I’m going back to 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. Yeah, that 4e, the one with healing surges, powers on cards, and encounter math so precise it felt like balancing an equation. The one that cam…
It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.
5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.
@jjjalljs@Postimo Also, 4e gave us useful at-will cantrips so that a wizard out of spell slots still feels like a wizard.
Its one thing 5e kept that I was glad of. I wish skill challenges had come along too, along with Healing Surges keeping their name. Hit Dice has a whole OTHER meaning within D&D, using the term for the dice you can roll for healing during rests is just confusing.
That’s valid, we might have under utilized rituals in replacing much of what I felt was lost in vancian casting. I still feel the homogenization of powers, while very sensible from a mechanical standpoint, stood out to me as very video game.
I can see you’re point in spell slots use for environmental vs combat, I think that was part of what I found interesting in caster classes in 3.5, and later pf1.
I get that there is a lot of intelligent design in 4e, and I think on a mechanical level it makes a ton of sense, but I think ultimately it comes down to rules vs rulings mentality to the game. I would say it was very much on the side of rules, and for many players that felt much more like the MMOs they knew than a TTRPG.
I think charm effects were moved to rituals, from a quick search.
https://dnd4.fandom.com/wiki/Call_of_Friendship for example.
It makes sense to me to move the non-combat spells into their own thing (ie: rituals). Details like should they take 10 minutes or 10 seconds can be debated. I think you need to compare 3e’s Charm spell to rituals for a fair comparison. They seem pretty similar to me.
5e and 3e often have this unpleasant (to me) tension around like “I could solve this problem with a 3rd level spell slot. I could just fly over the chasm. But… then if I need fireball I won’t have it later. So let’s do it the mundane, slow, boring, way that doesn’t use magic.”. Rituals were a decent solution for that.
@jjjalljs @Postimo Also, 4e gave us useful at-will cantrips so that a wizard out of spell slots still feels like a wizard.
Its one thing 5e kept that I was glad of. I wish skill challenges had come along too, along with Healing Surges keeping their name. Hit Dice has a whole OTHER meaning within D&D, using the term for the dice you can roll for healing during rests is just confusing.
That’s valid, we might have under utilized rituals in replacing much of what I felt was lost in vancian casting. I still feel the homogenization of powers, while very sensible from a mechanical standpoint, stood out to me as very video game.
I can see you’re point in spell slots use for environmental vs combat, I think that was part of what I found interesting in caster classes in 3.5, and later pf1.
I get that there is a lot of intelligent design in 4e, and I think on a mechanical level it makes a ton of sense, but I think ultimately it comes down to rules vs rulings mentality to the game. I would say it was very much on the side of rules, and for many players that felt much more like the MMOs they knew than a TTRPG.