The dichotomy of the Arcane
DragonKing
Member Posts: 1,977
in Off-Topic
So there has always been one aspect of the DnD that dumbfounded me and maybe those of you who are more learned than I in the deep lore of DnD could possibly shed some light on this. It's the very division between mage/wizard and sorcerer. We all know why they are different, once gains arcane power innately from *insert the infinite reasons* while the other through study and hard work. Game play wise this is all well and good but from a lore perspective this always left me stupified.
While taking into account I get every sorcerer wouldn't do this but wouldn't many sorcerers, who realize they possess an innate ability to magic, actually study like a wizard does. Not even just to understand their own power but to actually build on it and get better.
While I read mages and sorcerers don't get along it still makes little sense why a sorcerer wouldn't find any merit in actual study or magic through the lens of a mage or the balance of pathos and logos. Ethos, who needs that? We're studying magic here (yes I am the reason we can't have superpowers).
Is there something Im missing or am I truly expected to believe that a every sorcerer would never try to truly logically study magic and would just depend on talent alone with no attempts to grow or improve it.
While taking into account I get every sorcerer wouldn't do this but wouldn't many sorcerers, who realize they possess an innate ability to magic, actually study like a wizard does. Not even just to understand their own power but to actually build on it and get better.
While I read mages and sorcerers don't get along it still makes little sense why a sorcerer wouldn't find any merit in actual study or magic through the lens of a mage or the balance of pathos and logos. Ethos, who needs that? We're studying magic here (yes I am the reason we can't have superpowers).
Is there something Im missing or am I truly expected to believe that a every sorcerer would never try to truly logically study magic and would just depend on talent alone with no attempts to grow or improve it.
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But surely they are improving it over time - abilities are very limited at level 1, but progress with levels in a pretty similar way to mages. It seems reasonable to think of that improvement being the result of hard work honing their natural talents.
In Forgotten Realms and Pathfinder it seems to be mostly a heritage thing, especially being linked to dragon blood, hence the Dragon Disciple prestige class. What seems to be consistent is that you need to be born with talent for sorcery, but can study to become a mage.
As for why Sorcerer's don't study magic like Wizards: it seems that there is not really any synergy between the two approaches. The requirements differ too, so with Sorcerers being rare, the number of Sorcerers smart enough to successfully study magic like a wizard is even smaller.
Consider the Sorcerer a sort of number savant who can do calculations in his head very fast while the Wizard build a calculator and relies on that. While it might be interesting to compare, there is little chance of being able to improve to improve your method by studying the other one.
OTH Pathfinder does have a Sage Sorcerer subclass, which does approach spontaneous magic like a Wizard would and uses int as the primary attribute.
And like that you basically answer my question. My only focus is lore not mechanics as mechanics technically can be whatever it actually is wanted with no real common sense story was but just balanced for play, example bg2 and time stop. It's a spell that mechanically is very powerful and can be even game breaking but lorewise such a spell even in the hands of the top mages and worse brings many questions to the cause and effect of such a spell being used. Do they stop selling time for just that area? That world? That reality? That all encompassing existence? Anything smaller than that existence has to have irreversible effects as you're now stopping a fraction of existence while everywhere else is still moving forward and effectively breaking time itself. And what about all the greater beings such as gods and eldritch beings that should be immune to it, how are they perceiving such action? Why are they just letting it happen or is it that Everytime time is stopped they pushback against it to start it back again. Etc etc...
The answer is...
Of course!
I just thought I'd throw that out there, as it's somewhat related to the thread subject. The idea of the wizard/sorcerer dichotomy wasn't created in a vacuum. The same dichotomy comes up in real life in many fields, especially arts related fields. Study and practice vs. talent, emotional expression, and intuition.
Personally the one I would've went with, planned to originally but decided not to was natural born artist with the ability to draw, vs the one who had a inconstantly study and practice technique to do it. In fact I've personally lived this one myself and it's kinda the reason why this divide of how the wizard and sorcerer improve is kinda confusing to me.
In middle school (sorry don't really know the year number for those outside the states) I had a good friend who could literally draw anything, I sat and watch him free hand drawing after drawing while on on the other struggles to just draw a 3-d cube.while he could just do it I was buying/googling how to draw books and internet websites daily practicing. We were both around 13-14 at the time.
He dropped out I graduated highschool, life happened and we didn't see or hear from each other years until over a decade later. We were around 25-26, when we started catch up the subject of drawing came up and come to find up my drawing ability had vastly surpassed his.
Now there was a bit of a difference, he had eventually stopped drawing because all his artwork was stolen and that somehow mentally hurt him to the point he couldn't draw anymore, and the first time he did it in over a decade was after we caught up again and actually talked about it and what he showed me was exactly what you'd expect from someone who didn't study the fundamentals of drawing let alone not naturally gifted.
A gift is just that a gift If you don't build on it. What makes a prodigy a prodigy? Just the fact they can do what they do, or the fact they put countless hours into what they do ontop of the gift they were given. Maybe I'm wrong to do so but that's what I see when I look at the wizard and sorcerer class, a prodigy no better yet, a gift vs persistent study. Yet the gift just get better instead of persistence being added onto the gift to make it better.
A wizard could be presumed to have some ability to spontaneously cast as a base (like in Harry Potter), but he's not very good at it without study, practice, and the help of amplifying magical tools (grimoires, wands, staves, crystals, runes, familiars).
Sorcerers could be presumed to be perfectly able to improve their casting by studying wizarding theory and methodology, but most of them choose not to. They have another level of natural, spontaneous ability that makes them think "Why should I do things the hard way when I have so much magical power I can cast without even trying?" The character Qara in Neverwinter Nights 2 is kind of a stereotype of that kind of sorcerer thinking.
For sorcerers, it comes from their blood or their soul, whereas wizards have the same base ability that any regular person has that can be developed with study and practice. They do need some intelligence to work with, though, or they'll struggle to master the theories, glyphs, and tools, and to remember the vast amount of knowledge they need to retain.
This explains why sorcerers have a very limited repertoire of spells, whereas wizards are masters of flexibility. A wizard can study and learn whatever spell is needed to solve whatever problem. "Sleep, Knock, Charm Person, Friends, Magic Missile, Chaos, Stoneskin, Spell Deflection, Fireball for these enemies but Ice or Lightning for those fire resistant ones, Remove Curse, Remove Fear, Dimension Door, Time Stop, Polymorph self or other, on and on. Anything is possible."
Whereas sorcerers are more like "Fireball, fireball, fireball, fireball" solves every problem. (Which it really doesn't.)
I can't speak to drawing, but I know a lot about music. Child prodigies are like musical sorcerers. They tend to only know a few pieces that they play like masters. It's a bit of a mystery where they get their ability. They either burn out and fade into obscurity or blend in with other adult musicians when they grow up, because they stop being all that special.
Every once in a century or so we get a Mozart, but a true prodigy like that is an extraordinarily rare phenomenon. Mozart was a musical sorcerer. He supposedly just wrote great symphonies and operas off the top of his head.
Beethoven is known as a musical wizard. He wrote countless drafts of his symphonies, and wrote letters to friends about how he struggled to finalize works before publishing. We still have some of his discarded rough drafts of his works preserved in libraries. Beethoven worked and slaved for every note.
In the end, while both composers are still deeply appreciated and performed, Beethoven's wizardry is considered to be greater and more transcendent than even the great Mozart's sorcery. Every composer for the rest of the 1800s after Beethoven struggled to come out of his long, overwhelming shadow of genius (Schubert, Schumann, to some extent Brahms and Mendelssohn).
A lot of my assessment is only my subjective opinion, of course, but it's a pretty prevalent opinion among musicians and musicologists.
We also have a considerable library of stuff Beethoven dashed off for a quick commission. Town band wants something to play? Here's a day's work. Have fun. These pieces are largely forgotten now, of course; they're nowhere near as good as the works he spent all that time revising.
And of course, there are places in which that "revise it repeatedly, for as long as it takes" approach doesn't work. Beethoven was not a noted composer of opera, after all. "Fidelio" went through ten years of development and multiple performed versions, and wasn't very successful in the end.
I know it's not the most common at-the-table archetype, but the "old wizard" concept tends to exist as a nod to the idea that it takes a long time and a lot of effort to become a competent wizard. You dont just take a semester of evocation and start slinging magic missiles (This is of course subject to the setting and the DM, and from my experience, most players tend to play their characters in the 20-30 year old range regardless of class).
So from a lore perspective, it works for me to think that employing the same technique of study that allows a wizard to become fully proficient would take just as long for a sorcerer (years of training, etc). Whereas, once their inherent magic has presented, learning how to get better and more effective at casting it would be achieved by separate processes.
Another interesting point to extend my reading musicians as wizards analogy - I can barely play anything without my sheet music. With my sheet music, I'm a truly gifted musician. Take that away, and I have to painstakingly memorize scores to be able to play. It's almost like I can't cast crap without my spellbook.
We definitely need more charisma-based classes other than bards. I just don't think that sorcerers are a good candidate for that. Maybe paladins could fit that role, but they already depend on strength and wisdom to some degree.
Don't get me started on that, again that's a argument of mechanics but even in mechanics that made no sense to me, if their power manifested internally and for the sake of this discussion let's use the bloodline origins for sorcerers... Wisdom would be the better choice of a determining trait as the wisdom needed not just for their power but to grow it would literally be in their blood themselves and the sorcerer would have to learn to listen to their blood to (again just for the sake of this topic) hear the voices of their ancestors or ancestor that I'm assuming has long died, for guidance on using and growing their power.literally no different than how a cleric listens to their god or a druid listens to nature itself or the spirits of nature.
I logically can't come up with an reason why charisma would have anything to do with a sorcerers innate magical ability, what the better you are at cunning/bewildering/inspiring people the stronger the sorcerer becomes? A bard makes more sense for having them as a charisma based class but not a sorcerer. It feels like they just needed a class that depended on charisma and sorcerer got the lucky number.
Yeah. I think that fits it. Since the sorcerer is using innate skill/talent/etc - it makes sense that the attribute that works for them would come from something other than intelligence. Charisma works here because it's always been described as (possibly) being an ineffable quality about a character. Some people roleplay Charisma as looking good, others roleplay it as a "magnetic" personality or a quick wit. It just seems like a force of will from a character might be best covered (albeit, imperfectly) from their Charisma.
I do have to say - I really like the analogy to sight-reading music vs improvisation. It explains the difference nicely.
I dont know. I'm a sucker for high CHA characters, so I love that there is a pure arcane caster using the stat (in fairness, the Bard is now a full leveled CHA caster as well, but that's new to 5e).
It also makes sense somewhat considering that Wizards are INT based and Clerics (and Druids) are WIS based. So if you want to put another non-physical stat up there for a caster, CHA balances it out.
5e lets the Warlock (not a full caster, of course) use CHA, when their 4e counterpart used Constitution IIRC. I know 4e has a pretty bad reputation, but I do think there's room for a CON based caster somewhere in the lore. Not an easy needle to thread, but a cool idea.
One is that Sorcerers basically are able to use their innate charisma to convince the Universe itself to change for them. PS:T has touches of this at some points, though not in the form of sorcery.
The second one is that the usual cause/effect for stats is simply reversed here. Being a innately gifted sorcerer quite simply automatically makes you charismatic, i.e. maybe people can feel your power.
Admittedly, these problems seem to arise only in Dark Sun.
But it's not really hard to solve - you just have an reaction modifier that is determined by both your charisma and your reputation. Baldur's Gate actually has that.
In Dark Sun you would just have a really high decrease to reaction due to being a known sorcerer.
Aw yes, my personal favorite attire. Generic wizard look.
He looks pissed that he lost his pipe!
Bilbo: "I still don't understand why we have to destroy the ring, Gandalf. Can't we just use it against Sauron?"
Gandalf: "I have 21 in Charisma you fool, you dare question me? Here's a charisma-based spell for you, it's called Elbow to the Jaw!"