RavingSturm said:
Casters needing rest and a limited number of spells per day is a balance thing going back to D&D. The D&D designers wanted players to focus on teamwork and character synergy.
Yes, and the D&D designers failed, by the way. The restriction was stupid and the implementation of it was stupider still. It created a class imbalance because it was poorly handled - AD&D admittedly suffered less, 3.X was pretty much screwed.
The problem is that their
idea of balance goes like this "Well, spellcasters can use powerful abilities but only a limited amount of times per day, fighters can keep up fighting all the time". The
reality was rather different - sure spellcasters are limited but when their spells dry up, they are pretty much useless. Well, at lower levels, at least, at higher levels they may have magic wands and scrolls and stuff. I'll come back to those later. At any rate when spellcasters are spent, even though fighters can go on (I'll come back to this as well), they'd be pressured to rest with the group. So, from this, the restriction suddenly doesn't make sense - yes the spellcasters do get a limit but that's actually a limit on the entire group. It's as good as no limit, since there is almost no penalty for the group to rest every fight or two, which would enable the spellcasters to never really run out of spells. Which means that spellcasters don't even need to ration their resources - they get even more power, since they can go nova in every fight, expending as much resources as possible, which means they'd outperform "mundane" classes even more. And again, when they run out of spells, the group is pressured to stop and rest
anyway.
Now, I mentioned the scrolls and wands. These are items which allow spellcasters to expend a different form of resource in order to cast spells - namely, the scrolls themselves, or wand charges. They would use that
instead of the spells they have prepared. This allows them to sidestep the Vancian magic restriction. Sure, they do expend a form or resources, but D&D adventurers start swimming in gold after they've delved into few dungeons, so it's not really taxing on the characters, really. In other words, they can throw money at a problem and it goes away. There are other exploits that would make the casters completely obliterate the problem, but those are more system specific, this the consumable casting items are a general flaw in the design of it.
The other thing I wanted to come back to is the idea of "unlimited resources for fighters". The idea is pretty much this, but I'd just elaborate slightly - the spellcasters are bound by how much they can cast per day, the fighter classes are supposed to have no such restriction - they can swing their weapon all day long and more - long after the wizards run out of fireballs, the clerics run out of cures and so on. It
appears that the fighters are not restricted, but they actually are. They do have a resource they can run out of - a very precious resource - health. Fighters are supposed to be bravely whacking bad guys with various tolls of war, but this means they are exposed to being whacked back by the enemies - more so than the frail wizards[footnote]And even that gets perverted by D&D. Sure, "frail wizards" is the stereotype but BECAUSE of that, they are encouraged to stack up constitution. They could have more than the fighters, even, so the PC wizards are more likely to have paramount fitness levels.[/footnote]. This means that fighters have a higher chance of losing health - no matter the armour, they are going to. And health is a non-renewable resource - not unless other resources are expended - health potions, are one kind, but the other is magic. Yes, those same cure spells by the priest that the fighters can brave without...are actually needed. So either they rest
or they die. Or risk dying anyway - the difference at this point is negligible, since they want to rest. Hey, it gives them some HP back, as well.
In summary, the spellcasting restriction was not well done. On top of the problems outlined above, it adds a really obnoxious amount of bookkeeping which bogs the game down. It doesn't do what it's supposed to do as it manages to fail in several ways.
RavingSturm said:
Imagine if your priest/wizard could use heavy armor w/o penalties plus unlimited spell casting.
Sure - it's not hard:
they can in D&D 3.X. They are called "spellcasters". The wizard class is widely acknowledged to be vastly superior than all those non-spellcasting classes, there is also the term "CoDzilla" - no, it's not about a modern first person shooter franchise, it stands for "cleric or druid"-zilla. Named after what they can do to a game - the best description of druids[footnote]aside from them having abilities more powerful than entire classes [http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0346.html][/footnote] I've heard is "you can turn into fucking bear
who summons more bears". Sure, that's not the only thing they can do but the spellcasting bears ain't got stopping, not easily. As for clerics, they have spells to allow them to be better fighters than the actual fighters. While still being able to cast more spells. Hey, the wizards can do the same. They don't usually need to, but they can. What they are more likely to do is cast a spell that allows them to be GMs. That's not a big exaggeration, either - they have spells that let them directly say "this is what happens". At some of them allow a roll for save. By using metamagic, the casters
can effectively be unencumbered by the vancian spellcasting, they can even use spells to do the same. They can, in fact, cast spells that make other spells completely free - summon and bind a genie (or whatever race it was) and order it to cast Wish instead of you. This way you're not hit by the XP cost of it[footnote]The Wish spell can, more or less, do anything. In fact, it's description is of what it
cannot accomplish. It's not a long description. Casting it costs, I believe, 5000 XP or at least an amount of XP.[/footnote].
Heck, the tier system [http://brilliantgameologists.com/boards/index.php?PHPSESSID=7it8uqgn2abeu2m3sadul71g71&topic=5293] exists - it classes the character classes by the amount of power they have. The entire tier 1 consists of spellcasters. It's tier 3 where non pure spellcasters start to appear...and those aren't even core classes - duskblade, crusader, etc. The core non-spellcasting classes show up at tiers 4 and 5. There are 6 Tiers in total, if we don't count the truenamer class which has a special place below the entire tier system.