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D&D General One thing I hate about the Sorcerer

"Less player metagame authority over character growth, more diegetic and story progression" has been my personal hobbyhorse for years, but has about as much traction as an ice road trucker. :)
The issue I have here is that in my experience players love growth in line with story progression. It's just D&D that's very bad at providing it.
 

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Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
There's nothing inherently un-fun about being a high level Fighter. You take the hits, you deal the damage, you can play out several fantasies, from the visceral, primal satisfaction of beating someone up with a sword the size of Texas to being a cunning archer, to being a savvy master of tactical combat, and so on.

What is unfun is when the game shifts to requiring you to deal with "weird enemy supernatural ability #483" and you find yourself needing magic to overcome it. What is unfun is when things you struggle with, the magical classes have answers for. What is unfun is when the abilities of other classes are more impactful than what you are given. Like, take Indomitable, which lets you reroll a failed save (which you were probably unlikely to succeed at in the first place, since you can, at best, have 3 good saves), and Mr. Paladin over there gets to add his Charisma bonus to all saves no matter where he is (but for you to get that benefit, you have to be glued to him).

Or how you have no ability to make your attacks more accurate (outside of subclass), but every Barbarian can just give themselves advantage whenever they want, the casters are tossing d4's, d6's, and rerolls around like candy, and the Rogue, of all people, gets the power to say "nah, I hit brah"!

If a Fighter gets grappled, he has to hope he has good Athletics and luck. If a caster gets grappled, hey, they might be able to Misty Step away!

If a melee Fighter has to fight a flying dragon, he has to use a bow or toss javelins. A caster could have powerful spells, or even the ability to leap into the air or fly.

If a Fighter gets poisoned, paralyzed, petrified, or any other of nasty occurrences that he is probably the prime target for being on the receiving end of, he can't do much about it. But a spell can be cast to make that all go away.

By this point, I can tell some people are ready to angrily reply to me on this, so let me be clear. I'm not saying playing a non-supernatural character isn't fun. But D&D is built to make playing a supernatural character potentially more fun, or at the very least, to have abilities to handle the various circumstances the game throws at a character that the non-supernatural character can only dream of.

Which can lead to a miserable experience. I stress the word "can" here because I know, someone is going to say "I've never seen any of this in any game I have ever played or heard of" or "obviously the DM has to do X, Y, or Z to make sure this never, ever happens" or even "working as intended" (lol).

But this is a reality some people do have to deal with, I've seen it a lot, and it's a consequence of the fact that, from the very beginning, D&D's approach to magic has been pretty much "magic can do anything", while trying to keep people without magic more or less grounded when it comes to their abilities.
Not sure how much can actually be done about this ultimately. Magic let's you do things not-magic doesn't. At a certain point, that's going to be a potential issue for not-magic, and in my opinion the most reasonable way to deal with this is to have a point in PC development where, if you go beyond, not-magic becomes magic.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
The game I want doesn't exist even among the mass of 3pp, as well as OSR and NSR games, sad to say; believe me, I've looked. Most of my experiments the last few years have been trying to shape 5e into something approaching what I want.
I hear that, although a lot of what you seem to want can be accomplished through the OSR-sphere it seems to me, as the power cut-off is more suitable.
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
The issue I have here is that in my experience players love growth in line with story progression. It's just D&D that's very bad at providing it.
It's more that many D&D DMs don't like the inclusion of diagetic.progression passed gold because they don't want to feel forcd to reward them.

It's "magic items are optional" but for titles, boons, lores, blessings, gear, contacts, etc.
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
Not sure how much can actually be done about this ultimately. Magic let's you do things not-magic doesn't. At a certain point, that's going to be a potential issue for not-magic, and in my opinion the most reasonable way to deal with this is to have a point in PC development where, if you go beyond, not-magic becomes magic.
Or you have

GASP

Have hard limits of magic or types of magic.


We learning in 3e that warrior buff magic was bad. You can't have casters buff their combat stats past Tier 1 levels.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
It's more that many D&D DMs don't like the inclusion of diagetic.progression passed gold because they don't want to feel forcd to reward them.

It's "magic items are optional" but for titles, boons, lores, blessings, gear, contacts, etc.
It's not forced, rather it's part of the emergent narrative. If the emergent narrative allows for such rewards, you can get them. No one says it's guaranteed.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Or you have

GASP

Have hard limits of magic or types of magic.


We learning in 3e that warrior buff magic was bad. You can't have casters buff their combat stats past Tier 1 levels.
Not sure what you're getting at here; the sarcasm is too think for me to see clearly. How about you just make a suggestion plainly?
 

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
It's not forced, rather it's part of the emergent narrative. If the emergent narrative allows for such rewards, you can get them. No one says it's guaranteed.
Agreed it's not forced.

But fans act like it is.

Thus "magical items are option but I'm not going to provide you with variant rewards to replace them"

Or

"5e includes gold but it's mostly useless because we won't provide you with items and service cost above tier 1 to buy."
 

TwoSix

Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
I hear that, although a lot of what you seem to want can be accomplished through the OSR-sphere it seems to me, as the power cut-off is more suitable.
Most OSR games lean too much into the "keep it simple", "zero-to-hero" concept for what I'm looking for. I want starting characters to be distinct and competent, with a good amount of mechanical differentiation.
 


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