Pages

Monday, May 29, 2017

Spontaneous Casters in Pathfinder

I have a weird relationship with spontaneous casters in Pathfinder: on the one hand, I think they're nifty; on the other hand, I think making spontaneous magic dependent upon the Charisma stat of the caster is one of the dumbest things I've ever read.

I mean, I get that Bards are charisma casters...
... I'm not arguing that they shouldn't be. I am in fact totally on board with having Bards and Skalds use Charisma as their spellcasting attribute, because being charismatic is what those classes are all about. They've essentially learned how to weaponize "being charming".

I'm just saying that I don't see why Sorcerers use charisma when Wizards who have the same damn spell list use intelligence. Furthermore, Sorcerers are intuitive casters; they just use inherent talent to will magic into existence rather than learned knowledge or skill. Which attribute handles intuition? It's certainly not Charisma! No, it's Wisdom, which is also the basis for Will Saves and therefore directly measures willpower. 

Honestly, if I had my way, Sorcerers would use Wisdom -- but that's the stat which Divine casters use. Does that mean Divine casters ought to be spontaneous casters, too? If someone wanted to play a regular cleric who prepares spells in the morning, should that mean they use Intelligence? And it goes around and around my skull like this for a while until I can't take it anymore, and I just give up.


I don't know why I can't just accept things as they are. This just BUGS me, and I can't let it go, but I can't figure out a way to fix things.

At this point, the only way I can think to make this work without inventing and entirely new stat whole cloth would be to make a spontaneous caster's class level the spellcasting attribute, as character level = character growth and the increased puissance that comes from practice. However, this would horribly hose those classes, because other classes use their key attribute to get bonus spells, set the level for resisting effect, overcoming spell resistance, etc.

The easiest solution would be to just eliminate Sorcerers and Oracles altogether, but I don't like that option either.

ARRGH. Help, please.



1 comment:

  1. The solution that comes to mind: Sorcerers depend on ancestral blood that flows through their veins liking them to cast magic, and Oracles depend on a bunch of gods thinking they're cool.

    ReplyDelete