My problem with D&D magic

I must have reworked D&D spell list like 30000 times (the last, a radical GLOG-based attempt can be found here) For me, the way magic is handled is the great flaw of the game; and its biggest missed opportunity.

The greatest points of my gaming history have been when no Magic Users nor Clerics have been involved at all; when the game felt more tangible and, paradoxically, magical. For a while I just didn't even allow them, and it lead me to discover the primal affinity between Fighting Men and Hobbits.

I love Earthsea and the Dying Earth: the hate is not to the Wizard figure on itself, its just that I feel that D&D just doesn't do them right. It works awesome in combat, fighters are solid, every other class makes sense on the practice, but not magic people.

At first I thought, like you are possibly thinking, that the problem was Vancian magic (even if its just ripped of from the aforementioned Dying Earth stories). Now I am putting together a clean, personal rules synthetized from Greyharp's OD&D, and, inspired by this entry, I want to try what it proposes: classic vancian, but with MUs preparing only one spell per day. But then, I start to read the spell list and its all crooked to me. And I think that I've pierced on the problem: they are appropiate for a boardgame such as Heroquest, in which you have a determined drive (kill enemies on dark corridors) and this explains why Clairvoyance, Clairaudience and ESP only need to work just six feet beyond the MU, or why they can cast a Fireball in a given area in squares with scalable damage, yet lighting a bonfire or a torch is not possible RAW. Fireball deals area damage, and Lightning Bolt deals damage in a line.

 

For another example, divination, a great part of magic in real life and in all related media, is messy and fake through a whole sack of specific tricks (detect evil, detect traps, locate object, detect magic, detect invisible, etc) whose use must be preemptivelly divinated by the player so he can prepare by guessing the most important thing to detect. Together with the Clairvoyance, Clairaudience, ESP trio, they seldom have any use outside the dark Heroquest tunnel. And I get that D&D is about dungeons, but its not only about that. It's a game of adventure first, and world exploration and dungeons second. Spells should make the world feel vibrant, but they instead paint it like a bland boardgame. And its worse the higher level the spells get: Wall of Iron? Wall of stone? Wall of Ice? really? But there is more: can you picture getting to level 12 and getting to cast this boring shit? :

 

Because that is the underlying fact on all this: spells are designed to have a given technical specifications in dungeons but are pretty much uninteresting outside them, and not really interesting in dungeons when they are useful. On my opinion, not even combat spells are really needed: thats why MUs increase their to-hits and why they pair up with fighting men. I'd be more invested on a game where they have more utility or even social spells, increasing their use on cities and civilized areas, and less firepower, which they have never needed.

Last but not least, I'd like to remember why magic is in the game at all. It is not to provide gamist buffs. The game doesnt even need that. It is there because magic adds a mood to the game you are living into during the game. It adds the possibility of invoking fire, of unleashing a storm, of creating wonder. The best of having magic is the possibility of introducing wonderful, lush, evocative, epic, thrilling, a e s t h e t i c scenes through it.

I don't know if what I'm describing its even possible, or if I will be able to do it. But now I know a little better what I am pursuing, even if it makes magic irrelevant in battle or impractical in dungeons, though I am sure that all those concepts are not mutually exclusive. A list itself, God willing, will be posted shortly.