What do you think about vancian magic?

Complete and utter trash. It should never have been considered as the "standard" magic system.

What do you do when a low level party just spams Shield and Absorb Elements all the time though?

whats wrong with mana?
it still a resource that runs out eventually, but its a lot more flexible and simple to understand

>Who plays D&D for the setting though?
I'm guessing you've never played planescape

What do you do when a low level fighter just spams sword attacks all the time though?

False equivalence, you stupid cuck

It worked in a Vancian setting.

Vancian settings are not built for adventuring parties. They're built for groups of absurdly powerful mages who go on journeys across the cosmos to look for the source of the IOUN stones.

Or for solo cuntish rogue types who get through life by tricking and lying and occasionally murdering while stumbling upon super powerful artifacts and triggering ancient evils then noping the fuck out of there.

Mazirian the Magician prepared 2 greater and 3 lesser spells when chasing that one chick he wanted to do terrible rapey things to, and the spells were extremely limited in their scope. And once he ran out of spells he died due to tentacle bukkake, because tentacles.

If you want to do proper Vancian magic, you need to drastically step up your application of tentacle bukkake. Just tentacles everywhere.

I think it's better suited for Tabletop Gaming due to better manageable bookkeeping. Every time I play a psion, I either have to use my phone, or go through three pencils a night.

Nothing? If everyone in the party took Shield as one of their handful of spells, you're going to have a bunch of Wizards burning through magic really quickly and not having enough for anything else.

And of course, if they just took Shield and Not Mage armor, then their AC won't be much better than a Fighter with a mundane shield anyway.

And absorb elements is just resistance, not immunity, so that's half damage at most from any given spell.

So in conclusion, run everything as normal, then watch as they find out 17 AC and 6 hp isn't enough to win the entire game?

Either way, it's certainly more thematic to have a low level Abjuration mage who is good at using Mage armor and shield for long periods of time and keeping himself alive. It forces people to actually focus on what tricks their wizard has, rather than being some endless toolbox.

Your squad of Shield Wizards is also going to die in droves when they come across a 10 foot gap.

Nope, I love Vancian magic. I think the resource management aspect is great. When someone swings a sword, they don't usually stop and think about whether it will fatigue them, break the sword, or cripple them in some future conflict. They just do it. Vancian magic turns that sword swing (or rather, a spell) into a potentially debilitating decision. Every spell has more gravity to it because of that. It sucks if people just hoard their spells, so I think if you use Vancian magic it's important to emphasize to the players that it's better to run out of spells than it is to let them go to waste.

I like 5e's semi-Vancian (prepared spells + unassigned spell slots) better for gaming and pure Vancian better for writing.

I find pure Vancian a bit of a pain in the ass to DM for because it ties too much effective power level into how well the player guessed what they're going to need that day and it's especially a gigantic pain in the ass if I have to work in anything new on the fly and balance accordingly.

While we're on the topic:
I'm planning what is basically a con game of 5E for complete newbs soon. I'll make pre-generated characters. As 5E sheets are very elegant, I have space on the back for the caster's spellbook and would like to put an explanation on there that teaches someone who has never played DnD before how to use Vancian magic.

What needs to be on there, and in what order would it make the most sense?

Great for Vance Novels, shit for game design.

>D&D5 is the most dominant game on the market today
>Uses Vancian casting
>Vancian Magic is dead

Lolwut?

I would just use the spellpoint patient. Easier to get across the idea that they have a pool and spells cost different numbers of points

honestly, I think spell points are actually more complicated than spell slots.

5e isn't Vancian. Its use of "slots" is just predivided MP.

>You have X mana
>these spells cost Y mana, these spells cost Z mana
>you get your mana back after you sleep

Hm, put like that you have a point. And since it's going to be level 5, it will avoid the issues I had with my high level psions in 3.5.
spell points it is!

Doesn't the Eldritch Knight completely depose the vancian system, since they don't write down any of their spells, and they are all stored in their memory? And the definition of Vancian Magic is that you forget the spell after it is cast?

Yeah, at lower levels there won't be many issues with the player blowing all their points on high level spells instead. Best of luck to you with it!

>Unorinically calling 5e closer to MP than Vancian
Are you seriously so brainwashed by playing nothing but OGL 3.5 that the slightest imperceptible minutia makes you genuinely believe it's different?

firewalling top-level casts makes mages reliable boss killers, while limiting even low-level casts means you can make high-level spells less efficient, and thus low-level mages interesting instead of exp leeches, rather than more efficient, without inviting console-style "the party sits around while I cast Cure 1 50 times" minmaxing bullshit. i'm a fan.

Vancian magic was always just a thing that was relegated to Wizards in the first place. Cleric's have that "spontaneous casting" ability, along with the Druid. Sorcerer's don't even need to prepare spells, Paladin's get spell-like abilities, and Bard's can pretty much do whatever the fuck they want.

What is the difference?

Step one, I wouldn't do "spellbook" I'd just go ahead and pick spells for them. Con games, one-shots, and new players are situations where you don't want to throw any more of the system at them than you have to.

Step two, I like to make index-card tokens for each spell slot and then revise the spell list I give them to say "costs at least a lvl 2" or "costs at least a lvl 1" then put a * besides the ones that get a bonus when up-casted. Having the manipulatable cards go a long way towards helping people grasp the system as "spending" the resource.

If a system is Vancian, your preparation would look like "today I'll prepare 2 Shields, 2 Magic Missiles, and 2 Shatters" and that would be the only options you'd have. If you cast both Shields there'd be no way to cast a third because you only prepared 2 and if you didn't need your Shatters you just lose the spells.

5e runs on "I'll prepare Shield, Magic Missile, and Shatter and then I'll have 4 lvl 1 and 2 lvl 2 slots to spend on any of them in any combination so if I just need to cast Shield 6 times that's fine." It clearly comes out of the Vancian tradition but it's no longer truly Vancian.

What is this from?

It confuses me. When you read a Vance novel, his description of how magic works is literally memorization and spell slots.

How did he come up with this obviously game-driven system, decades before gaming was invented?

Most likely from the Dying Earth RPG.

He studied physics and mining engineering in university, but it could be that he read some essays from the period on quantum physics or on math, such as Turing's essay on computable numbers.

From a narrative standpoint? I think it's fucking shit. There's no way to properly translate "I ran out of slots" into the world to explain why you can't cast a spell again without having to resort to completely different things to explain it.

From a player standpoint? I think it's fucking shit too. Having to prepare ahead and juggle with slot economy when you have a minimal amount of usable slots and you don't know the things you're gonna face is one of the worst experiences I've had while playing. Not to mention that preparing spells takes time, so leaving slots open doesn't save you in combat, which is when most of your spell desperation kicks in because you're facing something you didn't prepare for.

It also makes you choose your options very narrowly: you're either offensive or support, because preparing both combat and utility spells makes you lacking in both accounts thanks to the limited availability.

As the final nail on the coffin: pic related. At no point, EVER in your gaming experience should you feel the need to resort to a spreadsheet to organize your character's things because you're wasting too much time at the table dealing with it using pen and paper.

One of the many awful, awful things about the wretched cesspool of a game that is DnD.

I think it could be fun if used in a setting and system built for it.
I think making it the default magic system for D&D was a mistake, because it makes assumptions about the setting, restraining creativity.

...

I think its original incarnation was much better than what eventually made it into games

Any schlub could pick up a spellbook, memorize a spell and read it off in the space of minutes. Becoming a sorcerer was a matter of

>collecting the relevant books and magic artefacts (all of which were hard to come by in the post-apocalyptic techno future of the dying earth setting)
>learning the language the spells were written in (fucking up even one letter could trigger deadly miscast effects and the likelihood increased with the length and corresponding power of the spell)

Everyone in Vance's world was a thief, a fighting man and a magic user all in one, completely torpedoing the martial/caster divide.

>Everyone in Vance's world was a thief, a fighting man and a magic user all in one, completely torpedoing the martial/caster divide.
Yet somehow, thieves ended up stealing the Fighting man's utility and even when a Fighting Man gains magic, he's inherently shittier than a mage who is half his level.

Ain't that some shit?

It's great in a Dying Earth campaign.