I'm prooty happy with sorcerers, myself. To me, there's enough of a flavor difference between "magic you got from bargaining with an outside source" and "magic that's bursting from something within your own soul" to be worth exploring, and I think that mechanic-wise they've done a good job of making sure the differences come through.
I mean, in 3.X, there was throwaway fluff text about sorcerers maybe having innate magical powers because of some dragonish leanings in their blood or soul... the sorcerer was The Other Wizard Who Is Slightly Less Hamstrung By Vance with dragonblood as a handwave for why they were slightly less hamstrung. But in PHB2 they took that and ran with it for the dragonsoul sorcerer and came up with something that is distinct and cool and distinctly cool. And then they took the competing explanation, that some people just have a natural innate affinity for wild magic, and they ran with that, and they came up with something that fits that, and that is also distinct and cool and distinctly cool.
Looking at them, I wondered where they would go from there... the two initial examples of power sources both managed to encompass the entire elemental spectrum and I wondered how many examples they could come up with that would do the same for Arcane Power and further supplements, but as you obviously know they were cleverer than that. Storm magic and cosmic magic.
Warlock and Sorcerer are really two of my favorite things about 4E, because between them you get a sense that magic is big, it's bigger than one person or one school or one system and there are many different ways of approaching it. From AD&D onward there was the idea of "Specialists", but you wouldn't necessarily know a necromancer from a mage who had necromancy spells. 4E gives different magic characters distinctive flavors and flairs in a way that I've never seen outside of GURPS, only they're all laid out before you which makes it easier to put a group together and just get a game going.
Edit To Add:
And while "Illusionist" fit into the Wizard class, I've got a feeling that certain specialties of magic... like Necromancer... will show up as their own classes when we get to other power sources... like Dark. If so, that will really highlight the ability of 4E to make different types of characters distinct from one another. In my 2nd edition AD&D PHB, it explains that Clerics are meant to be battle priests in the model of the hospitalers and Druids are merely included as an example of "priests of another mythos", with the idea that DMs and players can come up with other ones, when from the beginning they are very clearly an entirely separate class of characters and adding another one like them would take considerable mechanical adjustment. Illusionists are similarly included as the canonical example of a specialist mage, but they follow a simple set of rules that are laid out for each of the "schools" of magic and are in no way to mages as druids are to clerics. A true necromancer class should be as distinct from a common mage as a druid is from a cleric, and the fact that in 4E druids and clerics have been severed completely gives me hope that we'll get a kick-ass necromancer.
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ninetydegrees
no subject
on 2009-05-14 04:19 pm (UTC)I mean, in 3.X, there was throwaway fluff text about sorcerers maybe having innate magical powers because of some dragonish leanings in their blood or soul... the sorcerer was The Other Wizard Who Is Slightly Less Hamstrung By Vance with dragonblood as a handwave for why they were slightly less hamstrung. But in PHB2 they took that and ran with it for the dragonsoul sorcerer and came up with something that is distinct and cool and distinctly cool. And then they took the competing explanation, that some people just have a natural innate affinity for wild magic, and they ran with that, and they came up with something that fits that, and that is also distinct and cool and distinctly cool.
Looking at them, I wondered where they would go from there... the two initial examples of power sources both managed to encompass the entire elemental spectrum and I wondered how many examples they could come up with that would do the same for Arcane Power and further supplements, but as you obviously know they were cleverer than that. Storm magic and cosmic magic.
Warlock and Sorcerer are really two of my favorite things about 4E, because between them you get a sense that magic is big, it's bigger than one person or one school or one system and there are many different ways of approaching it. From AD&D onward there was the idea of "Specialists", but you wouldn't necessarily know a necromancer from a mage who had necromancy spells. 4E gives different magic characters distinctive flavors and flairs in a way that I've never seen outside of GURPS, only they're all laid out before you which makes it easier to put a group together and just get a game going.
Edit To Add:
And while "Illusionist" fit into the Wizard class, I've got a feeling that certain specialties of magic... like Necromancer... will show up as their own classes when we get to other power sources... like Dark. If so, that will really highlight the ability of 4E to make different types of characters distinct from one another. In my 2nd edition AD&D PHB, it explains that Clerics are meant to be battle priests in the model of the hospitalers and Druids are merely included as an example of "priests of another mythos", with the idea that DMs and players can come up with other ones, when from the beginning they are very clearly an entirely separate class of characters and adding another one like them would take considerable mechanical adjustment. Illusionists are similarly included as the canonical example of a specialist mage, but they follow a simple set of rules that are laid out for each of the "schools" of magic and are in no way to mages as druids are to clerics. A true necromancer class should be as distinct from a common mage as a druid is from a cleric, and the fact that in 4E druids and clerics have been severed completely gives me hope that we'll get a kick-ass necromancer.