, and I have used the subsequent systems as well. In my mind, it's no question that dumping Vancian magic made playing magic users a more pleasant experience.
That said, the pendulum needs to swing back the other way a bit. Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good. I am not sure where the happy medium is, but I'd rather have the overtuned wizards that we have now, than the undertuned and punished ones we had back in 2e. I say wizards specifically, because I am not convinced that the other spell casters are huge problems. It's the flexibility that wizards have to swap their loadouts super easy that I think cause the majority of the issues.
Whether you like it or not, or think it works for your game is an entirely different topic and mostly driven by personal tastes, which, as far as I'm concerned, requires no debate. Taste is taste and it's a matter for each player/table to determine their preference.
The topic is about the meaning and purpose of Vancian magic, and understanding why it exists at all is an important part of understanding it as a whole.
I think one way to look at Vancian magic and the concept of role-playing "systems" in a game in general is to understand that they are not all intended to be "fun" mechanics; they are more often intended to create a sense of drama, limitations, and often even drawbacks.
I mean for example is it fun to only have 1 Bonus action, rather than, say 3 Bonus actions? Is failing a skill check "fun"? Is casting a spell only to have an enemy make its saving throw "fun"? All of these limitations, drawbacks and potential failures could be construed by someone as not fun game mechanics. There are games that take the approach of taking something deemed "unfun" by the designer and altering how it works. For example, in Draw Steel, there is no such thing as a failed attack, when you make an attack, the question isn't if you hit or miss (everything is an auto hit), its a question of how much damage you do (a little or a lot). The designer of that game decided that missing attacks is not a fun mechanic.
As you point out "Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good." This is a common complaint about modern D&D by old-school gamers, though I think most would agree they are a bit more than just "a bit too good". Old Old-school gamers don't think its a fun mechanic to have the concept of The Magic-User being reduced to just a common thing anyone can do, The point of Vancian magic was to make Magic-Users very special. Evidence for that is in how OSR games typically debict mages as a unique class. You can look at pretty much any system, and it would be so.
About 75% of the classes/sub-classes in modern 2024 D&D are spellcasters of one form or another, it's more common to have magic abilities than it is to have good martial abilities in modern D&D. Modern D&D is in effect a game about different types of Wizards.
Vancian magic was one part of a larger eco-system of mechanics that defined the realities of a fantasy world, most notably that fantasy world was not "high fantasy" or "power fantasy", D&D was a low magic, low fantasy based mostly on a real medieval world. What magic did exist in the world was presumed to be the hands of the players, meaning it was a kind of expectation of the game that IF powerful magic-users existed, it was typically as a member of an adventure party or a villain in the story or some rare NPC that would help the players. It was intended to be limited, special, unique, rare.. whatever word you want to use to describe anything but common.
Powerful magic did exist, in fact, the magic in old-school vancian systems like AD&D was incredibly potent, came at very high levels and it was a rare part of the setting. Isolated to the Magic-User and Druid classes.
Modern D&D is a superhero power fantasy, and in that context, where everyone is a powerful magic wielder, Vancian magic doesn't make much sense, so with that I can agree. It is a system of magic that originated as an intentionally limiting concept, it doesn't fit into a setting where pretty much everyone is a powerful spellcaster superhero of one form or another.
To me, 'Vancian' simply translates into 'illogical game design deemed necessary for balancing purposes'. And it's not wrong, either. I liked how 3.5 psionics worked (decidedly un-Vancian), but it was a messed up ... well, mess.
That 'illogical' game design is inspired by how magic works in a highly regarded series of speculative fiction works written by one of the world's greatest fantasy and science fiction authors of all time.
Sure, but just because it works well in a series of novels (however well-regarded), doesn't mean it's the best fit for a tabletop game though. It's a totally different medium.
Vancian has advantages to be sure - instead of other RPGs that use things like mana points, your magic user can just have a sheet of paper that says Shield | Shield | Magic Missile | Mage Armor, and cross off each one as you use it, making it very easy to keep track of which spells you have left even between sessions.
But Vancian has disadvantages too, chief of which was every spellcaster player needing to guess what challenges they're going to be up against a day in advance. That's not the easiest ask for even an experienced player, and even when they get it right they need to figure out how many times they'll need each solution (do I prepare 2 fireballs or 4?) It's clunky design for a game where the players aren't supposed to have that kind of knowledge of what's coming. (And yes, divinations exist, but that just creates the secondary problem of pestering the DM before every long rest.)
It's clunky design for a game where the players aren't supposed to have that kind of knowledge of what's coming. (And yes, divinations exist, but that just creates the secondary problem of pestering the DM before every long rest.)
I'm very much not keen for a return to Vancian, but one solution could be that the Divination allows you to retcon your spell choice.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
But Vancian has disadvantages too, chief of which was every spellcaster player needing to guess what challenges they're going to be up against a day in advance. That's not the easiest ask for even an experienced player, and even when they get it right they need to figure out how many times they'll need each solution (do I prepare 2 fireballs or 4?) It's clunky design for a game where the players aren't supposed to have that kind of knowledge of what's coming. (And yes, divinations exist, but that just creates the secondary problem of pestering the DM before every long rest.)
Those limitations could be very fun...but it's a poor choice to make an entire character "just" to make-or-break their experience on those limitations. If "what spells did you think to prepare/memorize" were more of a party resource, than a character's function, it'd be a lot more reasonable. I think it's very similar to the "clerics are just heal bots" problem.
Older-school D&D mostly dealt with this, initially by happenstance, by being so freeform, thus more forgiving. Being "just a heal bot" or "just a fire-and-forget wizard with only the two wrong spells" mattered less if everyone was spending most of their time not-in-combat and with their actions less limited by their character stats. Older-school games were less pure-combat (despite their wargame roots), "because" the combat was kinda terrible and half-baked.
Really, this was a side-effect of how new the hobby was back then, and how long it took for the market to mature. It took awhile for the industry to figure itself out and know how to differentiate playstyles. Saying that vancian magic enabled a storytelling style of game is putting the cart before the horse --- but the OSR movement, given the benefit of hindsight, is able to turn that around.
Personally, I think vancian magic is very wargame-y. It can also be a good bit of worldbuilding, if you want "wizards" to feel rare and special.
But Vancian has disadvantages too, chief of which was every spellcaster player needing to guess what challenges they're going to be up against a day in advance.
The 'post-Vancian' system now in place incurs similar limitations. If that Wizard uses up all its spell slots of a particular spell's level and greater then encounters something against which that particular spell would have been useful or even critical ...
And this has happened to me in almost every session of 5E I have ever played in in which I played a caster.
Were it such a problem for me that a Wizard cannot predict what spells will or will not be required I wouldn't be a fan of the current system either.
Vancian magic is what it is. You needn't like it. Many do. Or we wouldn't see so many clones of and alternatives to D&D that still use it. As OSR said it really comes down to personal tastes. I do get why people don't like it but that's hardly the subject of the thread. Me I grew up with it. Vance ranks among my favorite authors. And I use an iteration of the game that uses it. I think it makes magic feel more special. Makes it feel otherworldly. I tend to run things a bit more 'grimdark' if you will and that is how like magic in my games. Special. Otherworldly. Not so ubiquitous and not feeling as if it's something everyone sees every day.
People Still call D&D's system 'Vancian Magic' though it is far different now than from what it was in the past. What are your criteria for 'Vacian magic.' I am not looking for strict sourced definitions, i am looking for what you think off the top of your head. Sourced definitions can be provided if they are the Basis of your opinion. No Wrong answers, just seeking opinions. We are not burning at the stake for a different take.
Who are these "people"? I used to play D&D1e long ago and never heard any one call anything "Vancian". I only recently heard another game refer to that word, and it raised my eyebrow.
While I think that D&D /is/ collaborative story telling, I don't think Vancian magic helps tell the story. I've read most of the arguments people have made in favor of it. To me, it sounds almost like folks are trying to justify the system. I'm sure it worked well in Vance's books. I do not feel it does anything to improve the experience of D&D. I've played with Vancian magic in game, and I have used the subsequent systems as well. In my mind, it's no question that dumping Vancian magic made playing magic users a more pleasant experience.
That said, the pendulum needs to swing back the other way a bit. Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good. I am not sure where the happy medium is, but I'd rather have the overtuned wizards that we have now, than the undertuned and punished ones we had back in 2e. I say wizards specifically, because I am not convinced that the other spell casters are huge problems. It's the flexibility that wizards have to swap their loadouts super easy that I think cause the majority of the issues.
Whether you like it or not, or think it works for your game is an entirely different topic and mostly driven by personal tastes, which, as far as I'm concerned, requires no debate. Taste is taste and it's a matter for each player/table to determine their preference.
The topic is about the meaning and purpose of Vancian magic, and understanding why it exists at all is an important part of understanding it as a whole.
I think one way to look at Vancian magic and the concept of role-playing "systems" in a game in general is to understand that they are not all intended to be "fun" mechanics; they are more often intended to create a sense of drama, limitations, and often even drawbacks.
I mean for example is it fun to only have 1 Bonus action, rather than, say 3 Bonus actions? Is failing a skill check "fun"? Is casting a spell only to have an enemy make its saving throw "fun"? All of these limitations, drawbacks and potential failures could be construed by someone as not fun game mechanics. There are games that take the approach of taking something deemed "unfun" by the designer and altering how it works. For example, in Draw Steel, there is no such thing as a failed attack, when you make an attack, the question isn't if you hit or miss (everything is an auto hit), its a question of how much damage you do (a little or a lot). The designer of that game decided that missing attacks is not a fun mechanic.
As you point out "Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good." This is a common complaint about modern D&D by old-school gamers, though I think most would agree they are a bit more than just "a bit too good". Old Old-school gamers don't think its a fun mechanic to have the concept of The Magic-User being reduced to just a common thing anyone can do, The point of Vancian magic was to make Magic-Users very special. Evidence for that is in how OSR games typically debict mages as a unique class. You can look at pretty much any system, and it would be so.
About 75% of the classes/sub-classes in modern 2024 D&D are spellcasters of one form or another, it's more common to have magic abilities than it is to have good martial abilities in modern D&D. Modern D&D is in effect a game about different types of Wizards.
Vancian magic was one part of a larger eco-system of mechanics that defined the realities of a fantasy world, most notably that fantasy world was not "high fantasy" or "power fantasy", D&D was a low magic, low fantasy based mostly on a real medieval world. What magic did exist in the world was presumed to be the hands of the players, meaning it was a kind of expectation of the game that IF powerful magic-users existed, it was typically as a member of an adventure party or a villain in the story or some rare NPC that would help the players. It was intended to be limited, special, unique, rare.. whatever word you want to use to describe anything but common.
Powerful magic did exist, in fact, the magic in old-school vancian systems like AD&D was incredibly potent, came at very high levels and it was a rare part of the setting. Isolated to the Magic-User and Druid classes.
Modern D&D is a superhero power fantasy, and in that context, where everyone is a powerful magic wielder, Vancian magic doesn't make much sense, so with that I can agree. It is a system of magic that originated as an intentionally limiting concept, it doesn't fit into a setting where pretty much everyone is a powerful spellcaster superhero of one form or another.
Youre making 90% of that up. Gygax had to come up with something for his game, and lifted his magic system from Jack Vance, just like he lifted most things from elsewhere and taped it all together. There was no deep thought put into it.
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Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Who are these "people"? I used to play D&D1e long ago and never heard any one call anything "Vancian". I only recently heard another game refer to that word, and it raised my eyebrow.
Gygax himself.
In 1976 he penned an article in which he explained the origins of the game's magic system and how it was inspired by how magic works in Vance's Dying Earth series and used that term himself.
Youre making 90% of that up. Gygax had to come up with something for his game, and lifted his magic system from Jack Vance, just like he lifted most things from elsewhere and taped it all together. There was no deep thought put into it.
In an article published in 1976 in The Strategic Review, Gygax explained the reasoning behind the Vancian magic system. And no. It wasn't just to 'copy' Vance. It was because he liked how versatilely spells of that nature could be utilized and felt it made much more sense to use it over how magic often worked in other fiction. Worked in ways it would not have been conducive to adventuring, worked in ways it would have been too time-consuming to be used in the midst of battle, and worked in ways that would have made magic-users too powerful.
Have you read Playing at the World? Or The Elusive Shift? These books by Jon Peterson chronicle the history and development of the hobby, and contrary to what you have just claimed, magazines and zines at the time were full of deep philosophical discussions about what even constituted a tabletop role-playing game, least of all discussions about why these or those rules made sense, or what rules might be better. You accused someone else of just making something up. But that is exactly what you did.
Youre making 90% of that up. Gygax had to come up with something for his game, and lifted his magic system from Jack Vance, just like he lifted most things from elsewhere and taped it all together. There was no deep thought put into it.
The fact that you don't know the history of the game is not unusual; most people don't bother with it, and that is fine. It's not necessary to know the history of the game to play and enjoy the game today. The fact that you're trying to erase the history, re-write it, and otherwise deny it, is willful. You could have taken the time to perhaps do a simple google search and find out what Gygax thought about Vancian magic, why he added it to the game, why he chose it over something else, and you would have quickly discovered that not only is everything I said 100% accurate, but most of that post is me paraphrasing Ggyax words and in some cases directly quoting him.
I find it fascinating how in modern gaming culture, it has become cosmopolitan to bash both the original design and designers of the game.
50 years later after Gygax's and Arneson's creation, the current edition of the game and every edition before it have and are still using 70% of the same mechanics designed by Gygax and Arneson in the 70's and it is still the most popular game on the market by a wide margin because no one that followed them... NO ONE has been able to create something better. These guys were that good. 50 years of D&D and people are still copying them and people still insist that they were just fumbling idiots with no design skills. If they were such terrible designers, why has no one come with anything better? Why does every game designer that makes D&D since Gygax departed TSR in the 80's after putting out 1st edition AD&D copy/paste their work?
What's worse is that Wizards of the Coast design team have never had an original idea for D&D. You name a mechanic in any version of WotC D&D and I will show you where that mechanic was pinched from in the OSR or from original designers at TSR. Wizards of the Coast 5e D&D lives on the back of the geniuses that created the original game and the creativity of the 3rd party developers that show them how to evolve it.
Yet we still have this habit of re-writing history and pretending like Wizards of the Coast is somehow leading the future of D&D. It's a complete joke.
Vancian magic was just one of many D&D mechanics that were inspired by stories from Appendix N. They weren't arbitrary choices or some sort of fillers; everything that went into D&D was deliberately driven by the creative works of pulp fiction. Vancian magic was never about being mechanically good for a game, it was always about paying tribute to the fantasy works upon which the entire game is based.
I find it fascinating how in modern gaming culture, it has become cosmopolitan to bash both the original design and designers of the game.
50 years later after Gygax's and Arneson's creation, the current edition of the game and every edition before it have and are still using 70% of the same mechanics designed by Gygax and Arneson
Um... no. 5e probably manages 70% similarity to 3e, but 3e was an enormous design change that redefined most of the game's core mechanics (attributes, attacks, defenses, saves, skills, how monsters are designed and written up, ...).
AD&D was a good design for 50 years ago. People have actually learned things since then.
I find it fascinating how in modern gaming culture, it has become cosmopolitan to bash both the original design and designers of the game.
50 years later after Gygax's and Arneson's creation, the current edition of the game and every edition before it have and are still using 70% of the same mechanics designed by Gygax and Arneson
Um... no. 5e probably manages 70% similarity to 3e, but 3e was an enormous design change that redefined most of the game's core mechanics (attributes, attacks, defenses, saves, skills, how monsters are designed and written up, ...).
AD&D was a good design for 50 years ago. People have actually learned things since then.
I can't say I can call it a good design, even for then. It was exploring a completely new design space, and that is going to lead to making choices that you can't know will be bad.
Nonetheless, a lot of its systems design choices are questionable. They're explicable due to the way it was developed (piecemeal, adding on to existing wargame rules, then adding more subsystems as needed, and replacing others), but nobody ever sat down and made it a coherent design. (Maybe that was the way that wargame design was often done back then, but it seems unlikely.)
I can't say I can call it a good design, even for then. It was exploring a completely new design space, and that is going to lead to making choices that you can't know will be bad.
It worked. When you don't have prior art, simply being able to function is already doing pretty well. Other than that, well, AD&D was a system that was essentially unplayable as written, everyone used house rules because you really couldn't play it any other way.
I find it fascinating how in modern gaming culture, it has become cosmopolitan to bash both the original design and designers of the game.
50 years later after Gygax's and Arneson's creation, the current edition of the game and every edition before it have and are still using 70% of the same mechanics designed by Gygax and Arneson
Um... no. 5e probably manages 70% similarity to 3e, but 3e was an enormous design change that redefined most of the game's core mechanics (attributes, attacks, defenses, saves, skills, how monsters are designed and written up, ...).
AD&D was a good design for 50 years ago. People have actually learned things since then.
Hardly... Attributes, defenses, saves, skills, and monster design in modern D&D are just slight variations of what already existed. Do you really think it's design when you decide "ok if you're a strength 17 you get +4 instead of +3... or reverse AC math? look at me, I'm a designer.
Give me a break. There hasn't been anything new in D&D in nearly 40 years. It takes zero talent to buy a franchise, take someone's design and adjust it. This is not innovation. it's not design; it's small adaptions of someone else's work that the community was doing long before Wizards of the Coast came along and charged 50 books for a printed book.
I can't say I can call it a good design, even for then. It was exploring a completely new design space, and that is going to lead to making choices that you can't know will be bad.
It worked. When you don't have prior art, simply being able to function is already doing pretty well. Other than that, well, AD&D was a system that was essentially unplayable as written, everyone used house rules because you really couldn't play it any other way.
You're citing an intended feature of the game as a bug. The whole point of AD&D was to be a guide to a method and tradition, it was not a rulebook. You're applying modern thinking to a classic premise. You didn't play AD&D; you created an AD&D game in your own vision.
While I think that D&D /is/ collaborative story telling, I don't think Vancian magic helps tell the story. I've read most of the arguments people have made in favor of it. To me, it sounds almost like folks are trying to justify the system. I'm sure it worked well in Vance's books. I do not feel it does anything to improve the experience of D&D. I've played with Vancian magic in game, and I have used the subsequent systems as well. In my mind, it's no question that dumping Vancian magic made playing magic users a more pleasant experience.
That said, the pendulum needs to swing back the other way a bit. Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good. I am not sure where the happy medium is, but I'd rather have the overtuned wizards that we have now, than the undertuned and punished ones we had back in 2e. I say wizards specifically, because I am not convinced that the other spell casters are huge problems. It's the flexibility that wizards have to swap their loadouts super easy that I think cause the majority of the issues.
Any time an unfathomably powerful entity sweeps in and offers godlike rewards in return for just a few teensy favors, it’s a scam. Unless it’s me. I’d never lie to you, reader dearest.
Tasha
Yeah. There were so many little things that kept magic users in check. Besides the vancian part of the discussion, and memorizing a spell multiple times to cast it multiple times, and casting times which was brought up earlier. They needed more xp to level. They had to roll percentile die when they wanted to try and learn a new spell, and you failed, that was it, you could never learn that spell. They needed an int score of 10+spell level to cast spells of that level. So a 19 int to cast 9th level spells — at a time when asi didn’t exist and you basically needed someone to cast a wish on you to get above an 18. Or really to get any ability score increase.
Again, I don’t want to go back. But it does feel like they could be reined in a bit. Though, as I say that I’m thinking that I play in a group where I’m a wizard, we have a champion fighter (24 version) and I certainly don’t feel like my character outshines that one. Or any of the others in the group. Certainly, there’s times when I can solve a problem with a spell very easily, but there’s lots of times when they are outshining me. Could just be that I have a fantastic DM, which I do.
Yes and no. Low level spellcasters were certainly absolutely terrible in AD&D. High level spellcasters were godlike, far more potent than they are in 5e.
With the exception of 4e (which treated magic so much differently than any other edition of D&D that it barely belongs in the same discussion), in every edition spellcasters were terrible at low levels (1-2 definitely, 3-4 maybe), okay at mid levels (5-8 or so), and increasingly overpowered and gamebreaking at higher levels, and the blame for this is solidly on the spellcasting system -- the phrase 'linear fighter, quadratic wizard' was coined way back in the 80s.
Whether you like it or not, or think it works for your game is an entirely different topic and mostly driven by personal tastes, which, as far as I'm concerned, requires no debate. Taste is taste and it's a matter for each player/table to determine their preference.
The topic is about the meaning and purpose of Vancian magic, and understanding why it exists at all is an important part of understanding it as a whole.
I think one way to look at Vancian magic and the concept of role-playing "systems" in a game in general is to understand that they are not all intended to be "fun" mechanics; they are more often intended to create a sense of drama, limitations, and often even drawbacks.
I mean for example is it fun to only have 1 Bonus action, rather than, say 3 Bonus actions? Is failing a skill check "fun"? Is casting a spell only to have an enemy make its saving throw "fun"? All of these limitations, drawbacks and potential failures could be construed by someone as not fun game mechanics. There are games that take the approach of taking something deemed "unfun" by the designer and altering how it works. For example, in Draw Steel, there is no such thing as a failed attack, when you make an attack, the question isn't if you hit or miss (everything is an auto hit), its a question of how much damage you do (a little or a lot). The designer of that game decided that missing attacks is not a fun mechanic.
As you point out "Without any restrictions at all, magic users are a bit too good." This is a common complaint about modern D&D by old-school gamers, though I think most would agree they are a bit more than just "a bit too good". Old Old-school gamers don't think its a fun mechanic to have the concept of The Magic-User being reduced to just a common thing anyone can do, The point of Vancian magic was to make Magic-Users very special. Evidence for that is in how OSR games typically debict mages as a unique class. You can look at pretty much any system, and it would be so.
About 75% of the classes/sub-classes in modern 2024 D&D are spellcasters of one form or another, it's more common to have magic abilities than it is to have good martial abilities in modern D&D. Modern D&D is in effect a game about different types of Wizards.
Vancian magic was one part of a larger eco-system of mechanics that defined the realities of a fantasy world, most notably that fantasy world was not "high fantasy" or "power fantasy", D&D was a low magic, low fantasy based mostly on a real medieval world. What magic did exist in the world was presumed to be the hands of the players, meaning it was a kind of expectation of the game that IF powerful magic-users existed, it was typically as a member of an adventure party or a villain in the story or some rare NPC that would help the players. It was intended to be limited, special, unique, rare.. whatever word you want to use to describe anything but common.
Powerful magic did exist, in fact, the magic in old-school vancian systems like AD&D was incredibly potent, came at very high levels and it was a rare part of the setting. Isolated to the Magic-User and Druid classes.
Modern D&D is a superhero power fantasy, and in that context, where everyone is a powerful magic wielder, Vancian magic doesn't make much sense, so with that I can agree. It is a system of magic that originated as an intentionally limiting concept, it doesn't fit into a setting where pretty much everyone is a powerful spellcaster superhero of one form or another.
Sure, but just because it works well in a series of novels (however well-regarded), doesn't mean it's the best fit for a tabletop game though. It's a totally different medium.
Vancian has advantages to be sure - instead of other RPGs that use things like mana points, your magic user can just have a sheet of paper that says Shield |
Shield| Magic Missile | Mage Armor, and cross off each one as you use it, making it very easy to keep track of which spells you have left even between sessions.But Vancian has disadvantages too, chief of which was every spellcaster player needing to guess what challenges they're going to be up against a day in advance. That's not the easiest ask for even an experienced player, and even when they get it right they need to figure out how many times they'll need each solution (do I prepare 2 fireballs or 4?) It's clunky design for a game where the players aren't supposed to have that kind of knowledge of what's coming. (And yes, divinations exist, but that just creates the secondary problem of pestering the DM before every long rest.)
I'm very much not keen for a return to Vancian, but one solution could be that the Divination allows you to retcon your spell choice.
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Those limitations could be very fun...but it's a poor choice to make an entire character "just" to make-or-break their experience on those limitations. If "what spells did you think to prepare/memorize" were more of a party resource, than a character's function, it'd be a lot more reasonable. I think it's very similar to the "clerics are just heal bots" problem.
Older-school D&D mostly dealt with this, initially by happenstance, by being so freeform, thus more forgiving. Being "just a heal bot" or "just a fire-and-forget wizard with only the two wrong spells" mattered less if everyone was spending most of their time not-in-combat and with their actions less limited by their character stats. Older-school games were less pure-combat (despite their wargame roots), "because" the combat was kinda terrible and half-baked.
Really, this was a side-effect of how new the hobby was back then, and how long it took for the market to mature. It took awhile for the industry to figure itself out and know how to differentiate playstyles. Saying that vancian magic enabled a storytelling style of game is putting the cart before the horse --- but the OSR movement, given the benefit of hindsight, is able to turn that around.
Personally, I think vancian magic is very wargame-y. It can also be a good bit of worldbuilding, if you want "wizards" to feel rare and special.
The 'post-Vancian' system now in place incurs similar limitations. If that Wizard uses up all its spell slots of a particular spell's level and greater then encounters something against which that particular spell would have been useful or even critical ...
And this has happened to me in almost every session of 5E I have ever played in in which I played a caster.
Were it such a problem for me that a Wizard cannot predict what spells will or will not be required I wouldn't be a fan of the current system either.
Vancian magic is what it is. You needn't like it. Many do. Or we wouldn't see so many clones of and alternatives to D&D that still use it. As OSR said it really comes down to personal tastes. I do get why people don't like it but that's hardly the subject of the thread. Me I grew up with it. Vance ranks among my favorite authors. And I use an iteration of the game that uses it. I think it makes magic feel more special. Makes it feel otherworldly. I tend to run things a bit more 'grimdark' if you will and that is how like magic in my games. Special. Otherworldly. Not so ubiquitous and not feeling as if it's something everyone sees every day.
Who are these "people"? I used to play D&D1e long ago and never heard any one call anything "Vancian". I only recently heard another game refer to that word, and it raised my eyebrow.
Youre making 90% of that up. Gygax had to come up with something for his game, and lifted his magic system from Jack Vance, just like he lifted most things from elsewhere and taped it all together. There was no deep thought put into it.
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Gygax himself.
In 1976 he penned an article in which he explained the origins of the game's magic system and how it was inspired by how magic works in Vance's Dying Earth series and used that term himself.
So, I ran through the pregenerated characters for the G-D series. They are
So, 8 of 12 characters are spellcasters of some sort. Is that really significantly different from 5e?
In an article published in 1976 in The Strategic Review, Gygax explained the reasoning behind the Vancian magic system. And no. It wasn't just to 'copy' Vance. It was because he liked how versatilely spells of that nature could be utilized and felt it made much more sense to use it over how magic often worked in other fiction. Worked in ways it would not have been conducive to adventuring, worked in ways it would have been too time-consuming to be used in the midst of battle, and worked in ways that would have made magic-users too powerful.
Have you read Playing at the World? Or The Elusive Shift? These books by Jon Peterson chronicle the history and development of the hobby, and contrary to what you have just claimed, magazines and zines at the time were full of deep philosophical discussions about what even constituted a tabletop role-playing game, least of all discussions about why these or those rules made sense, or what rules might be better. You accused someone else of just making something up. But that is exactly what you did.
The fact that you don't know the history of the game is not unusual; most people don't bother with it, and that is fine. It's not necessary to know the history of the game to play and enjoy the game today. The fact that you're trying to erase the history, re-write it, and otherwise deny it, is willful. You could have taken the time to perhaps do a simple google search and find out what Gygax thought about Vancian magic, why he added it to the game, why he chose it over something else, and you would have quickly discovered that not only is everything I said 100% accurate, but most of that post is me paraphrasing Ggyax words and in some cases directly quoting him.
50 years later after Gygax's and Arneson's creation, the current edition of the game and every edition before it have and are still using 70% of the same mechanics designed by Gygax and Arneson in the 70's and it is still the most popular game on the market by a wide margin because no one that followed them... NO ONE has been able to create something better. These guys were that good. 50 years of D&D and people are still copying them and people still insist that they were just fumbling idiots with no design skills. If they were such terrible designers, why has no one come with anything better? Why does every game designer that makes D&D since Gygax departed TSR in the 80's after putting out 1st edition AD&D copy/paste their work?
What's worse is that Wizards of the Coast design team have never had an original idea for D&D. You name a mechanic in any version of WotC D&D and I will show you where that mechanic was pinched from in the OSR or from original designers at TSR. Wizards of the Coast 5e D&D lives on the back of the geniuses that created the original game and the creativity of the 3rd party developers that show them how to evolve it.
Yet we still have this habit of re-writing history and pretending like Wizards of the Coast is somehow leading the future of D&D. It's a complete joke.
Vancian magic was just one of many D&D mechanics that were inspired by stories from Appendix N. They weren't arbitrary choices or some sort of fillers; everything that went into D&D was deliberately driven by the creative works of pulp fiction. Vancian magic was never about being mechanically good for a game, it was always about paying tribute to the fantasy works upon which the entire game is based.
Um... no. 5e probably manages 70% similarity to 3e, but 3e was an enormous design change that redefined most of the game's core mechanics (attributes, attacks, defenses, saves, skills, how monsters are designed and written up, ...).
AD&D was a good design for 50 years ago. People have actually learned things since then.
I can't say I can call it a good design, even for then. It was exploring a completely new design space, and that is going to lead to making choices that you can't know will be bad.
Nonetheless, a lot of its systems design choices are questionable. They're explicable due to the way it was developed (piecemeal, adding on to existing wargame rules, then adding more subsystems as needed, and replacing others), but nobody ever sat down and made it a coherent design. (Maybe that was the way that wargame design was often done back then, but it seems unlikely.)
It worked. When you don't have prior art, simply being able to function is already doing pretty well. Other than that, well, AD&D was a system that was essentially unplayable as written, everyone used house rules because you really couldn't play it any other way.
Hardly... Attributes, defenses, saves, skills, and monster design in modern D&D are just slight variations of what already existed. Do you really think it's design when you decide "ok if you're a strength 17 you get +4 instead of +3... or reverse AC math? look at me, I'm a designer.
Give me a break. There hasn't been anything new in D&D in nearly 40 years. It takes zero talent to buy a franchise, take someone's design and adjust it. This is not innovation. it's not design; it's small adaptions of someone else's work that the community was doing long before Wizards of the Coast came along and charged 50 books for a printed book.
You're citing an intended feature of the game as a bug. The whole point of AD&D was to be a guide to a method and tradition, it was not a rulebook. You're applying modern thinking to a classic premise. You didn't play AD&D; you created an AD&D game in your own vision.
The point of AD&D was what this guy is doing.