Quote Originally Posted by Ziegander View Post
And yet I'm not talking about "utility magic." I'm talking about a system of non-combat effects for characters regardless of class.

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Your concept of a character that is strictly utility only works for certain classes.
I was responding specifically to Nu's suggestion to split spells by combat vs. utility, hence the reference to Vancian magic and 4e rituals, not to your general suggestion of giving everyone utility abilities. I'm fully in favor of spreading the noncombat ability love around to every class, though as I said I doubt WotC will deliver. They did a pretty good job of it in SWSE, but that was a different team at the helm and they didn't learn anything from it for 4e.

And this brings me to the "three pillars design" that Mearls and company keep touting, but ultimately, I predict, will fail horribly to deliver. If each of the three pillars (Combat, Social, Exploration) were given equal weight with regards to design as well as importance to character and inter-party balance, then sacrificing combat effectiveness for utility in one of the other areas would be acceptable. However, nothing we have seen thus far indicates that the Social and Exploration pillars hold any significance to player characters whatsoever. Which is sad, especially when you consider that the Rogue was originally imagined as, and continues to be designed as if it were, the "out-of-combat guy." We have the Rogue set up to be the skills master, except, just like in 3.5 and 4e, skills don't matter. Maybe they matter a little bit more than in 3.5 or 4e, or maybe they matter even less it's really hard to tell so far. But in the first playtest, because of this, the Rogue was the weakest class. In the second playtest, we didn't get an increased importance to the non-combat "pillars" of adventuring, no, we got a Rogue with increased combat power.
I hate to jump on the "SWSE is the direction 4e/5e should have taken" bandwagon, but...yeah, SWSE did a good job with the utility abilities. Skills actually do stuff (hello, Use Computer, Mechanics, Persuasion, Knowledge [Tactics], Pilot, Use the Bleepin' Force...), most of the Noble, Scout, and Scoundrel talents are noncombat-related, you can build a character of any class (except Soldier, really, and even then it has some good noncombat abilities to splash in) as an all-utility character, and the exploration and interaction portions of the game just generally were better mechanically supported.

I liked the suggestion someone made right after the first playtest packet came out, when some people were complaining about themes and backgrounds not doing enough for noncombat situations, that class should give you combat abilities, specialty/theme should give you utility/exploration abilities, and background should give you interaction abilities. On the magic side, you might pick the Wizard or Sorcerer class for your typical warmage blaster spells and features, the Conjurer theme/specialty for transportation (or Illusionist for illusions or Transmuter for terrain shaping and so forth), and the Court Magician (or Hedge Witch or Spell-for-Hire) background for various social abilities and features; on the nonmagic side, your Fighter or Barbarian class might give you tanky front-line combat feats and features while your theme/specialty of Scout gave you exploration and movement abilities (or teamwork stuff from Warlord or wilderness stuff from Ranger or whatever) and your background of Knight (or Mercenary or Samurai) accounted for social stuff.

Instead, we get backgrounds that are just a package of the same dubiously-useful-for-social-stuff skills and specialties that don't even pretend to be noncombat-focused. Not very promising.