Quote from: Marleycat;754301So let me get this straight people are having a meltdown over THREE 0-level spells? Unless you actually pick them when you level up? Okaaay. I do assume you'll find more as you adventure but really? I do know that Wizards can have all of them at some point but isn't that logical? They're CANTRIPS for God sake! So you get 15-20 of them maybe 4-5 are direct damage types at best.

There is no mention of gaining more. But at 18th level you gain a 1st and a 2nd level spell that become at wills as well. And using your rest and reorganization period you can swap in and out what those 2 are. So Im going to say a mage has to select 3 cantrips that they can cast at will from whatever theyve picked up past the starting 3. Swapping in and out just like the mastery ones.

Assuming the system hasnt changed overly in the final version.

Oh yeah. and Evoker path gets potent Cantrip at level 5. Even if you miss with the cantrip it still deals 1/2 damage but not any effects like shocking grasps stun. Enchanter gets essentially an at-will charm sort of effect.

Quote from: Omega;754304There is no mention of gaining more. But at 18th level you gain a 1st and a 2nd level spell that become at wills as well. And using your rest and reorganization period you can swap in and out what those 2 are. So Im going to say a mage has to select 3 cantrips that they can cast at will from whatever theyve picked up past the starting 3. Swapping in and out just like the mastery ones.

Assuming the system hasnt changed overly in the final version.

Oh yeah. and Evoker path gets potent Cantrip at level 5. Even if you miss with the cantrip it still deals 1/2 damage but not any effects like shocking grasps stun. Enchanter gets essentially an at-will charm sort of effect.

So? In Pathfinder you know them all at the start and in FantasyCraft a full 20th level Wizard can at-will any 0/1/2 level spells they know and have specialty spells that are considered one level lower meaning less spell points for 5-6 spells of your choice if not more and in the latter they're still underpowered compared to the martial types.

And it's about time blaster Wizards get a chance to be viable. 3/4e made that choice utterly stupid. Good so my Ray of Frost hits for half damage at 5th level but that might break the game and it's not Dnd! Cry me a river.

By the way they are nerfing the Enchanter antipathy ability.

Yeah, I'm not really seeing the major issues. And if I run into any problems with my group I'll probably just deal with them as needed. It lets players play a spellcaster and not a dart thrower who can sometimes shoot a magic missile.

Seems like a fair enough bump from older editions without turning into 3rd ed or 4th ed silliness.

Quote from: Bionicspacejellyfish;754311Yeah, I'm not really seeing the major issues. And if I run into any problems with my group I'll probably just deal with them as needed. It lets players play a spellcaster and not a dart thrower who can sometimes shoot a magic missile.

Seems like a fair enough bump from older editions without turning into 3rd ed or 4th ed silliness.

Correct. If I want to throw darts or use a crossbow I'll play a Rogue preferably an elven one with the Assassin background and really start the carnage and laugh in the shadows, quietly of course so I don't get ganked myself.

I have zero interest in it, and spells better damn well be disrupt-able as concentration checks need to die in a fire. Would be the first thing I house rule out upon contact, barring anything else more egregious. You may fuck a bit with the power maths, but don't fuck me over with the quantity maths. Expected mechanical assumptions on multiplier effects, a.k.a. quantity and action economy, can and have been crippling to settings and their conversions, IME.

I want Basic to be as basic as can be. Get your flash out and give me a clean baseline with which to build atop. Unless your setting explains the ramifications for anything greater, I'll assume it is overstepping creative bounds into my GM purview and will be ignored -- be it at the table, and maybe at the sales rack.

As for my permitting 0-lvl spell quantities, extra casting will most definitely come with a cost in my tables. At my MOST generous you get Your Level plus INT Mod of 0-lvl spells. If you want to dip into more, it costs you a temporary INT point per spell, requiring full night rest to recoup an INT point per night. Yeah that means you can Cantrip or Light yourself into a temporary coma, that's a good thing in my opinion. Learn to manage resources and prepare.

Re unlimited damage cantrips - unlimited at-will attacks works fine in my 4e D&D game, but 4e is a game of fantasy superheroes, not resource management. We don't track arrows in 4e either - how are you supposed to track the number of arrows used in a burst or blast attack?

If arrows are being tracked, I reckon cantrip expenditure ought to be tracked too, at the same sort of scale; maybe around your total INT in castings per encounter, recoverable with a short rest of 5-10 minutes, the same amount of time it would take the archer to gather up his arrows and straighten any dented heads (real arrows rarely got damaged to the extent of being unuseable; picking up enemy arrows and firing them back was routine).

That shouldn't impact game balance, but with ca 18 castings per 5-10 minutes, no using attack cantrips to drill through rocks. Conversely if a battle runs for more than 18 rounds you're generally in a lot of trouble anyway.

My issue with limitless damage cantrips is that it removes a significant component of the resource management aspect of the game. Missile weapons have an ammunition resource, melee attacks are limited by your HP resource but damage cantrips are unlimited range attacks.

That said, its an easy house rule and as for its default setting implication I say meh. Every edition had setting defining quirks that were effectively ignored because they were not logically applied to the setting. i.e 3E could also have had the wizard ice cream shop scenario yet it never happened. 5E is no different.

My bigger gripe is that the default setting (as implied by the modules) is a shitty Forgotten Realms/Dragonlance mash up.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;754171Anyone else finding extreme irony in the sort of Cult of the RAW that says that all at wills must be literally unlimited. It just seems so out of place on this forum. Its almost like people are hypocrites.

Hypocrites? Simply because we can parse basic English?

At-will means AT WILL. So barring being unconcious or otherwise incapacitated to a point that impacts your ability to exercise your will, yes it does mean literally unlimited.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;754177They do, as i showed above.  What we have here are a few folks who have no idea how 5e actually works, and are assuming things that aren't true, and/or are taking away conclusions from statements that were never actually made.

In the example you quoted, I said compared to a standard attack, the MU's at will isn't overpowered.  EW assumed that meant that the damage was equal based on his statement.  Note that nothing in my statement remotely says that they are equal, just that one isn't overpowered compared to the other.

If a magic user can crank out semi comparable damage in combat to a fighter without the expenditure of limited resources IT IS OVERPOWERED.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;754212Jesus you're fucking stupid.  No, there isn't a difference between:

1d8+1d8

and

(1d8+1d8)

Your target has damage resistance 8. Make a difference now?

Quote from: Bobloblah;754220Just houserule it is a fairly useless response to most criticism. Otherwise, as CRKrueger pointed out, every game would be just fine, because you can always houserule it. I know I can houserule it.

Its easier to start with a basic game that gives you more of what you want and adding to that then filtering out floating piles of shit before even getting started.

Quote from: Larsdangly;754213Check your books, dude! In every edition before 3E, wizard's to-hit chances at low to medium levels are within a point or two of fighters of the same level. I would say this is just a symptom of the broader problem that all editions after Chainmail and before 3E (maybe even pre 4E) give fighters way too anemic of a progression in attack ability. The only remedy is to tack on kool powerzzz as house rules, or spread around magic items. Really, if you are playing 'traditional' D&D using RAW and omitting stuff like weapon specialization, the only advantages to being a fighter are hit points and the freedom to use any weapons and armor.

Hit points are huge part of the fighters combat power.

So, is resource management like the ultimate goal of the game? To see who can manage their arrows/torches/spells/etc the best? Speaking from experience it seems like a thing that some people loved and some people not so much. I still don't see how giving a spellcaster one to three at will options when they completely exhaust their spells is going to somehow let mages run roughshod over a dungeon. It's not like they can cast a cantrip and another spell at the same time so if the party is relying on the mage's light spell and he decides to cast something else then they're all in the dark. There's still risk management going on. To put it another way, I've never felt the need to track the durability of a fighter's weapons and armor in order to rein in their power.

Sure we can rely on Smith's Light spell and not burden ourselves with torches but if we run into an anti-magic field we're screwed. And Smith can't cast anything else because none of us have infravision, etc.

Just seems like a strange hill to die on if that's your biggest gripe with the magic system (which again seems very much toned down from 3rd/4th ed mages being able to just magic their way through everything.)

Personally I've always been more concerned about Clerics and Druids unbalancing a game since they have access to great magic as well as good combat abilities and are able to wear armor. I flat out banned druids in my homebrew world because of it.

Haven't been following it enough to know, just waiting to see it when it comes out and make my judgement then.

In terms of resource management, I do think it is a feature of the game that is important. But the whole game doesn't have to revolve around it and giving Wizards a few 0 level cantrips they can keep casting isn't going to wreck resource management at the higher end (I am not terribly into the whole "pew pew" wizard thing, it just isn't this huge thing that destroys the game for me). So as long as your still managing resources for things like fireball, then it should be fine.

Honestly the biggest concern I have about spell casting after 4E is that it goes back to back to the feel it use to have in the previous editions (including 3E) and includes a lot of the fun non-combat stuff. Was never a big fan of rituals in 4E, so hope those are gone as well.

Quote from: Bionicspacejellyfish;754372So, is resource management like the ultimate goal of the game? To see who can manage their arrows/torches/spells/etc the best? Speaking from experience it seems like a thing that some people loved and some people not so much. I still don't see how giving a spellcaster one to three at will options when they completely exhaust their spells is going to somehow let mages run roughshod over a dungeon. It's not like they can cast a cantrip and another spell at the same time so if the party is relying on the mage's light spell and he decides to cast something else then they're all in the dark. There's still risk management going on. To put it another way, I've never felt the need to track the durability of a fighter's weapons and armor in order to rein in their power.

There is more to the game then metagame balance during dungeon exploration.

There are setting considerations which have been expressed here, but most importantly the major difference in feel between classes is largely cosmetic when they are all performing in the same way with different window dressing .

This was supposed to be the edition that felt like D&D again but it is yet another iteration of the band of fantasy superheroes style of play. 4E already did four color fantasy heroes very well.  

Without the expenditure of limited magical resources, the magic user needs to suck donkey balls in combat so hard that he chokes.

If that is not the case then you have something other than a D&D magic user. It isn't a matter of being unbalanced with other party members. If they ARE all balanced to have equal utlity in combat then there is the problem. That is what gets you the band of four color fantasy heroes style that doesn't feel like D&D.

WOTC has yet to figure this out.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;754366Hypocrites? Simply because we can parse basic English?

At-will means AT WILL. So barring being unconcious or otherwise incapacitated to a point that impacts your ability to exercise your will, yes it does mean literally unlimited.

Oh for fucks sake. At will is a game rule term, not an in world term. And hell, even in English, I have the ability to throw punches at will in real life. Doesn't mean it doesn't tire me out.

I can snap my fingers at will. If I do it continuously for long enough I'll get blisters on my fingers though.

The reason they are worded in game as at will is that you can cast them often enough that it really won't matter unless you are attempting to abuse the rules, in which case, wow, its like D&D was made with an arbiter of the rules built in.

Also, Jesus fucking christ, did you just go into whining about game balance after this part. Am I really on the right forum?

Quote from: Bionicspacejellyfish;754372To put it another way, I've never felt the need to track the durability of a fighter's weapons and armor in order to rein in their power.

Yeah - when wizard at-wills are as powerful as fighter at-wills, best to worry about tracking expenditure of both, or neither. I wouldn't let a fighter tunnel through solid rock with infinite use of some at-will melee or ranged attack, and same goes for the wizard.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;754375If that is not the case then you have something other than a D&D magic user. It isn't a matter of being unbalanced with other party members. If they ARE all balanced to have equal utlity in combat then there is the problem. That is what gets you the band of four color fantasy heroes style that doesn't feel like D&D.

WOTC has yet to figure this out.

While I would agree that 4e doesn't feel like D&D - it does feel like 'four color fantasy heroes', which is fine by me - the Pathfinder casters get some weak at-will attack spells, and that doesn't detract from the D&D feel. As you indicate, though, this is because they do not have equal utility in combat; they are significantly weaker than a fighter's attacks. The PF wizards do get a large number of magic-missile type attacks at 1st level that compare to fighter attacks (actually a bit weaker IME) - but these are limited to around 7/day.

Quote from: Emperor Norton;754376Oh for fucks sake. At will is a game rule term, not an in world term. And hell, even in English, I have the ability to throw punches at will in real life. Doesn't mean it doesn't tire me out.

The erosion of language is a sad thing. To say that a term means something but then say that, because its a game that term means "whatever" is piss poor design.

In other words, don't fucking use the term at-will unless you mean it. It has already been established that using magic is not physically debilitating to the caster.

From the DMG page 40:  (AGAIN)

Release of word/sound-stored energy is not particularly debilitating to
the spell caster, as he or she has gathered this energy over a course of
time prior to the loosing of the power. It comes from outside the spell
caster, not from his or her own vital essence. The power to activate even
a first level spell would leave a spell caster weak and shaking if it were
drawn from his or her personal energy, and a third level spell would
most certainly totally drain the caster’s body of life!

So. Once again from a logical perspective, if there is indeed some reasonable practical limit to amount of 0 level magic that a caster can sling around in a given time period, what makes more sense:

1) Give sliding scale guidelines about the management  of this resource and how it can be customized to provide the amount of usage desired based on those limits.

OR

2) Just say that such magics are completely at-will then change what at-will actually means when someone who understands english explores the rule to its logical conclusion.


TLDR version: English motherfucker! Do you speak it?