So, I've been thinking... I know that clerics, druids and wizards have a much bigger spell list than the other spellcasting classes, but the only disadvantage is that they can only choose a select few each day.
But on the other hand, classes like bard, sorcerers and warlocks have access to a smaller selection of spells, but they already have memorised all of them, and thus, can cast them freely each day (keeping spell slots in mind, obviously).
I was wondering, which side of the spectrum is better: having more variety of spells, or not having to worry about preparing them? Please, share your thoughts in the comments! Thank you!
Having different spells for different days/reasons is amazing: political mission? Prep social boosting spells. Dungeon crawling? Prep more combat spells. Travelling? Prep spells to aid travel and more protections against surprises or the environment. Lot of downtime? Prep your creative spells or ones for long term plans ("Oh I have a month of downtime? Great, I'll use wall of stone, stone shape and fabricate to create a basic little cottage - that's like 3 days max, so I will spend the rest making improvements and setting traps with Glyphs of Warding...").
Sorcs and Warlocks and Bards - they're good, but so, so limited. Either you try to mix it up with utility and combat or control but then you have less to use. You could put everything into combat and control - and be basically useless outside of combat. You're quite forced into that "one thing" you can "specialise" in, but have nothing left outside of it. Whereas Wizards, Druids and Clerics can have something for every occasion, no matter what you're doing.
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Prepared spells is so extraordinarily useful. On top of that, most of the casters who get it also get a selection of known spells based on their subclass -- so really, known casters are just left in the dust imo.
Yeah, I agree with you on the limited access to spells. I was torn between a Warlock or a Wizard, and I was leaning more towards Warlock, 'cos of the Eldritch Invocations. I mean, like, you can cast certain spells at will, which is kinda overpowered, but I wasn't totally sure lol
If your DM allows you to craft magical items in your downtime using XGtE and you have Arcana proficiency, you can create consumable spell scrolls on your down days. It takes 25 gold and one day to craft a Level 1 spell scroll, 250 gold and 3 days for a second level, etc. as long you have the material components. Simply wake up one morning and prepare a spell you normally wouldn't use so you can make a scroll.
My artificer has crafted little "grenades" for herself (reflavored spell scrolls) for abilities she uses occasionally but not often enough to warrant preparing them for a typical day. Faerie Fire, Snare, Sanctuary, Cure Wounds, Feather Fall, etc.
If a situation comes up where she would need it, she simply grabs it out of her bag and uses it.
Non-prepared classes can do this to, but it's more versatile with prepared casters.
Preparing spells is literally only ever better than known spells.
In third edition, there was a tradeoff to preparing spells vs the (relatively small list of) spells-known casters. Preparing let you have a greater variety of spells that you could swap out on rests, but you had to prepare them in slots ahead of time; Sorcerers had a small pool of spells but could cast them flexibly. Thus, the tradeoff was variety vs flexibility.
In fifth edition, spell slots are already flexible, and spells prepared per day scales pretty closely to spells known. Prepared casters get the best of both worlds (and better ritual casting on Wizards to boot), and spells-known casters are supposed to make up for having less variety by having other class features (like metamagic). Whether this is a reasonable tradeoff is debateable, other than if we consider the Tasha's Sorcerer origins being a mea culpa that Sorcerers definitely do not get enough spell variety.
That said, I think the variety tradeoff is pretty minimal. 5e has way too many spells, and beyond a few 'newbie trap' spells and a bit of a learning curve about how to maximise variety in your spell list, it's not that bad (especially now that all spells-known classes can swap spells and cantrips on levelups). Personally, I rarely swap out spells on rest because it's annoying bookkeeping and usually there isn't that much signposting about what's going to be useful tomorrow anyway; thus I don't find there's much functional difference between the different kinds of casting at this point.
People have made the case for why preparing can be really useful and versatile. Some benefits of known spells are:
You avoid choice paralysis. I know people who dread the even levels because they have to read and remember what every spell of the new level does so they know what to prepare
The spells become part of your character. They say something about who you are and how you interact with the world. I have found this to be a major roleplaying aspect of my bard.
Fewer known spells can spawn creativity and fun scenarios. With a cleric/druid, I can't count how many times they had the perfect spell for the occasion so we'd just do nothing until a long rest and then push the win button the next day. Without that, you feel much more pressure to make do with the tools you have. For me, the best D&D moments I've ever had were born from situations like this where we had to do some harebrained scheme because we couldn't do something the easy way.
Most casters that prepare spells will have the ability to prepare at least as many spells a day as a caster with innately known spells will have. In most cases, they'll have more.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Yeah, I agree with you on the limited access to spells. I was torn between a Warlock or a Wizard, and I was leaning more towards Warlock, 'cos of the Eldritch Invocations. I mean, like, you can cast certain spells at will, which is kinda overpowered, but I wasn't totally sure lol
I mean, there's a lot more to a class than just prepared vs known spells. Warlocks are cool for a lot of reasons. Their spell repertoire is subpar but they get to do cool stuff like cast certain spells at will. Just follow what seems cool to you. There's really no trap options in 5e, at least as far as classes go.
Yeah, I agree with you on the limited access to spells. I was torn between a Warlock or a Wizard, and I was leaning more towards Warlock, 'cos of the Eldritch Invocations. I mean, like, you can cast certain spells at will, which is kinda overpowered, but I wasn't totally sure lol
I mean, there's a lot more to a class than just prepared vs known spells. Warlocks are cool for a lot of reasons. Their spell repertoire is subpar but they get to do cool stuff like cast certain spells at will. Just follow what seems cool to you. There's really no trap options in 5e, at least as far as classes go.
There are trap choices within classes though....
Sorcerer metamagic is a big one to me....you could pick an option that you literally never use to the niche factor of several of the options.
NOT picking certain spells (Conjure Animals, Eldritch Blast, Shield, etc....) can be a trap of sorts as its a huge opportunity loss to NOT pick them.
Yeah, I agree with you on the limited access to spells. I was torn between a Warlock or a Wizard, and I was leaning more towards Warlock, 'cos of the Eldritch Invocations. I mean, like, you can cast certain spells at will, which is kinda overpowered, but I wasn't totally sure lol
I mean, there's a lot more to a class than just prepared vs known spells. Warlocks are cool for a lot of reasons. Their spell repertoire is subpar but they get to do cool stuff like cast certain spells at will. Just follow what seems cool to you. There's really no trap options in 5e, at least as far as classes go.
There are trap choices within classes though....
Sorcerer metamagic is a big one to me....you could pick an option that you literally never use to the niche factor of several of the options.
NOT picking certain spells (Conjure Animals, Eldritch Blast, Shield, etc....) can be a trap of sorts as its a huge opportunity loss to NOT pick them.
I'd agree there are trap picks, but I disagree that there's trap NOT-picks. Ironically, Find Traps is a trap pick. It doesn't friggin do anything. Not picking EB? Well, clearly you can't then pick any of the EB invocations, and if you want those, then you really should pick EB... But you'll be okay without them. Plenty of casters get by with Fire Bolt or whatever. Then you end up with one or two more invocations, too.
You gotta remember that 5e is really forgiving by design. You could find a table that really pushes optimization and if you don't optimize you'll die... But that's not the norm, at all.
For a player who exhibits decision paralysis for spell selection, having spells known is significantly better, because they can work through the options outside of game time, and don't have that whole list to choose from during sessions.
For most other players, the number of prepared spells is comparable to the number that other classes know, but having the option to choose from a larger list daily really provides the oportunity to tailor the spell list to specific settings. For instance, it is great to prepare water-breathing in a sea-faring campaign... not so much in a desert.
I personally like going with sorcerers and focusing on spells that don't require any material components, because with the subtle-spell metamagic, the only thing that can prevent the character from casting spells is an anti-magic field. I haven't had a character lose everything (such as being arrested) yet, but there have been close calls, and the character still being at full power while basically naked would be quite useful... if that extremely circumstantial situation arose.
For a player who exhibits decision paralysis for spell selection, having spells known is significantly better, because they can work through the options outside of game time, and don't have that whole list to choose from during sessions.
For most other players, the number of prepared spells is comparable to the number that other classes know, but having the option to choose from a larger list daily really provides the oportunity to tailor the spell list to specific settings. For instance, it is great to prepare water-breathing in a sea-faring campaign... not so much in a desert.
I personally like going with sorcerers and focusing on spells that don't require any material components, because with the subtle-spell metamagic, the only thing that can prevent the character from casting spells is an anti-magic field. I haven't had a character lose everything (such as being arrested) yet, but there have been close calls, and the character still being at full power while basically naked would be quite useful... if that extremely circumstantial situation arose.
On of the things I do with my Druid (we play on Roll20 and use the Beyond20 chrome extension and DDB campaign) is I make a copy of my character in DDB and work out changes to my prepared spells outside of game, then if we get a long rest, I can swap them out fairly quickly with decisions already made.
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And definitely feel prepared casters not necessarily “better” but they have advantage with versatility. At one point, we had a long way to travel and we were only on foot, no mounts, so we took a long rest and I prepared Wind Walk so the whole party could fly and get to our destination quicker. Would not have been a spell I would have chosen if I was a known caster.
I am on the side of preparing spells being better than knowing them. I feel the open options at every LR greatly outweigh......well, NOT having to decide or choose, I guess, is the flip side. As a few have stated, having all the spells available to you and picking from them every LR allows a lot more versatility and potential utility than grabbing a spell at level, then possibly never encountering a situation where you want it. Or, picking a spell at a level, because where you are and what you're doing then makes it a good choice, but afterwards, your party moves on and that "perfect spell choice" at the time is not very useful. This, obviously, is even more profound at higher levels, where you are likely picking some higher leveled spells. I'm a fan of options and versatility over simplicity, at least in my D&D characters.
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From a design standpoint there's a lot to be said in favor of known spells. Makes it simpler to play, speeds up long rests, makes your spells feel more like character traits than tools. But from an optimization standpoint, prepared is simply better.
The surrounding features might outweigh this effect, but in my opinion they really don't. I guess Bard probably gets enough extra stuff beyond what Wizard gets, that you could say it's better to know your spells than to prepare them. But I don't think Sorcerer does. Warlock is its own thing, I try not to think about Warlock.
Bard: 14 spells known (slightly more for a lore bard)
Cleric: 25 spells prepared (10 domain, 10+wisdom modifier choice), 92+ spells they have the ability to prepare (depending what non-cleric spells on domain list)
Druid: 15-25 (depending on druid type) spells prepared, 103+ spells they have the ability to prepare (depending on non-druid spells on realm list)
Sorcerer: 11 spells known (more for aberrant or clockwork)
Warlock: 10 spells known
Wizard: 15 spells prepared, up to 222 spells potentially in spell books, can cast rituals without them being prepared.
The preparation casters have more spells on hand, and vastly more flexibility, so they're just straight up better at spellcasting. In theory the known spells classes could make up for this with better non-spellcasting class features, but cleric and druid class features are actually really good (wizard class/subclass features mostly aren't that impressive, but sorcerer class/subclass features aren't either).
As a DM, the known spells classes are much less of a headache. It would be interesting to change the cleric, druid, and wizard into known spells classes (you'd want to leave wizards the ability to cast rituals from books without them being known).
Bard: 14 spells known (slightly more for a lore bard)
Cleric: 25 spells prepared (10 domain, 10+wisdom modifier choice), 92+ spells they have the ability to prepare (depending what non-cleric spells on domain list)
Druid: 15-25 (depending on druid type) spells prepared, 103+ spells they have the ability to prepare (depending on non-druid spells on realm list)
Sorcerer: 11 spells known (more for aberrant or clockwork)
Warlock: 10 spells known
Wizard: 15 spells prepared, up to 222 spells potentially in spell books, can cast rituals without them being prepared.
The preparation casters have more spells on hand, and vastly more flexibility, so they're just straight up better at spellcasting. In theory the known spells classes could make up for this with better non-spellcasting class features, but cleric and druid class features are actually really good (wizard class/subclass features mostly aren't that impressive, but sorcerer class/subclass features aren't either).
As a DM, the known spells classes are much less of a headache. It would be interesting to change the cleric, druid, and wizard into known spells classes (you'd want to leave wizards the ability to cast rituals from books without them being known).
In my opinion as a DM, if you want to limit prepared casters as a house rule (such as if you have a player who gets decision paralysis, grinding the game to a halt at every long rest)... I'd have the prepared caster bring one prepared list to the session with up to five alternate spells they can swap out for on long rests. That lets them still have the benefit of preparing spells, but limits the number they're choosing from each session to keep the game moving. And between sessions they can change up what list they want to have prepared for the next game.
In my opinion as a DM, if you want to limit prepared casters as a house rule (such as if you have a player who gets decision paralysis, grinding the game to a halt at every long rest)
I wouldn't be doing it to avoid decision paralysis, I'd be doing it as a straight-up nerf to make my life easier. At the moment it's a non-factor, as my players mostly don't think about all the options they have access to.
For me the answer is "spell access", and what I'm trying to accomplish with a character, theme and powerwise, as well as potential later multiclassing. Access to major important spells, such as fireball, healing, or counterspell is fairly major. Bards have a nice mix of healing and "cleric" type spells, and "mage" type spells - ex. Invisibility, polymorph, dimension door, hypnotic pattern, just to name a few. Sorcerors have interesting special abilities and thematic builds, as well as access to metamagic. The only class I'm somewhat dissapointed with in 5e is Warlock. The "2 spell slots that renew on a short rest, and various powerful abilities" theme was a good idea, but generally, in no campaign have that I have ever played, especially at higher levels, do GM's throw monsters at the party in a format specifically dictated by some chapter in the DMG and the Warlock class. I've always found nova'ing my entire spell selection at difficult fights with a cleric/mage of some sort hybrid to be more effective. - IMHO warlock needs a revise for 5.5, to bring it more into line with the other full casters, or ALTERNATELY give it some truly unique and powerful higher level abilities that make up for it's limited spell selection (currently, really the only one that truly stands out is darksight).
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Hello!
So, I've been thinking... I know that clerics, druids and wizards have a much bigger spell list than the other spellcasting classes, but the only disadvantage is that they can only choose a select few each day.
But on the other hand, classes like bard, sorcerers and warlocks have access to a smaller selection of spells, but they already have memorised all of them, and thus, can cast them freely each day (keeping spell slots in mind, obviously).
I was wondering, which side of the spectrum is better: having more variety of spells, or not having to worry about preparing them? Please, share your thoughts in the comments! Thank you!
Ren
Having more variety.
Having different spells for different days/reasons is amazing: political mission? Prep social boosting spells. Dungeon crawling? Prep more combat spells. Travelling? Prep spells to aid travel and more protections against surprises or the environment. Lot of downtime? Prep your creative spells or ones for long term plans ("Oh I have a month of downtime? Great, I'll use wall of stone, stone shape and fabricate to create a basic little cottage - that's like 3 days max, so I will spend the rest making improvements and setting traps with Glyphs of Warding...").
Sorcs and Warlocks and Bards - they're good, but so, so limited. Either you try to mix it up with utility and combat or control but then you have less to use. You could put everything into combat and control - and be basically useless outside of combat. You're quite forced into that "one thing" you can "specialise" in, but have nothing left outside of it. Whereas Wizards, Druids and Clerics can have something for every occasion, no matter what you're doing.
Click ✨ HERE ✨ For My Youtube Videos featuring Guides, Tips & Tricks for using D&D Beyond.
Need help with Homebrew? Check out ✨ this FAQ/Guide thread ✨ by IamSposta.
Prepared spells is so extraordinarily useful. On top of that, most of the casters who get it also get a selection of known spells based on their subclass -- so really, known casters are just left in the dust imo.
Yeah, I agree with you on the limited access to spells. I was torn between a Warlock or a Wizard, and I was leaning more towards Warlock, 'cos of the Eldritch Invocations. I mean, like, you can cast certain spells at will, which is kinda overpowered, but I wasn't totally sure lol
Ren
If your DM allows you to craft magical items in your downtime using XGtE and you have Arcana proficiency, you can create consumable spell scrolls on your down days. It takes 25 gold and one day to craft a Level 1 spell scroll, 250 gold and 3 days for a second level, etc. as long you have the material components. Simply wake up one morning and prepare a spell you normally wouldn't use so you can make a scroll.
My artificer has crafted little "grenades" for herself (reflavored spell scrolls) for abilities she uses occasionally but not often enough to warrant preparing them for a typical day. Faerie Fire, Snare, Sanctuary, Cure Wounds, Feather Fall, etc.
If a situation comes up where she would need it, she simply grabs it out of her bag and uses it.
Non-prepared classes can do this to, but it's more versatile with prepared casters.
Preparing spells is literally only ever better than known spells.
In third edition, there was a tradeoff to preparing spells vs the (relatively small list of) spells-known casters. Preparing let you have a greater variety of spells that you could swap out on rests, but you had to prepare them in slots ahead of time; Sorcerers had a small pool of spells but could cast them flexibly. Thus, the tradeoff was variety vs flexibility.
In fifth edition, spell slots are already flexible, and spells prepared per day scales pretty closely to spells known. Prepared casters get the best of both worlds (and better ritual casting on Wizards to boot), and spells-known casters are supposed to make up for having less variety by having other class features (like metamagic). Whether this is a reasonable tradeoff is debateable, other than if we consider the Tasha's Sorcerer origins being a mea culpa that Sorcerers definitely do not get enough spell variety.
That said, I think the variety tradeoff is pretty minimal. 5e has way too many spells, and beyond a few 'newbie trap' spells and a bit of a learning curve about how to maximise variety in your spell list, it's not that bad (especially now that all spells-known classes can swap spells and cantrips on levelups). Personally, I rarely swap out spells on rest because it's annoying bookkeeping and usually there isn't that much signposting about what's going to be useful tomorrow anyway; thus I don't find there's much functional difference between the different kinds of casting at this point.
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile.
Really depends on what you mean by "better."
People have made the case for why preparing can be really useful and versatile. Some benefits of known spells are:
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
Most casters that prepare spells will have the ability to prepare at least as many spells a day as a caster with innately known spells will have. In most cases, they'll have more.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
I mean, there's a lot more to a class than just prepared vs known spells. Warlocks are cool for a lot of reasons. Their spell repertoire is subpar but they get to do cool stuff like cast certain spells at will. Just follow what seems cool to you. There's really no trap options in 5e, at least as far as classes go.
There are trap choices within classes though....
Sorcerer metamagic is a big one to me....you could pick an option that you literally never use to the niche factor of several of the options.
NOT picking certain spells (Conjure Animals, Eldritch Blast, Shield, etc....) can be a trap of sorts as its a huge opportunity loss to NOT pick them.
I'd agree there are trap picks, but I disagree that there's trap NOT-picks. Ironically, Find Traps is a trap pick. It doesn't friggin do anything. Not picking EB? Well, clearly you can't then pick any of the EB invocations, and if you want those, then you really should pick EB... But you'll be okay without them. Plenty of casters get by with Fire Bolt or whatever. Then you end up with one or two more invocations, too.
You gotta remember that 5e is really forgiving by design. You could find a table that really pushes optimization and if you don't optimize you'll die... But that's not the norm, at all.
For a player who exhibits decision paralysis for spell selection, having spells known is significantly better, because they can work through the options outside of game time, and don't have that whole list to choose from during sessions.
For most other players, the number of prepared spells is comparable to the number that other classes know, but having the option to choose from a larger list daily really provides the oportunity to tailor the spell list to specific settings. For instance, it is great to prepare water-breathing in a sea-faring campaign... not so much in a desert.
I personally like going with sorcerers and focusing on spells that don't require any material components, because with the subtle-spell metamagic, the only thing that can prevent the character from casting spells is an anti-magic field. I haven't had a character lose everything (such as being arrested) yet, but there have been close calls, and the character still being at full power while basically naked would be quite useful... if that extremely circumstantial situation arose.
On of the things I do with my Druid (we play on Roll20 and use the Beyond20 chrome extension and DDB campaign) is I make a copy of my character in DDB and work out changes to my prepared spells outside of game, then if we get a long rest, I can swap them out fairly quickly with decisions already made.
-
And definitely feel prepared casters not necessarily “better” but they have advantage with versatility. At one point, we had a long way to travel and we were only on foot, no mounts, so we took a long rest and I prepared Wind Walk so the whole party could fly and get to our destination quicker. Would not have been a spell I would have chosen if I was a known caster.
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I am on the side of preparing spells being better than knowing them. I feel the open options at every LR greatly outweigh......well, NOT having to decide or choose, I guess, is the flip side. As a few have stated, having all the spells available to you and picking from them every LR allows a lot more versatility and potential utility than grabbing a spell at level, then possibly never encountering a situation where you want it. Or, picking a spell at a level, because where you are and what you're doing then makes it a good choice, but afterwards, your party moves on and that "perfect spell choice" at the time is not very useful. This, obviously, is even more profound at higher levels, where you are likely picking some higher leveled spells. I'm a fan of options and versatility over simplicity, at least in my D&D characters.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
From a design standpoint there's a lot to be said in favor of known spells. Makes it simpler to play, speeds up long rests, makes your spells feel more like character traits than tools. But from an optimization standpoint, prepared is simply better.
The surrounding features might outweigh this effect, but in my opinion they really don't. I guess Bard probably gets enough extra stuff beyond what Wizard gets, that you could say it's better to know your spells than to prepare them. But I don't think Sorcerer does. Warlock is its own thing, I try not to think about Warlock.
At tenth level:
The preparation casters have more spells on hand, and vastly more flexibility, so they're just straight up better at spellcasting. In theory the known spells classes could make up for this with better non-spellcasting class features, but cleric and druid class features are actually really good (wizard class/subclass features mostly aren't that impressive, but sorcerer class/subclass features aren't either).
As a DM, the known spells classes are much less of a headache. It would be interesting to change the cleric, druid, and wizard into known spells classes (you'd want to leave wizards the ability to cast rituals from books without them being known).
In my opinion as a DM, if you want to limit prepared casters as a house rule (such as if you have a player who gets decision paralysis, grinding the game to a halt at every long rest)... I'd have the prepared caster bring one prepared list to the session with up to five alternate spells they can swap out for on long rests. That lets them still have the benefit of preparing spells, but limits the number they're choosing from each session to keep the game moving. And between sessions they can change up what list they want to have prepared for the next game.
I wouldn't be doing it to avoid decision paralysis, I'd be doing it as a straight-up nerf to make my life easier. At the moment it's a non-factor, as my players mostly don't think about all the options they have access to.
For me the answer is "spell access", and what I'm trying to accomplish with a character, theme and powerwise, as well as potential later multiclassing. Access to major important spells, such as fireball, healing, or counterspell is fairly major. Bards have a nice mix of healing and "cleric" type spells, and "mage" type spells - ex. Invisibility, polymorph, dimension door, hypnotic pattern, just to name a few. Sorcerors have interesting special abilities and thematic builds, as well as access to metamagic. The only class I'm somewhat dissapointed with in 5e is Warlock. The "2 spell slots that renew on a short rest, and various powerful abilities" theme was a good idea, but generally, in no campaign have that I have ever played, especially at higher levels, do GM's throw monsters at the party in a format specifically dictated by some chapter in the DMG and the Warlock class. I've always found nova'ing my entire spell selection at difficult fights with a cleric/mage of some sort hybrid to be more effective. - IMHO warlock needs a revise for 5.5, to bring it more into line with the other full casters, or ALTERNATELY give it some truly unique and powerful higher level abilities that make up for it's limited spell selection (currently, really the only one that truly stands out is darksight).