D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

Minigiant said:

The Gift is either having the Intelligence to understand magic at a decent speed or the magical sorcerer origin to "skip steps".

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Pretty much how I always saw it.

CreamCloud0 said:

I believe they were referring to the wider pop cultural idea that ‘the ability to use magic is an innate gift a person may specifically have’ than any specific DnDism, where arcane magic it’s more treated as a science anyone can learn.

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That, and various references in earlier editions of DnD. They may not have been prolific but they were there.

cbwjm said:

various references in earlier editions of DnD

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Well, I looked through my AD&D 1E and 2E PHB and DMG and didn't find anything remotely like it.

Of course, perhaps in other books from those editions?

Either way, there was never a "gift" for wizards in any D&D games I ever played in. So, I don't personally consider that WotC took it from the wizard and gave it to the sorcerer...

I'm not denying your experiences or views, just relating my own. Thanks for the response.

Have I already linked the amazing Laserllama Sorcerer in here @cbwjm ?

ezo said:

Well, I looked through my AD&D 1E and 2E PHB and DMG and didn't find anything remotely like it.

Of course, perhaps in other books from those editions?

Either way, there was never a "gift" for wizards in any D&D games I ever played in. So, I don't personally consider that WotC took it from the wizard and gave it to the sorcerer...

I'm not denying your experiences or views, just relating my own. Thanks for the response.

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I feel like I remember reading it in the Complete Wizard's Handbook.

I've always thought the same thing as @cbwjm, that the ability to become a wizard was a "gift" that most people didn't have (for default D&D). So the idea must have been disseminated from somewhere. Maybe an aside or a sidebar in some random book.

There are numerous references in core Dragonlance material that Raistlin was "born with the gift" and that he and others are "strong in the magic." Older D&D kept the magic-user broader and less defined; it had some definite quirks (learning, memorization, dependence on Intelligence), but it wasn't as codified as the sorcerer/warlock/wizard triad of 3.5 onward.

TwoSix said:

I feel like I remember reading it in the Complete Wizard's Handbook.

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I didn't see anything in there either, but admittedly I could have missed something.

ezo said:

Maybe, but the only pop reference to that I know of is Harry Potter. I'm sure there are others, of course, such as Merlin (child of an incubus I think), which of course in 5E would be a "sorcerer" with fiendish bloodline.

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If you include folklore and myth, it's a pretty mixed bag (but generally not studious guy with books very often).

Ancient societies like Egypt and Babylon a lot of magic is interwoven with priestly rites or with trafficking with demons or the like. The later seems very warlockish, but there's always how someone learned to traffic with the demons.

In Greek myth it is muddied because just about everyone of import at least sometimes (depending on the depiction) had deific or nymph blood in their heritage, or having been directly touched by the gods (most oracles, excepting those that had divine heritage). Likewise there are lots of priests and priestess, and it's not always clear if their magic is provided by the gods, or through special knowledge shared amongst the clergy. Similarly, a lot of sorceresses like Medea and Circe 'practice sorcery' or the like, but it isn't exactly clear if this is a knowledge-process or innate thing.

Likewise, 'witches' across cultures like Hecate, Ceridwen, Baba Yagga, etc. seem to often just know their magic, and exactly what or how is often unexplained (other than they are often off by themselves and where they might be getting books of knowledge would be unclear).

I think the earliest clear 'magic as knowledge transfer' example I can think of is Shakespeare's Prospero, who explicitly learned his sorcery from books. After that as you advance through the enlightenment and into the more modern era you start getting Prester John and Hermetic orders and alchemy and Aleister Crowley and magic kinda retroactively gets a lot of bookishness to it and we end up with the Wizard of Id-style wizard as something of a standard.

If I had to guess, and this could be a totally unfounded opinion, but I'd be willing to suggest that the wizard as D&D knows it now was greatly influenced by HPL. Where in magic was almost always a function of obtaining esoteric lore.

Putting on my amateur/armchair historian and anthropologist hat it seems to be that we have, broadly, three different 'core' types of magic that gets represented over and over again in human history:

1.) It's actually divine/you're empowered by (or actually are) a god.
2.) It's borrowed from something that is innately magical.
3.) It's something that you can actually learn to manipulate.

I think these also largely track with human history as it goes forward from earlier to present.

Raiztt said:

If I had to guess, and this could be a totally unfounded opinion, but I'd be willing to suggest that the wizard as D&D knows it now was greatly influenced by HPL. Where in magic was almost always a function of obtaining esoteric lore.

Putting on my amateur/armchair historian and anthropologist hat it seems to be that we have, broadly, three different 'core' types of magic that gets represented over and over again in human history:

1.) It's actually divine/you're empowered by (or actually are) a god.
2.) It's borrowed from something that is innately magical.
3.) It's something that you can actually learn to manipulate.

I think these also largely track with human history as it goes forward from earlier to present.

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Isn't #2 a subsection of #1?