Drolyt wrote:And vancian casting makes your game worse. It is a clunky resource mechanic that is not at all intuitive and makes the game difficult for newbies. There is a whole fucking chapter in the PHB that is devoted entirely to explaining the insanity that is the vancian casting system. There is a reason people latched onto the damn warlock, and it isn't because they wanted to suck or thought their spellcasters weren't emo enough, it is because a huge swath of the playerbase, including many I have personally played with, fucking hate vancian casting and for that sole reason stick to playing barbarians in core.
I brought up the source material because emulating something in fantasy fiction is a valid thing to want to do. I don't play D&D because I thought the fucking D&D movie or cartoon was any good, I want to play interesting characters. Basically no character anyone would ever want to make requires vancian casting and many characters are harder to make that way because it doesn't allow you to customize your spell lists.
Saying that you could theoretically have both a limited spell list and vancian casting misses the point. Vancian casting in no way makes the game better on its own, so why keep it?
Reading your posts is like entering a bizzaro world where a guy named Vancian Casting brutally murdered your parents in front of you and then raped you for days.
Literally nothing you say about the actual mechanic of vancian casting demonstrates that you even know what it is, but somehow it is at fault for literally everything that is wrong with your life. So point by point:
Drolyt wrote:It is a clunky resource mechanic that is not at all intuitive and makes the game difficult for newbies. There is a whole fucking chapter in the PHB that is devoted entirely to explaining the insanity that is the vancian casting system.
Um... no. It is a simple mechanic that is explained very shortly. So shortly in fact that the entire explanation in full, along with slight variations, is repeated four times in the Classes Chapter. Here is the entire explanation of how Vancian casting works for the Cleric in full, along with bonus information in addition to the description:
A cleric must choose and prepare his spells in advance (see below).
To prepare or cast a spell, a cleric must have a Wisdom score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. The Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a cleric’s spell is 10 + the spell level + the cleric’s Wisdom modifier.
Like other spellcasters, a cleric can cast only a certain number of spells of each spell level per day. His base daily spell allotment is given on Table: The Cleric. In addition, he receives bonus spells per day if he has a high Wisdom score. A cleric also gets one domain spell of each spell level he can cast, starting at 1st level. When a cleric prepares a spell in a domain spell slot, it must come from one of his two domains (see Deities, Domains, and Domain Spells, below).
Clerics meditate or pray for their spells. Each cleric must choose a time at which he must spend 1 hour each day in quiet contemplation or supplication to regain his daily allotment of spells. Time spent resting has no effect on whether a cleric can prepare spells. A cleric may prepare and cast any spell on the cleric spell list, provided that he can cast spells of that level, but he must choose which spells to prepare during his daily meditation.
Now, you may be thinking of the Magic Overview Chapter, because you are an idiot. The Magic Overview Chapter explains how effects interact, but in fact, if you made everyone in the game at will casters instead of Vancian, the game would run just fine without changing even a single goddam word of the Magic Overview Chapter. That is because how targeting spells works has literally nothing to do with the management of spells as a resource.
Drolyt wrote:it is because a huge swath of the playerbase, including many I have personally played with, fucking hate vancian casting and for that sole reason stick to playing barbarians in core.
You can have whatever personal preferences you want, but don't project them onto a complete rejection of a resource mechanic. You are projecting your hatred onto other people who just happen to like other resource mechanics without wanting to eliminate perfectly viable mechanics. I personally don't like playing vancian casters as much as at will ones, which is why I make at will caster classes. But I also never want to play a character that holds a weapon in their hand, that doesn't mean I think that no one else should be allowed to have that mechanic in their game.
Drolyt wrote:I brought up the source material because emulating something in fantasy fiction is a valid thing to want to do. I don't play D&D because I thought the fucking D&D movie or cartoon was any good, I want to play interesting characters.
Here is the thing. You are an idiot. There are plenty of interesting characters that don't exist in fiction. On the other hand, most fiction characters are extremely boring to play in a game, see, Ichigo, Kenpachi. So instead of saying "Wahh, Vancian casting doesn't let me play Ichigo, and Ichigo is the only possible interesting character, therefore vancian casting doesn't let me play interesting characters" you could actually try to come up with an interesting character who is vancian. And you would succeed, just like the thousands of D&D players who have played an interesting caster character in the last 30 years.
Now, you could also just make your interesting character not vancian, but that isn't a good reason to try to eliminate an entire resource mechanic from the game that other people might want to use.
Drolyt wrote:Basically no character anyone would ever want to make requires vancian casting and many characters are harder to make that way because it doesn't allow you to customize your spell lists.
Again, you are completely full of shit. Vancian casting is the most customized list short of writing your own class. Vancian casting, unlike being a Beguiler, allows you to prepare the spells you want to cast and no others. Which is part of the reason that vancian casting allows you make many types of characters better than a specialized system like at will or encounter or build up. Vancian casting is almost always the second best way to model any character, which is precisely why having it included in games is a good thing, it allows you to make characters that the designers didn't make themselves first.
Drolyt wrote:Saying that you could theoretically have both a limited spell list and vancian casting misses the point. Vancian casting in no way makes the game better on its own, so why keep it?
You should keep it because it is good for the game. Primarily just because it allows D&D campaign stories to be in the same general universe as current games of D&D, but also because it provides the largest number of characters for the least amount of designer effort.
You are missing the point. The point is that I agree that Vancian Casting was a bad guy because he killed your parents and raped you. But just because he has a similar name doesn't mean you should blame a resource management system that you don't even understand for what he did to you.