This was an aside in a WotC thread, but this seemed about actual gameplay.

Basically, I'm not a fan of Vancian casting. I find it to be much more bookkeeping and complication in play than most other (non-D&D) magic systems that I'm used to. In other systems, a magician typically has fewer spell effects, but they can be used more regularly and are thus more powerful.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 28, 2023, 02:32:53 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on June 28, 2023, 01:53:58 PM
The rules from 6E, not the content.  I offer the 6E sorcerer and the 6E warlock by default because it fixes issues with the class.  The warlock as written is unplayable in any campaign with a basis in reality.  Casting Eldritch Blast as your main attack and having less spells than a retarded syphillitic familiar with the assumption that gee you'll just take a short rest every hour, its no where near good game design.  The warlock was made for 5 room dungeons with two encounters, a puzzle, a trap and a reveal room, that's it.  It is why for the most part people use locks as dips not main players characters.  The 6E sorc was made a half caster with medium armor, like the artificer but actually useful to game play abilities.  The 6E sorcerer was just given more spells, which I was already doing in the first place and that's the only thing I take from 6E for sorc.

I always liked the 5e Warlock precisely because of its short rest recovery precisely because the DM of that campaign used the alternate recovery times of "short rest = 8 hours and long rest = 3 full days in a fully safe environment like a town."

My Celestial Warlock was the only thing keeping the party from a TPK at some points since I had healing spells that recovered on a short rest instead of needing 3 days in town to recover spells and nearly a full week to recover all your lost hit dice if you'd used more than half (which was nearly always).

Even in a regular game though it was the Warlock invocations that mattered way more than their spells (though the fact you always upcast your warlock spells to the highest level you've got was also handy)... Tome letting you snag extra cantrips from any class also provided a lot of extra utility. They're much closer in execution to a magically augmented rogue than to a wizard-style caster of spells.

Here I agree with Chris24601. I've had multiple warlocks in my 5e games, and I've found them to be highly effective. Especially the special familiar (Pact of the Chain) along with the different invocations and enhanced Eldritch Blast give the warlock a lot of at-will abilities that are extremely useful. The single spell slot made only a marginal change, and thus short rests were nice but not a big deal.

I haven't read the 6E D&D warlock, and it sounds like it is going back to more being centered on Vancian casting.

In my own games, I've often favored magic abilities more like 5E cantrips and invocations - things that a magician can do any time. Like, a shaman doesn't need a spell slot to speak to spirits -- or a druid doesn't need to track duration to speak to animals. They just know the language of animals and can speak to them.

I've been considering about optional rules I can use in my D&D game to have alternatives or simplifications of Vancian magic -- but my focus is more on world-building and campaign development.

I mentioned it there, but I highly recommend checking out the Force- and tech-casters in SW5e (and they have optional rules for both short and long rest recovery casters... by default forcecasters are long rest recovery and techcasters are short, but I think it makes more sense to do the opposite... Jedi refocus with an hour of meditation, Engineers need overnight to recharge and reload all their tech).

The Consular is basically the full-caster, The Sentinel is your Gish (casts up to 7th level powers) and the Guardian is your half-caster like a Paladin or Ranger. Tech casters are similar. Both essentially use power points, but with limits on how many higher level spells they can use between long rests (Consulars get one each of 6-9 per day, Sentinels one each of 5-7, and Guardians one each of 4-5)... but is otherwise slotless.

As many of the Force and Tech powers are just refluffed spells (at the same level as normal), it'd be pretty easy to adapt the chassis to a more standard list of spells.

If you're looking to continue with 5e, fan projects like SW5e.com may be one way to go.

Eldritch Blast is boring.

Quote from: David Johansen on June 28, 2023, 07:23:17 PM
Eldritch Blast is boring.

I agree. Still, hitting things with a sword or bow is also boring -- but that doesn't mean that the fighter class is boring (at least, in my opinion).

For me, the interesting parts about the warlock was the invocations and the familiar. Pact of the Chain is a game-changer by having a constant invisible flying scout. A lot of the invocations are also quite useful, like Mask of Many Faces and Misty Visions.

To be more witchy, the standard warlock attack could be more like an evil eye -- maybe less damage and instead give disadvantage.

Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2023, 04:27:44 PM
In my own games, I've often favored magic abilities more like 5E cantrips and invocations - things that a magician can do any time. Like, a shaman doesn't need a spell slot to speak to spirits -- or a druid doesn't need to track duration to speak to animals. They just know the language of animals and can speak to them.

I've been considering about optional rules I can use in my D&D game to have alternatives or simplifications of Vancian magic -- but my focus is more on world-building and campaign development.

I ran a campaign with a warlock PC. He did spam eldritch blast a lot, but it was okay,

But  don't play 5e anymore and  I'm not interested in 6e,  so I'm not sure I can give much advice on that, although I did write  some ideas on 5e and spell points - which simplifies things IMO.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2021/05/minimalist-d-x-spell-points.html

With that said, IIRC 5e already has various cantrips and special abilities that let you cast certain spells  without slots.  Shouldn't be too hard more features in the same vein.

In the OSR realm, I wrote a small PDF on alternatives to vancian magic, including spell points, blood magic (using HP) and roll to cast. I prefer any of these alternatives over spell slots, TBH.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/397412/Alternate-Magic-OSR

Here is how I use spell point in B/Xish games, BTW:

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2022/10/spell-points-for-bx-and-osr-systems.html

Quote from: David Johansen on June 28, 2023, 07:23:17 PM
Eldritch Blast is boring.

And yet 4E gets panned for giving fighters more to do than "I hit it with my sword" every  round. Boring isn't the same as bad or ineffective.

Not every spellcaster needs to be Master of The Universe like the wizard to be interesting. Honestly, I prefer the Warlock because it's got so many more limits that mean you have to actually get creative with what you have instead of just waiting a day memorize a difficult suite of spells. It's closer to a spellcasting rogue than a wizard and is a lot of fun when played that way instead of trying to be an offbrand wizard.

But that also means what you do have often has to be really solid and flexible. Eldritch Blast is no less bland than fire bolt or most of the other combat cantrips which almost never do anything but some type of damage. But force is the least resisted of damage types. Eldritch blast also is among the most damaging cantrips (and wins by a country mile with the damage invocation) and its multi-attack makes it much more likely to do at least some damage each turn instead of an all-or-nothing attack like firebolt and it allows multiple weak targets to be struck like a mini-AoE, and it can be further augmented by other invocations.

It's basically the spear of combat cantrips, bland but exceptional in its performance.

It also means you really only need the one cantrip to contribute as much to most combats as a fighter does (there are even magic items for buffing it's hit and damage just like magic weapons get) so all your other cantrips and spells can be pure utility choices rather than needing a bunch of attack spells to cover all your bases.

I played a Warlock during my brief exposure to 5e, and found it pretty fun, if a bit overpowered as a utility class. The minimal spells per day don't really matter because the invocations mean you don't need spells. There's an argument to be made that a design which encourages the player to use the same spell every turn, and to build their character around that spell, isn't optimal. And there's a further argument to be made about what spellcasters being able to spam magic blasts says about the implied setting, but hey, that's 5e.

I also don't much care for Vancian magic. Spell slots are fine, but I dislike prepared spells, as I think it encourages players to use a small selection of high-percentage spells, at the expense of more contextually useful ones.

One alternative which you might want to look at is Shadow of the Demon Lord. That gives you a set number of casts per day for each spell (based on the spell-level and the characters' magic power stat). It still encourages the player to choose spells which will be useful in a lot of circumstances, but at least if you know a spell, you might as well try and find uses for it.

The approach which I would like to see tried in a D&D-like game, and which I might employ if I ever have the free time to write my own game, goes something like this:

I would dispose of D&D spells as we generally recognize them entirely, and instead bifurcate the magic into two groups: The first group I would call something like "powers" or "minor arcana". These would be a bit like warlock invocations, plentifully available (if not at-will) abilities, that produce relatively minor magical effects. In concept, this would be similar to old-school cantrips, minor bits of conjuring which magicians can do with little thought or effort. This category is where I would park most of the classic combat spells, like sleep, shield, lighting bolt etc., but I would hugely reduce their power levels. To compensate, I'd tune up the combat/skill capabilities of my magic-using classes.

The other group would be "spells", but in this system all spells would be "ritual spells". No spell preparation or spells/day, but the casting times would range anywhere from a minute up to days or weeks. The major "prices" of these spells are the difficulty in learning them, and the time cost of performing the ritual. This is where I'd put classic utility spells like shape earth or Leomund's secure shelter, instead increasing their power level above what it is in D&D.

The idea is to get rid of the headaches involved with Vancian casting, while retaining the feeling of magic being special and also not making wizards useless in moment-to-moment gameplay.

Quote from: jhkim on June 28, 2023, 04:27:44 PM
This was an aside in a WotC thread, but this seemed about actual gameplay.

Basically, I'm not a fan of Vancian casting. I find it to be much more bookkeeping and complication in play than most other (non-D&D) magic systems that I'm used to. In other systems, a magician typically has fewer spell effects, but they can be used more regularly and are thus more powerful.

Quote from: Chris24601 on June 28, 2023, 02:32:53 PM

Quote from: honeydipperdavid on June 28, 2023, 01:53:58 PM
The rules from 6E, not the content.  I offer the 6E sorcerer and the 6E warlock by default because it fixes issues with the class.  The warlock as written is unplayable in any campaign with a basis in reality.  Casting Eldritch Blast as your main attack and having less spells than a retarded syphillitic familiar with the assumption that gee you'll just take a short rest every hour, its no where near good game design.  The warlock was made for 5 room dungeons with two encounters, a puzzle, a trap and a reveal room, that's it.  It is why for the most part people use locks as dips not main players characters.  The 6E sorc was made a half caster with medium armor, like the artificer but actually useful to game play abilities.  The 6E sorcerer was just given more spells, which I was already doing in the first place and that's the only thing I take from 6E for sorc.

I always liked the 5e Warlock precisely because of its short rest recovery precisely because the DM of that campaign used the alternate recovery times of "short rest = 8 hours and long rest = 3 full days in a fully safe environment like a town."

My Celestial Warlock was the only thing keeping the party from a TPK at some points since I had healing spells that recovered on a short rest instead of needing 3 days in town to recover spells and nearly a full week to recover all your lost hit dice if you'd used more than half (which was nearly always).

Even in a regular game though it was the Warlock invocations that mattered way more than their spells (though the fact you always upcast your warlock spells to the highest level you've got was also handy)... Tome letting you snag extra cantrips from any class also provided a lot of extra utility. They're much closer in execution to a magically augmented rogue than to a wizard-style caster of spells.

Here I agree with Chris24601. I've had multiple warlocks in my 5e games, and I've found them to be highly effective. Especially the special familiar (Pact of the Chain) along with the different invocations and enhanced Eldritch Blast give the warlock a lot of at-will abilities that are extremely useful. The single spell slot made only a marginal change, and thus short rests were nice but not a big deal.

I haven't read the 6E D&D warlock, and it sounds like it is going back to more being centered on Vancian casting.

In my own games, I've often favored magic abilities more like 5E cantrips and invocations - things that a magician can do any time. Like, a shaman doesn't need a spell slot to speak to spirits -- or a druid doesn't need to track duration to speak to animals. They just know the language of animals and can speak to them.

I've been considering about optional rules I can use in my D&D game to have alternatives or simplifications of Vancian magic -- but my focus is more on world-building and campaign development.

Such a wise and honorable writing!

I've hated Vancian magic since my intro to D&D. Just made no sense that a caster spends hours memorizing a spell - then forgets it after casting. It's like studying for a test then after taking the test, you promptly forget the subject matter. STUPISTUPIDSTUPID.

I messed around with Spell point ideas, but finally settled on allowing wizards to use their prepared spells as often as they like. "Oh ToG you're unbalancing the game by making casters too powerful! Repent of this!" Nah. Casters should be effective - look at the fkn fiction. If it wasn't for Gandalf and Merlin and Luke Skywalker and the rest of the mages a lot of stories would've ended way more fkd up.

#TrashVancian! 

I dislike the 5e Warlock for basically giving up on its core resource mechanic and demanding you do the equivalent of spell slots anyway for its higher power options.

In the 5e game I played, our warlock was always the second banana as we rarely had multiple encounters a day.

I have a plug in replacement for the Vancian system, that I simply call Magic Pools that we have been using at our table for about a year now:

The basics
 Spells per day is the number of different spells that can be prepared
 Spells are not forgotten when cast but must make a Drain Check to determine the spells cost, usually only 1 Magic point. When the pool is reduced to 0, temporally can no longer cast spells associated with that pool until that pool is restored to at least one point.
 Can regain Magic while adventuring by allowing a Caster to meditate to restore a single MP to the pool of their choice. This is great for lower-level casters as it keeps them in the magic business longer than they usually can be during an adventuring day.
 Can swap out a prepared spell later in the day for a different spell, but it requires one turn per spell level of the spell they are swapping to. If the swap is interrupted, they must make either an Intelligence check for Arcane casters or a Wisdom check for Divine casters to see if they lost the prepared spell they were trying to replace. If lost, the Caster can prepare another spell using the swap-out procedure above.
 NOTE Martial Spell casters like Paladins or Rangers cannot swap out prepared spells later in the day due to those classes being a full martial and gaining magic later in their levels

Also added a Metamagic system that does the usual altering of a spell: to bolster its effect, hide the spell, expand the area of effect, extend the range, make it non lethal, extend the druation, mobile casting, penetrating spell, safeguarded spell the trade off being a penalty to the Drain Check of the spell.

How Magic Pools Work
Prepared spellcasters draw power from a reservoir of magic to cast spells from.
These reservoirs are called Magic Pools and usually cost a single Magic Point (MP) to cast a spell from them. They are fully restored when the caster gets a full night's sleep (8 hours).

Basic Magic Pool (BMP)
Gained at the level 1st level spells are acquired, starts with 1 MP, and grows at a rate of 1 MP per level after that up to 3 MP in that pool. BMP can only cast 1st - 2nd level spells from it.

Trained Magic Pool (TMP)
Gained at the level 3rd level spells are acquired, starts with 1 MP, and grows at a rate of 1 MP per level after that up to 3 MP in that pool. TMP can only cast 3rd - 4th level spells from it.  In OSE, Cleric and Druids start with 2 MP instead of 1 MP when they first gain access to their TMP due to acquiring both 3rd and 4th level spells at 6th level.

Expert Magic Pool (EMP)
Gained at the level 5th level spells are acquired, starts with 1 MP, and grows at a rate of 1 MP per level after that up to 3 MP in that pool. EMP can only cast 5th - 6th level spells from it.

Magic Pool Expansion
Starting at 12th level, if a caster has access to EMP, then their BMP expands to 4 MP, at 13th, their TMP expands to 4 MP, and at 14th, their EMP expands to 4 MP.

This is the Limit for B/X Based OSR systems.

SYSTEMS THAT HAVE 7TH OR HIGHER LEVEL SPELLS

TTRPGs with spells that go higher than 6th gain the following pools

MASTER MAGIC POOL (MMP)
Gained at the level 7th level spells are acquired, starts with 1 MP, and grows at a rate of 1 MP per level after that up to 3 MP in that pool. MMP can only cast 7th - 8th level spells from it.

LEGENDARY MAGIC POOL (LMP)
Gained at the level 9th level spells are acquired, starts with 1 MP, and grows at a rate of 1 MP per level after that up to 3 MP in that pool, LMP can only cast 9th - 10th level spells from it. The LMP is the only pool you can not restore through Meditation but can restore a point by rolling the maximum on your Drain Check. In Pathfinder 2e, 10th level spells would still be limited to one a day (or 2 with the 20th level feat)

MAGIC POOL EXPANSION Starting at 12th level, if a caster has access to EMP, then their BMP expands to 4 MP , at 13th, their TMP expands to 4 MP , at 14th, their EMP expands to 4 MP, and at 16th, their MMP expands to 4 MP.

Drain Checks ( 2d6 )
After casting a spell, the caster rolls 2d6 to see how much the spell will cost in Magic.
Natural 2 drains 2 MP from your pool
3-7 drains 1 MP from your pool
8-11 drains nothing from your pool
Natural 12 restores 1 MP to your pool up to its normal maximum for your level.
It can only drain or restore magic from the correct pool. If you cast a spell with only 1 MP left in your pool and suffer 2 MP drain, it drains the last MP and takes the other MP in non-lethal damage equal to 4 plus the spell level.

Regaining Magic While Adventuring
Once an hour, if at full health and haven't taken any damage (lethal or non-lethal) in the past hour, can Meditate for 1 Turn to restore a single MP to the pool of their choice.
NOTE Martial casters like Paladins and Rangers cannot regain magic by meditating due to being a full martial and gaining magic later in their levels. The only way for them to restore magic to a pool is by rolling a Natural 12 on their drain check or by getting a full night's sleep.

Magic Items that grant spell slots
Magic Items that grant extra spell slots like a Ring of Wizardry now give additional prepared spells and gain a +1 bonus to Drain Checks to the spell levels the Ring alters.
Magic Items that grant the ability to recall a spell to be cast again, like a Pearl of Power, restores one MP to the pool that the item was going to restore IE. If it can restore a 1st through 3rd level spell, the user can either restore 1 MP to BMP or TMP.

Alternate Rule Resist Drain
Starting at 4rd level and every 4 levels afterwards, Non Martial spellcasters gain a Resist Drain skill pool that allows them to reroll the lowest die on a Drain Check once.
Resist Drain skill pool refreshes at beginning of the game session.
1 reroll at 4th,
2 rerolls at 8th,
3 rerolls at 12th

EXAMPLE OF USING THIS IN A B/X OSR SYSTEM
Under the Vancian Magic system, a 7th level Elf would be able to cast 3 First, 2 Second, 2 Third, and 1 Fourth level spell.
Using the Magic Pool System, they would have 3 MP in their BMP and 3 MP in their TMP, to which they can prep 3 First, 2 Second level spells to cast from their BMP and 2 Third and 1 Four level spells they can cast from their TMP
( 3 ) BMP can prep (3) 1st level, and (2) 2nd level spells
( 3 ) TMP can prep (2) 3rd level, and (1) 4th level spells