The concept of 'organic' growth in D&D

[OgreBattle]

E6-9 does organic growth fine doesn't it?

Muticlass chimera's are fine at lvl6, the only problem is if you also want them to advance to lvl10-20

[Aryxbez]

As I came to understand over the years, your character "trains" to have their class features, and so it's less an ability pops into existence, and more it's something they're implied to have been working toward all along. The DM is supposed to look ahead, and have the story accommodate this notion, so that it makes sense when the Fighter gets his Artifact Sword, the Wizard achieves a eureka moment, or when in doubt you let the PC's spend Downtime refining new abilities from the hard lessons of past adventure(s).

It sounds like they want to feel like they "earned" their super swag, Special Mounts, Underworld favors and like. Whereas as PC it's expected you will survive encounters & level up, so maybe they don't think it's a "reward" anymore as its expected? Whereas magic items can be random, so you don't know what you'll get, so you gotta deal with the cards you were dealt type deal. You could get a Trident of Warning, you might also get a Deck of Warning, any and everything in-between.

[WiserOdin032402]

The key is that 3rd edition made magic items available but rare. That is, you could have whatever specific magic items you wanted, but the expected number of magic items you'd have at one time was very low. A fucking tenth level Fighter wouldn't be expected to have a backup magic dagger. And might not even have a magic bow. 4th edition doubled down on that, with even more build specificity and even less concurrent equipment.

5th edition flipped the script on availability but not on quantity. So you were still expected to see only 2 magic weapons by 10th level, but you didn't even get to pick what they were. That's worst of both worlds, and obviously they had to walk that shit back.

In AD&D you had a bunch of random stuff, but the operative word is that you had a bunch of random stuff. If your magic sword got broken or disenchanted or whatever, you switched to a backup magic weapon. If you're going to slot machine things, people need that many pulls on the lever.

-Username17

So it sounds like a lot of babies went out with a lot of bathwater and the fact that nobody fixed legacy issues with legacy mundane classes creates issues now that the structure of treasure distribution has been radically altered. A potential fix might just be 'dump treasure all over your players and use wish economy rules for gold and stuff'.

Spoilers: "Organic" is neckbeard-speak for either of the following:

1) I want my players to ruin their own fun by making all the wrong choices, and I'll get this by withholding information from them, because I'm malicious.
2) I want my players to have no agency, because I'm a scaredy cat and I fear losing control of the game.
3) I genuinely somehow want one thing while actively working towards the opposite of that thing I supposedly want, because I make no sense.

I had a feeling it'd be more complex than that, but it does somewhat feel like that's what it is, doesn't it? Though these people aren't your classic neckbeard Lamentations of the Flame Princess playing types. They're 'hip' and 'cool' which means they paid 50 dollars for 325 pages of fluffy bullshit (5th Edition) and wouldn't play such old and clunky games like 3.5 because rules inherently slow everything down unless it's for spells or combat. I wish I was making any of that sentiment of theirs up.

For your question of organic growth and artifact swords and multiclassing and so on, I'd say Earthdawn handles all of these problems really well. There are no mundane classes, so there's less (no?) worry about that. Levels exist but are much less important, it's almost a skill-based class system with levels added on. Flying/swimming mounts can be handled similarly to artifact weapons, iirc - your mount can upgrade and get more powerful as your character does, if you choose to invest char resources in that area.

Highly 2nd the recommendation to look at Earthdawn. I dunno about the newest edition(s) and whether they fix some of the problems or whatever.

Duly noted. I've gotten a few of them to look at earthdawn and they're making the switch, so that's helping somewhat.

E6-9 does organic growth fine doesn't it?

Muticlass chimera's are fine at lvl6, the only problem is if you also want them to advance to lvl10-20

Part of my goal is to get them away from D&D because they're literally tearing the system apart trying to fit it to what they want it to do. D&D 5th edition is already epic 6 from levels 6 to 20 (unless you're a wizard or cleric) and that's not doing it for them. Granted part of their resentment for the system is that, and I quote (from separate instances),

'It's not lethal enough'

'If you start with a scoundrel, a street rat that, due to her adventures, hears the call and ends joining the armed ranks of the church as a paladin... the early choices as a character wouldn’t allow that character to effectively change her destiny.'

'What's the other option? Building into every single scene all the results of every potential skill roll, and your Players Handbook triples in size, and lawyering increases exponentially because every "guideline" becomes a law. The Climb section becomes as long as the Armor section. And each of the fifty skills you insist are needed each has a section as long as the Armor section. Because there can't be any vagueness. Each skill roll must have a clearly defined outcome in the book, just like combat.'

'So learn a whole new system and teach it to your whole group, or mod a few items in the system and your group is happy?'

As you can tell this is probably an exercise in insanity and an uphill battle but I made headway with Symbaroum and it's coming along slowly with Earthdawn.

As I came to understand over the years, your character "trains" to have their class features, and so it's less an ability pops into existence, and more it's something they're implied to have been working toward all along. The DM is supposed to look ahead, and have the story accommodate this notion, so that it makes sense when the Fighter gets his Artifact Sword, the Wizard achieves a eureka moment, or when in doubt you let the PC's spend Downtime refining new abilities from the hard lessons of past adventure(s).

It sounds like they want to feel like they "earned" their super swag, Special Mounts, Underworld favors and like. Whereas as PC it's expected you will survive encounters & level up, so maybe they don't think it's a "reward" anymore as its expected? Whereas magic items can be random, so you don't know what you'll get, so you gotta deal with the cards you were dealt type deal. You could get a Trident of Warning, you might also get a Deck of Warning, any and everything in-between.

Which is probably why some of them are trying to figure out how to crowbar in EXP training rules (You don't level up immediately, you have to go get someone to train you to the next level with that EXP) on top of already having a 'wounds' system which is like HP but not HP in that it's easy to heal HP, hard to heal wounds, and wounds will just kill you no save if you get enough of them. They've got more houserules but I don't remember them off the top of my head quite like wounds.

[Whatever]

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55422 here's the Earthdawn 1E Old School Sourcebook Review (OSSR), it goes into a lot of detail about the good and bad of the system.

If they like D&D as such, and want a system where the world reflects those rules naturally (like characters being able to say "I'm a fifth circle adept of the blade" and have that make sense to their audience), then Earthdawn is a great place to start. Anyone working on a heartbreaker should take a look at it.

[hyzmarca]

Consider, for example, loot shooters.

Destiny, Borderlands, things like that. In a loot shooter you have guns. Lots and lots of guns. Powerful, special, basically magical guns drop everywhere all the time. And you're going to Pokemon those things and put them in your golfbag until its overflowing. Because that's the entire gameplay loop. Kill thing, get awesome gun, repeat. And that's a gameplay loop that triggers the same reward function as getting real things does. Your brain gets filled with dopamine and it becomes very addictive. And they they get you with microtransactions, but that's neither here nor there.

Organic Growth is similar in principle, while also drawing from narrative traditions. King Arthur doesn't have a magic sword drop in his lap because he's a 10th level Rightful King of Britain. He gets a magic sword because he pulls it from a freaking rock, and later because he gets a replacement from a watery tart in a farcical aquatic ceremony.

But lets say that Rightful King of Britain is a class that has "Pulls Caliburn from the stone" as a class feature at level 5 and "Gets Excalibur from the Lady of the Lake" as a class feature at level 10. Now, lets say that Arthur gets to the Stone at Level 4 and can't pull it out

Now, he has three options. He can either stay there and grind for EXP until he hits 5, which is immersion breaking. He can just leave it and maybe come back later, which will leave him without a major class feature when he hits level 5 later in the adventure. The third is that the DM just gives it to him level early, or gives him a bunch of free EXP so that he can hit 5. Which sort of defeats the point of the level and EXP system.


But that's easy compared to what happens when he hits level 10 and is no where near The Lake, and isn't even in the same country as The Lake.
At that point, you either completely break the story or Arthur goes without a major class feature for the forseeable future. Sure, The Lady could teleport to him somehow. But she's the Lady of the Lake, not the Lady who teleports around, that's not the story. It's a small handwave, but it's a handwave with narrative repercussions, such as "why now" and "wait, if she's not stuck in her lake why is she not doing this shit herself."
Alternately, he could just find Excalibur as a drop from a monster or stuck in the mud or something, but that breaks the story even worse.



Old school D&D uses always treasure all the time in two ways. One, to give players that dopamine reward. Two, to allow DMs the ability to tell a fucking story.


If your adventure plot requires the PCs to find the Sword of Kas, and none of them has a "Finds the sword of Kas" Class feature at this level, then either you have organic growth or you tell a different story.

And when you have 5 PCs who are all 13th level Elothar Warriors of Bladereach, then you run into the problem that the Sword of Kas is a unique artifact and there's not supposed to be 5 of them.

There's also the issue of 'you must be this tall to ride' items. If your plotted out adventure path leads to the Elemental Plane of Fire, then the PCs need to have fire resistance, otherwise they just instantly die. If they have to pay a class feature for fire resistance items just to participate in your adventure, that's bad. It's bad for them and it's bad for you and it's bad for the game. You need some way to give them free fire resistance before they step through that portal. The easiest and most logical way is to just have doodads of fire resistance in the portal room for them to pick up. Because of course a portal room leading to the plane of fire would be full of safety equipment. And that's organic growth.

[Foxwarrior]

As Dave Arneson said, TTRPGs are about playing the protagonists of movies, TV shows, and books. Lots of stories involve explanations for how characters get stronger as a major element, so it's not strange that sometimes someone would like to roleplay a scene where they get taught how to curve bullets, or go back to their demon overlord and renegotiate for an additional powerup or whatever, rather than just arbitrarily saying "you've been adventuring for long enough, upgrade your characters to keep the game from going stale."

Aside from balance and choice problems (which aren't necessarily problems from every frame of mind), there's the problem of pacing. I can't think of any action movies where five different protagonists are learning five different magic systems. If a typical origin story movie (the kind of movie where the protagonist gets more powerful over time) uses 20% of its screentime on the protagonist learning new abilities and acquiring new artifacts, then giving five protagonists each the same amount of focus (but keeping the number of other scenes the same) brings it up to over half the time being spent on discovering new powers for someone or other.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

'What's the other option? Building into every single scene all the results of every potential skill roll, and your Players Handbook triples in size, and lawyering increases exponentially because every "guideline" becomes a law. The Climb section becomes as long as the Armor section. And each of the fifty skills you insist are needed each has a section as long as the Armor section. Because there can't be any vagueness. Each skill roll must have a clearly defined outcome in the book, just like combat.'

This makes me look at my 50 pages of skill writeups and feel bad.

[OgreBattle]

I haven't thought deeply about this but... the "You leveled up, you gained some skills and unlocked new learnings and cool stuf... hit points go up, damage goes up" system seems to be a big problem with making such growth.


Like the wise sage needs levels, which means he is tougher than an orca.
The thief turned paladin, it's because his thieving skills and his paladin ability set are tied to levels that it becomes wonky.

D&D started off as a mashup of wargaming involving blocks of pikemen getting hit by catapaults and civil war battle ships shelling each other. Hit points comes from that stuff.

I think a modern tabletop skirmish game is better for basing The Great New RPG off of. I always bring up Fantasy Flight Xwing, Bloodbown, Mordheim-type stuff 'cause those have characters scale finitely. Putting the ace pilot in the factory standard starfighter doesn't give the starfighter more hit points to survive frost giants.

[Foxwarrior]

Hit points are one of the most convenient tools for planned obsolescence. With them you can give someone an "upgrade" from fireballs to touch attacks, and they say "thanks, I feel stronger now"

But I think we discussed this angle not too long ago.

[Username17]

So it sounds like a lot of babies went out with a lot of bathwater and the fact that nobody fixed legacy issues with legacy mundane classes creates issues now that the structure of treasure distribution has been radically altered. A potential fix might just be 'dump treasure all over your players and use wish economy rules for gold and stuff'.

Third edition was a radical departure from the way AD&D handled magic items, with the explicit understanding that players would have a lot less stuff and that that stuff would be more tailored to the player's vision of their character. That's not inherently wrong, but it is factually true that the wealth by level numbers aren't high enough to deliver the experience people want in the level range of 5-10, which is a surprisingly big problem considering home much people gravitate to exactly that level range of play for other reasons.

4th and 5th edition are just absolute fucking train wrecks. There is no coherent idea of what role magic items are supposed to play in the game or how people are supposed to accumulate them. Both games are completely indefensible. You can't even say that they would be fit for purpose with one weird trick, it's just fucking awful.

AD&D 1st and 2nd edition magic items were definitely not without flaws. There were real issues. Just to name a few:

• Character inventories ended up with a bunch of weird crap you were never going to use like you were playing a CRPG.
• Sometimes you just didn't get things that you needed. Nothing actually required the charts to ever spit out the +3 or better weapon you needed to hurt higher end monsters.
• Some character concepts like "exotic weapon user" and "other sized warrior" just weren't represented on the charts. Like at all.

These are all real issues and it's not wrong for some people to say they are red lines. If you say that you want to support characters who fight with a whip or pixie rangers or something, that's not unreasonable. And the magic item slot machine - at least as presented in AD&D will not get you there.

But any changes you make to that do come with real consequences. If you make the treasure non-random you also make it not surprising. Does a story whose ending in known need to be told at all? Sometimes yes, but also sometimes no. By 4th edition, the answer was clearly "No."

-Username17

[Zaranthan]

it is factually true that the wealth by level numbers aren't high enough to deliver the experience people want in the level range of 5-10, which is a surprisingly big problem considering home much people gravitate to exactly that level range of play for other reasons.

I think one of the reasons people gravitate to 3.X's "sweet spot" is because that massive looming problem actually has a simple solution: give the players more treasure than the WBL chart says to give them. That's it. An extra pile of gold & gems in every loot instance just fixes it.

[Username17]

it is factually true that the wealth by level numbers aren't high enough to deliver the experience people want in the level range of 5-10, which is a surprisingly big problem considering home much people gravitate to exactly that level range of play for other reasons.

I think one of the reasons people gravitate to 3.X's "sweet spot" is because that massive looming problem actually has a simple solution: give the players more treasure than the WBL chart says to give them. That's it. An extra pile of gold & gems in every loot instance just fixes it.

When K and I gave the Elothar Warrior of Bladereach the "Fistful of Rubies" class feature, it was a joke but we weren't kidding.

-Username17

[maglag]

I haven't thought deeply about this but... the "You leveled up, you gained some skills and unlocked new learnings and cool stuf... hit points go up, damage goes up" system seems to be a big problem with making such growth.


Like the wise sage needs levels, which means he is tougher than an orca.
The thief turned paladin, it's because his thieving skills and his paladin ability set are tied to levels that it becomes wonky.

D&D started off as a mashup of wargaming involving blocks of pikemen getting hit by catapaults and civil war battle ships shelling each other. Hit points comes from that stuff.

I think a modern tabletop skirmish game is better for basing The Great New RPG off of. I always bring up Fantasy Flight Xwing, Bloodbown, Mordheim-type stuff 'cause those have characters scale finitely. Putting the ace pilot in the factory standard starfighter doesn't give the starfighter more hit points to survive frost giants.

Yes it does when authority equals asskicking.

It's not always a case, specialy in real life, but it's still pretty common in a lot of media, in particular manga/anime. Depending on the story, it's a pretty good bet that the wise sage can wrestle an orca if push comes to shove.

Like Tony Stark has leveled up so much over the years that even armorless and weaponless he's been known to solo skrull armies with his bare fists!

[OgreBattle]

I'm under the impression most D&D gamers still think "Aragorn is a level 12-20 because he is king" , while in the books Aragorn will get badly injured if he sleeps on lava

[maglag]

I'm under the impression most D&D gamers still think "Aragorn is a level 12-20 because he is king" , while in the books Aragorn will get badly injured if he sleeps on lava

That's a wrong impression since "King" is mid-level by D&D standards. For example the official kings in Eberron don't go above level 11 while the local popess is actually a 18th level cleric (also a 11 year old girl). Because being the popess, the highest mortal representative of the gods, is higher authority than just ruling a chunk of dirt, so she kicks a lot more ass than the inferior kings.

Meanwhile in Lotr Gandalf the holy wizard was one of the highest authorities around that even king Aragorn bowed down to and thus Gandalf was tough enough to wrestle a burning Balor while falling down a mountain.

[Foxwarrior]

it is factually true that the wealth by level numbers aren't high enough to deliver the experience people want in the level range of 5-10, which is a surprisingly big problem considering home much people gravitate to exactly that level range of play for other reasons.

I think one of the reasons people gravitate to 3.X's "sweet spot" is because that massive looming problem actually has a simple solution: give the players more treasure than the WBL chart says to give them. That's it. An extra pile of gold & gems in every loot instance just fixes it.

When K and I gave the Elothar Warrior of Bladereach the "Fistful of Rubies" class feature, it was a joke but we weren't kidding.

-Username17

But you get Fistful of Rubies at 11th level...?

[Mord]

There's a bit of a double standard here in that casters expect to have full access to the spell list and to be able to pick and choose, whereas if a fighter brings the same expectation it's frowned on. I know people regularly bitch about the idea that you can walk into a town and trade a bunch of dungeon crap for a bespoke magic sword using the DMG pricing guidelines, but is that any more offensive than the notion that a spellcaster always has access to the materials needed to learn any given spell when they reach the appropriate level? Player and MC expectations are simply calibrated such that when the MC forces the Fighter to go on a vision quest to get the +5 sword it's considered thematic and appropriate, whereas when the MC forces the Wizard to delve a forgotten library to collect a tome of Stinking Cloud it's considered an unreasonable imposition.

Probably a lot of this stems from the fact that swords and spells are qualitatively different things to our minds. The idea that someone can, through experience and experimentation (or a flash of divine insight, or communion with nature), uncover some new application of the principles of magic doesn't offend most people, because we don't have a good mental map to an IRL equivalent of spellcasting. Expectations have been set by fiction such that magic is pretty frequently just believing in yourself really hard (e.g. "Use the Force, Luke"), and we're often shown that the process of learning new magic has more in common with practicing a skill (e.g. tossing cards into a hat, improving fluency in a language). Whereas we have a very good mental map to the process of picking up a new sword; you can just do that IRL, though the sword won't actually be magic.

That's the kind of expectation you can fix by spending some time establishing the physical mechanics of spellcasting in your setting. D&D isn't going to do this because it wants to cram every conceivable type of magic praxis into its kitchen sink, including psionics and ritual and chaos magic, and because material components back in the day were a literal joke. But, if you took the time to establish "in this world, magic spells consist of an elaborate etching into the surface of a special crystal that is then lacquered with pixie dust" you can recalibrate expectations around who gets what with what level of ease.

Moreover it's kind of hard to plan for the Fighter to get his +5 artifact sword at level 12 when there's nothng really put to the page that explicitly tells the MC or player that he will need one around then. A secret "MC-only" class progression table for every class might thread the needle. Players will know about it, like they know about all "MC-only" things, but certain grogs may be satisfied if there's a secret table that reminds the MC "hey make sure Fighter Joe gets his +5 at level 12" but the player-facing table is just +3 HP at level 12. If the MC is planning ahead, they can make the +5 sword a major in-setting artifact like the Master Sword that is foreshadowed or even the focus of the sessions leading up to the Fighter dinging to 12, or they can just say "oh hey how about that you just so happen to find Glamdring in the troll hoard." I'd say Excalibur is a middle ground between those extremes; in most of the Arthurian romance I'm familiar with, no one has ever heard of Excalibur before one day Merlin grabs Arthur, says "come on we're hitting up the Lake," and then the Lady hucks the sword at him.

[K]

There's a bit of a double standard here in that casters expect to have full access to the spell list and to be able to pick and choose, whereas if a fighter brings the same expectation it's frowned on. I know people regularly bitch about the idea that you can walk into a town and trade a bunch of dungeon crap for a bespoke magic sword using the DMG pricing guidelines, but is that any more offensive than the notion that a spellcaster always has access to the materials needed to learn any given spell when they reach the appropriate level? Player and MC expectations are simply calibrated such that when the MC forces the Fighter to go on a vision quest to get the +5 sword it's considered thematic and appropriate, whereas when the MC forces the Wizard to delve a forgotten library to collect a tome of Stinking Cloud it's considered an unreasonable imposition.

Dungeon Crawl Classics makes the wizard either roll off a chart when he gets a new spell or he can use spells he's encountered in some learnable form.

I've done some pretty vile and/or risky things to get spells in that game, so I think it's working as intended as limiter on both power and choice.

[Foxwarrior]

Yeah, I think it's the design philosophy of most D&D classes that serves as an obstacle to making wizards need to rummage around in basements for all their spells, rather than a fundamental mental model. You can't really make Wizards need to find every spell they want without also changing clerics, sorcerers, druids, psions, warlocks, fire mages, etc.

But if you wanted to, it wouldn't be hard to make every class in the game rely on different kinds of parts they found on or around the monsters they fought.

[Emerald]

There's a bit of a double standard here in that casters expect to have full access to the spell list and to be able to pick and choose, whereas if a fighter brings the same expectation it's frowned on. I know people regularly bitch about the idea that you can walk into a town and trade a bunch of dungeon crap for a bespoke magic sword using the DMG pricing guidelines, but is that any more offensive than the notion that a spellcaster always has access to the materials needed to learn any given spell when they reach the appropriate level? Player and MC expectations are simply calibrated such that when the MC forces the Fighter to go on a vision quest to get the +5 sword it's considered thematic and appropriate, whereas when the MC forces the Wizard to delve a forgotten library to collect a tome of Stinking Cloud it's considered an unreasonable imposition.

I don't think that's so much a double standard of magic vs. nonmagic or magic use being abstract vs. sword use being concrete as it is a difference of handwaving tolerance between intrinsic abilities and extrinsic items.

No one complains about casters picking up spells as they please because class concepts of "knows magic theory" and "channels a magic bloodline" and so forth let it be assumed that they were working on spell research in the background, and I doubt anyone would complain about fighters picking up weapons as they please because it's assumed that they were working on crafting said weapons in the background if the ability to enchant magic weapons and armor was an ability fighters had, of which getting free weapon and armor enhancements at level-up was an obvious extension.

However, fighters can't (in standard 3e) enchant their own gear, so fighters handwaving the acquisition of a magic sword mid-adventure when they can't make one on their own is something people complain about...and if wizards couldn't learn spells on their own but could only acquire spells by retrieving scrolls from tombs or paying to copy spells from other wizards (because magic is ancient supernanotech that no one understands and Spellcraft doesn't exist, or whatever), or could only use magic through special foci they have to find and not under their own power or with self-crafted foci (as you suggest further down), then people would very likely complain about wizards handwaving the acquisition of a given spell mid-adventure when they can't learn it on their own, in exactly the same way.


An interesting illustration of this case is the paladin's mount. Compare the class feature 2e and 3e:

A paladin may call for his war horse upon reaching 4th level, or anytime thereafter. This faithful steed need not be a horse; it may be whatever sort of creature is appropriate to the character (as decided by the DM).
[...]
The paladin does not really "call" the animal, nor does the horse instantly appear in front of him. Rather, the character must find his war horse in some memorable way, most frequently by a specific quest.

Upon reaching 5th level, a paladin gains the service of an unusually intelligent, strong, and loyal steed to serve her in her crusade against evil.
[...]
Once per day, as a full-round action, a paladin may magically call her mount from the celestial realms in which it resides. This ability is the equivalent of a spell of a level equal to one-third the paladin’s level. The mount immediately appears adjacent to the paladin and remains for 2 hours per paladin level; it may be dismissed at any time as a free action. The mount is the same creature each time it is summoned, though the paladin may release a particular mount from service.

In 2e, players complained about the paladin taking time away from the main adventure to find his mount and DMs complained if paladins tried to fast-forward the whole thing.

In 3e, no sidequest, no complaints, no problem.

Why? Because the mount went from being an extrinsic thing placed in the world by the DM (like a magic weapon) to an intrinsic ability to gain a class feature without depending on anyone else (like a spell). Same thing again with the holy avenger: In 2e, it was an extrinsic magic item that was uniquely awesome, so many paladins quested for their own, to their parties' chagrin; in 3e, it was a weapon paladins can mostly duplicate with an intrinsic holy sword spell, so few paladins bother to find one and no one complains about the lesser magic sword that they do get.

But if you wanted to, it wouldn't be hard to make every class in the game rely on different kinds of parts they found on or around the monsters they fought.

Yeah, you basically have to make casters and fighters either equally independent of gear (cast innate magic yourself vs. channel innate magic through your sword) or equally dependent on gear (find Harry Potter wand vs. find artifact sword) to deal with the "secret class feature" problem, and if you're going to go the latter route then a magical component harvesting system is probably the mechanically easiest and most thematically-appropriate option.

[Whipstitch]

However, fighters can't (in standard 3e) enchant their own gear, so fighters handwaving the acquisition of a magic sword mid-adventure when they can't make one on their own is something people complain about...and if wizards couldn't learn spells on their own but could only acquire spells by retrieving scrolls from tombs or paying to copy spells from other wizards (because magic is ancient supernanotech that no one understands and Spellcraft doesn't exist, or whatever), or could only use magic through special foci they have to find and not under their own power or with self-crafted foci (as you suggest further down), then people would very likely complain about wizards handwaving the acquisition of a given spell mid-adventure when they can't learn it on their own, in exactly the same way.

Yeah, allowing players to feel confident in some basic assumptions about the world around them is one of the first and most important steps in respecting player agency. RPG groups are attempting to build a fictional consensus reality and people will get frustrated if they don't feel like they have a decent grasp of what is and isn't reasonable for their character to be doing. People will often accept all manner of bullshit monster power and fancy magical item so long as it is clear that said magic is a special case that doesn't require the group to call into question all prior assumptions. This is why people are willing to accept a beholder floating in and death lasering the rogue but get super annoyed when you jerk them around about carry weights so often that they don't even know if a halfling can carry home his own groceries. It's a big part of why I maintain a degree of skepticism when internet randos complain about players that care about REALIZARM. Sometimes the problem really is player getting lost in the weeds over silly, silly details but oftentimes the players are pissed off because they would have been doing things differently if they had a more accurate idea of what the setting allows.

[Ice9]

I mean, Wizards learning spells from finding scrolls / trading spells / looting spellbooks / sneaking into other Wizards' towers to copy from their spellbooks / etc. is a lot of fun, and in an ideal system all/most classes would have in-world ways to grow their capacities like that.

But it does clash pretty hard against any kind of time-sensitive plot or unusual environment (like, a remote wilderness with few other sapient creatures).

[hyzmarca]

Wizards learning from scrolls was the way that it worked in AD&D. It was underpowered balanced compared to Clerics who just dumpster-dived the entire list every night and an attentive DM might veto the most obviously OP ones.

It's actually a good way not just to limit power, but to structure growth and avoid option paralysis.

It has the advantage that if your DM is any good, he'll put useful spells in your path and you won't have to read his mind to hopefully guess what spells you'll need.