Sorcerers-only magic 5e
Because I’m not going to be in a position to run this any time soon, I thought I should probably put this here rather than in Game Planning. But I’d be curious to hear people’s thoughts.
Starting a deliberately kitchen-sink game has made me think about a more restricted one, in which options were limited to give a more coherent feel to the world. Basically, it would be a 5e game in which the only casters were Sorcerers.
The idea would be that it would be set in a fantasy world that was pseudorealistic: humans only, fictional but mundane and vaguely plausible-ish states and societies at the usual D&D vaguely late-medieval Europe tech level. The closest thing there is to reliable magic is the sort of things that (non-spellcasting) monks can achieve. Nonhumans are mysterious and rare magical creatures, the Old People, and not playable. Then a bunch of people with Old People ancestry start to manifest magical powers, and the game is about the way in which that alters the balance of power, causes crises of religious belief, social revolution, etc. A bit Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but crossed with the X-Men.
Anyway, mechanically I think I would want to allow Sorcerers to access a wider spell list. One possibility would be to declare that one group can pull from the Cleric list, one from the Bard list, and so on, so there are multiple types of Sorcerer. Or I could go kitchen-sink and say that the whole spell list is available to everyone, probably on condition that you pick a theme and stick with it for the most part. (If evocation is your thing, X number of your spells must be evocation spells.). Thoughts?
The other thing would be to create Sorcerer half-casters to open up the possibilities. That’d be an area in which I’d be especially interested to hear how you think one could tweak the existing mechanics for Paladin, Elements Monk, Ranger, Arcane Trickster, and Eldritch Knight to give them partial versions of Sorcerer metamagic.
I’d also allow casters to pick any one of the three mental stats as their casting stat, representing different kinds of “uncanny” mental gifts that come with having magical powers.
Starting a deliberately kitchen-sink game has made me think about a more restricted one, in which options were limited to give a more coherent feel to the world. Basically, it would be a 5e game in which the only casters were Sorcerers.
The idea would be that it would be set in a fantasy world that was pseudorealistic: humans only, fictional but mundane and vaguely plausible-ish states and societies at the usual D&D vaguely late-medieval Europe tech level. The closest thing there is to reliable magic is the sort of things that (non-spellcasting) monks can achieve. Nonhumans are mysterious and rare magical creatures, the Old People, and not playable. Then a bunch of people with Old People ancestry start to manifest magical powers, and the game is about the way in which that alters the balance of power, causes crises of religious belief, social revolution, etc. A bit Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, but crossed with the X-Men.
Anyway, mechanically I think I would want to allow Sorcerers to access a wider spell list. One possibility would be to declare that one group can pull from the Cleric list, one from the Bard list, and so on, so there are multiple types of Sorcerer. Or I could go kitchen-sink and say that the whole spell list is available to everyone, probably on condition that you pick a theme and stick with it for the most part. (If evocation is your thing, X number of your spells must be evocation spells.). Thoughts?
The other thing would be to create Sorcerer half-casters to open up the possibilities. That’d be an area in which I’d be especially interested to hear how you think one could tweak the existing mechanics for Paladin, Elements Monk, Ranger, Arcane Trickster, and Eldritch Knight to give them partial versions of Sorcerer metamagic.
I’d also allow casters to pick any one of the three mental stats as their casting stat, representing different kinds of “uncanny” mental gifts that come with having magical powers.