The Gaming Den

I've run a couple of games now where all the characters were based on a very similar fighter/rogue/sorcerer chassis, on the basis that basically all fictional fantasy adventurers fight, skill, and some kind of magic. It's been popular, but I feel like it would benefit from drawing some distinctions, mostly to do with how the characters relate to their phlebotinum. Something like:

The Adept
Your magic is the product of long study. Classic archetypes: wizard.

The Dabbler
Your magic is the product of... some study. But not that much, you wanted to get laid in college. Classic archetypes: bard, rogue.

The Inborn
Maybe you have magic-being heritage, maybe you're a mutant, but your special powers are something you were born with. Classic archetypes: sorcerer, psion.

The Patron
You don't have any magic of your own, but a magic being hangs out with you and performs spells on your behalf when you ask. Classic archetypes: cleric, druid, artifact-bearer.

The Secret Patron
You don't have any magic of your own, but a magic being secretly hangs out with you and performs spells on your behalf without consulting or telling you. Classic archetypes: None in D&D that I'm aware of, but it shows up in fiction and some players will want it because reading spell text is hard.

The Destined
You don't have any magic of your own, but level-appropriate spell-like effects flavored as 'destiny' and 'lucky breaks' regularly happen around you. Classic archetypes: All the martial classes who get 'MC pity' as a secret class feature.

Preliminary dilemmas:
• How to distinguish Dabblers as less expert and polished than Adepts without making them flat worse? What are their up- and down- sides?
• Destined and Secret Patrons have action advantage issues (Patrons can have 'asking for spell' take the ordinary action). Balance with fewer castings?

@angelfromanotherpin:

The Dabbler is allowed more creativity, his magic is less restricted, as he isn't bound by preconceived notions of 'this spell' or 'that spell', i.e. the rules of magic are loose guidelines for him? There is a big aspect of 'luck' here as befitting of bards and rogues.

The Adept has greater mastery and more spells in their repertoire at the expense of having less freedom in spellcraft. It's like when you become specialized in a particular field, it becomes difficult to see things with fresh eyes and think outside the box.

At a glance, you could make the Adepts focus on a field of magic that pertains to a fictional, essential force which the characters themselves can articulate but which is mechanically superficial (for example: a single elemental force, "nature," or psychic power) and give the dabblers an eclectic set of spells that only support the specific goal they want to achieve (e.g.: stealing things, fighting vampires, or convincing pretty people to have sex with them)

So a Fire Adept can start a fire that lurches around under their control but also use purifying, warming flames to burn away diseases and fouling agents in food and drink, a Nature Adept can turn into a big fucking bear and maul you but also talk to bears and convince them not to maul you, and a Psychic Adept can read minds and marshals a swarm of telekinetically levitating daggers. Their powers have comparatively moderate intersectional use but are aesthetically consistent.

Thieving Dabblers can turn themselves invisible and also sense danger even though one is an illusion and the other is an extra sensory perception, Slayer Dabblers can create species-specific poisons and antitoxins as well as they can set a magic circle to trap supernatural entities even though one is chemistry and the other is geometric fetishism, and Sexy Dabblers can convince people of ridiculous untruths and dance so well that when they do it with a sword in hand, people end up deader and the dabbler stays aliver than if they tried to fight straight-up, even though one of those things is intensely interpersonal and the other works best when done "like nobody's watching."

Adepts are PhDs, Dabblers are technicians with twenty trade certificates.

The fundamentals of game design would tell you that each character needs to be able to do a meaningful action in most action phases of your game.

This means that your uber-mage archtype who is expected to be tossing hot magic on most action rounds for combat and utility needs to have fewer actions in equally weighted parts of your game (for example, if social actions take up a fourth of the total actions in a game, the uber-mage is probably shit at that).

The converse is also true. The tits-and-beer mage with a smattering of magic actions for combat and utility action rounds needs equally powerful non-magical actions. Maybe more non-magic social and utility actions.

You can approach it from a "natural is supernatural" angle where a lvl 10 warrior and mage have the same amount of inherent magic, the warrior just turns it into rock hard super muscles and eagle vision while the mage expends it as memorized spells.

So the dabbler isn't lazier, he just partitioned a smaller part of his energy into vancian stuff.

More Dabbler thoughts...

1) Arcana Unearthed had a system where spells were divided into simple and complex (and exotic, but nm). Any caster could use simple spells, but most characters got access to complex spells by tag, like 'complex fire spells.' Following Eikre's thought, I could see something like most classes getting their spells entirely by tag (all healing, all spider, whatever), while Dabblers get 'all simple,' providing breadth but not depth.

2) I had a thought that some Dabbler spells might be flavored as one-shot items that they 'picked up somewhere.' Something like:
• One of your highest level spell slots is a scroll-like item that is filled by the MC (or just randomly) with an effect not on their known list, hopefully with an effect that takes some creativity to leverage.
• To compensate, one of your highest level spell slots is a scroll-like item that you can decide what it is when you cast it, like a Frank-Sulin Sorcerer, in classic 'I have just the thing' style. That way they in-fiction have fewer high-level spells, but in fact don't.

3) If 1 and 2 are combined, the 'item' spells should (for the MC pick) and could (for the PC pick) be complex.