Quote Originally Posted by Anonymouswizard View Post
Eh, D&D magic essentially needs a full rewrite, and skill-based magic isn't the worst way to do it (subdivide the skills enough and you wouldn't even need the resource management aspect). I actually really like skill based magic, and it's in every fantasy game I own bar one (maybe two? I can't remember if you get to add a skill in Keltia*).
Conversely, I think skill-based is probably one of the worst ways to go if you were to rewrite D&D magic, partly because it is in practically every fantasy game out there--say what you will about Vancian magic balance-wise, but it's certainly distinct flavor-wise and mechanically and rarely found outside D&D and its direct derivatives--but partly because D&D scales much more drastically than almost every other game out there, even other zero-to-hero ones, and skill-based stuff doesn't really scale that well unless you sharply restrict the math to the point that it's not really skill-based anymore.


Vancian magic doesn't "need" a rewrite at all. In and of itself, the base system is perfectly functional, well-balanced given its design goals, and can be fairly flexible within its constraints (prepared vs. spontaneous vs. a mix, class-specific spell lists vs. shared lists vs. tier lists, and so on). The problem is, and has always been, that individual spells can end up stronger or weaker than whatever balance point du jour you're aiming for, and that individual classes can have lists that are too broad or too narrow. That's why all the "replace Wizards with Beguiler-like classes" fixes work out well, why late Pathfinder settled on the 2/3 caster model, and so forth.

But it's very difficult to balance a system by taking a list of spells, sorting them into large categories, and applying blanket rulings. Not impossible, but you're better off building from the ground up.
Again, that's not really necessary. The vast majority of spells are basically fine--maybe a little strong or a little weak, maybe a little niche, maybe a little clunky, but there's a reason that when Pathfinder (or Arcana Evolved, or dozens of other 3e-based products) mucked around with the spell lists, most of the spells ended up unchanged except perhaps for trivial changes made so the developers could justify their paycheck. Most forumites here can rattle off the broken spells pretty easily, polymorph and gate and so on--and that's just the thing, there are just a fairly small set of broken spells (and, granted, a somewhat larger set that some think are totally fine and some thing are game-breakers too) but people take a look at a couple dozen spells out of the literal 3,000+ spells AD&D and 3e had and conclude that the whole system is broken, when you only really have to address the major outliers.

Which isn't to say that you couldn't or shouldn't go back to the drawing board, spell-wise--I've done plenty of tweaking in that area myself--just that it's not necessary to touch huge swaths of the spell list to improve balance, and it's not necessary to throw out Vancian to do that either.