Vancian Magic (Arcane Edition)
A PRACTICAL PERSPECTIVE
“Mischief moves somewhere near and I must blast it with my magic!”
― Jack Vance in “Turjan of Miir” from The Dying Earth
Vancian magic, named for its original creator Jack Vance, is the style of “spell slot” magic popularized by Dungeons & Dragons. In it, magic users take time to make lengthy spell preparations in advance so they can complete the spell later in the day with nothing more than a trigger procedure and, perhaps, a material component or physical focus. It works well for D&D because it requires comparatively little bookkeeping, since casters work with discrete slots instead of a pool of points and the slots essentially refresh when the character sleeps instead of throughout the day. This process becomes strained, however, at higher levels, when casters have twenty or more spell slots to prepare. It also cripples the power of magic-users, since, as most DMs apply this system, they have to prepare their spells before they have any idea what sort of challenges they’ll face throughout the day. This renders sometimes 90% of the caster’s spellbook inaccessible.
Greetings, friends! Today we’re looking at one of the most divisive magical paradigms in all of RPG fandom. As we consider it, I ask you to remember that in an RPG, rules are intended to enhance our enjoyment of the game; and that when we DM our own campaigns, the game rules are ultimately in our hands.
SPELL SLOTS BY THE SYSTEM
In the original source material of Vance’s Dying Earth stories, a magical spell is living knowledge that burns itself upon the wizard’s brain when ze reads it, straining the capacity of hir mind and striving to unleash itself into the world through hir. Spells are mostly-forgotten lore from the height of the earth’s civilizations, and men struggle to hold onto their mastery as time and learning slip from a declining world. Wizards are the fearsome, terrifying men and women that wield this power, and any wizard with spells is a force to be feared.
In this world, wizards prepare spells before they leave the sanctuary of their libraries. They shudder to cast the last of their readied spells for fear of being powerless. Novice wizards can only hold a single, weak spell in their minds, and they’re exhausted by the effort of casting it. With exercise, though, a mage can train hir mind to hold a handful of powerful spells and cast them in a day.
If you read these stories, you can understand the excitement the game creators must have felt when they adapted it for their first campaigns--the narrative is bewitching, and it makes you yearn to master eldritch lore of your own.
Dungeons & Dragons takes its mechanics from this system more or less faithfully. It stays true to the scarcity of power at low levels, and it makes up for the one-shot nature of low-level wizards by providing magic items like scrolls, wands, and potions that a wizard can carry with hir to augment hir arsenal. At higher levels, depending on the edition you’re playing, the wizard has more than enough magic to cast spells through several encounters without having to rely on magic items at all.
For it to work as intended, this system requires the DM to either award or allow the PCs to gain magic items regularly. If ze doesn’t, low level PC magic-users will be effective glass cannons: they’ll use their spell and then they’ll be stuck on the sidelines in combat for the rest of the day while enemy NPCs (because of each NPC’s inherently one-shot nature) cast spell after spell at them. If they do get enough magic items, though, magic-users will have potions to buff their teammates as appropriate, wands to continue attacking enemies after their spell slots are gone, and scrolls to fill out their spell arsenals.
Notice that this relies on two things: first, the DM has to provide magic items or give the PCs a chance to buy or craft them. The fabled Foolish DM, of course, will unbalance hir campaign with inappropriately powerful magic items. Far more common is the stingy DM, who keeps the PCs from getting any magic items and thereby forces them to rely on their own stats or on hirelings and NPC allies. Wizards, who are designed in the system to rely on magic items, suffer from this dearth far more than their martial-minded allies.
Second, the players have to know how to use magic items in this system. Many players don’t realize the usefulness of noncombat spells, so they turn their noses up at scrolls and potions that could rescue their parties from dangerous situations, simply because they don’t deal damage. Other players prefer saving up their money for rings or cloaks or staves, so they neglect the one-use items designed to keep them in the fight after they’ve used up their daily spells.
If either piece of this puzzle is missing, you end up with dissatisfied players and the myth that 1st-level wizards in AD&D are worthless after the first encounter of the day. (They’re not!... unless the player doesn’t learn how to think like a 1st-level wizard.)
A CHARACTER’S VIEW
Before we examine any rules, let’s look at the magic system from the ground-level perspective of the character bound by it. Even though ze’s a wizard, the character has no metagame knowledge of the rules. To hir, the rules are simply how the world works. An apple falls down when you drop it, and a spell stays prepared in your mind until you cast it.
Brannigan the Austere is a young (some would say impetuous) human wizard. He has no less than nineteen spells in his spellbook, a truly formidable sum achieved through rigorous study, and he can cast six spells of varying levels in a day. It takes him maybe an hour to prepare spells for casting. (10 minutes per spell level for each spell in AD&D. Casting a ninth-level spell cost you an hour and a half of study time, so you held on to those spells until you really needed them!)
Brannigan doesn’t have a set time he prepares spells in a day. (What does he look like, some halfwit priest?) Instead, he waits until he knows what he’s doing. He researches the task so he’ll know which spells will be most helpful to him. He may allow his party members to make suggestions or requests as to which spells he prepares, although he’ll reserve the final judgment for himself--after all, he knows the capabilities of his magic far better than any tramping barbarian or fluffing bard!
And don’t get the impression that he’s going to tell his allies what he has in his spellbook. Bran’s spellbook is the single most valuable possession he has; he guards it with his life. If he were to lose it somehow, it would be a disaster that could spell the end of his life, or worse: the end of his career as a wizard. He guards his spellbook as jealously as any dragon hoards gold.
So Brannigan takes the time to make informed decisions about which spells he’s going to prepare. In the depths of an enemy castle, Hold Portal may be the spell that saves his life, while Fireball might as well be Water Breathing for all the good it does him. If it takes all day to track down the information that the Witch of the Well has a Ring of Fire Resistance and he loses an entire day of spell slots, it won’t bother Bran in the least. When he sets to preparing his spells that evening, he’ll memorize Lightning Bolt instead of Flaming Sphere. He knows this knowledge may make the difference between victory and death.
Although his friends Traven Trueblood and Mogg can fight bandits and undead all day with sword and mace, Brannigan is keenly aware that his spellcasting abilities are very limited. Since he won’t be able to convince them not to take on every group of skeletons they meet, though, he augments his natural abilities with trinkets and baubles that give him an edge in combat. His grandmother’s Amulet of Protection never leaves his neck. He bought a citrine ring of True Strike from a talismonger last year that can give an attack spell a nudge when he really needs it to hit its mark. Along with these mainstays, he always carries a wand of Magic Missiles and usually has another useful wand, like Acid Arrow. He carries perhaps a dozen different scrolls on which he can rely in a pinch: Summon Monster, Protection from Arrows, Magic Weapon. The kinds of spells he might like to have on hand, but won’t need at his fingertips at all times. Finally, he has a belt filled with vials of potions to save himself when he’s in a bind: Feather Fall. Expeditious Retreat. Mirror Image.
These items don’t come cheaply--in fact, some of them are downright expensive. Bran doesn’t care. These are the things that let him explore ancient ruins in search of fantastic artifacts, that give him the power he needs to take on evil priests, wizards, and monsters that threaten his homeland. To Bran, these are simply the tools of his trade, and he pays for them or takes the time to craft them as willingly as an archer pays for magic arrows or a rogue pays for masterwork lockpicks.
THE RULES
As long as the DM allows an arcane caster to prepare hir spells whenever ze wants, the rules, as written, are fine. It’s even within the realm of possibility that a wizard might prepare some but not all of hir spells at the same time, although that’s not strictly in keeping with the spirit of the system. From the system’s perspective, the daily component of spell slots isn’t really all that important: what’s important is that the wizard can only hold so many spells in hir mind at one time. If a DM wants to allow a wizard to prepare spells more than once per day, as long as the wizard doesn’t exceed hir slot allotment, it’s within the realm of possibility inside the system that ze would be able to do that. The limiting factor in that case would likely be the individual wizard’s threshold for mental fatigue.
That’s purely theoretical, of course. According to a strict reading, a wizard only has X number of spell slots per day. Ze can prepare all of hir spells at once, but ze cannot cast more than the specified number of spells in a single day. Under this interpretation of the rules, a wizard might, indeed, find reason to hold back preparing some of hir spells for later in the day, and the DM should probably allow that.
Notice, I’m not talking about divine casters here. They follow different rules for preparing spells. We’ll consider them later.
These are the rules, as written. Personally, I tend to houserule the rules as written. A lot. As such, here are my 3 personal amendments and corollaries to Vancian Magic:
Wizards can prepare spells whenever they want to.
It takes about 15 minutes to prepare a spell, but a wizard can prepare several spells at the same time. Most wizards can prepare all their daily spells in about an hour. (I prefer the 3rd-edition rules to the 2nd-edition ones.) The DM can rule, based on the individual spell or circumstance, that it takes longer to prepare higher-level spells or to prepare spells in distracting environments.
It’s insulting to make wizards follow the same preparation rules that clerics follow. They’re not beholden to a higher power for their magic, so there’s no reason they have to prepare spells at a certain time of day or all at once.Spell Slots represent a mage’s ability to prepare and cast magical spells on the spot.
A wizard uses a spell ze’s memorized when ze needs to cast quickly, like in the heat of battle. It’s the strain of casting under extreme pressure, as well as the effort of holding the spell in hir mind, that causes the wizard the serious fatigue that tests hir limits.Therefore, wizards can cast a spell with a ritual instead of memorizing it.
4th edition explored this line of thought a little, but I prefer to apply it universally to all spells, not just to a cherry-picked few.
Casting a spell ritual requires the wizard’s spellbook and any necessary components and takes about 15 minutes or the casting time, whichever is longer. This does not consume any of the wizard’s spell slots for the day. In addition, since ze’s performing the preparation for the spell on the spot, the wizard does not need to have the spell prepared--ze can cast any spell from hir spellbook.
While it’s fair for the DM to require the caster to have a quiet environment and some additional components like a focusing circle or candles to cast a ritual, you shouldn’t place any restrictions on the wizard you wouldn’t place on hir while preparing hir daily spells. Essentially, this is the same process as that, except that the caster isn’t going to try to cram the spell into hir mind after the preparations are complete.
It’s also understandable that a DM might be tempted to require the wizard to have a free spell slot of the appropriate level before ze can cast a ritual--but don’t. There’s no reason a wizard should have to have an empty spell slot if ze isn’t going to slot the spell for later use. It’d be like emptying out your refrigerator so you can cook supper: odd and more than a little pointless.
Now, some people hate Vancian magic with a flaming fireball passion. Other people love it. Some people don’t even realize there are other types of magic systems out there.
Personally I find it annoying under most DMs, but I have to admit that, within a proper narrative environment, the physics of Vancian magic can be compelling.
Even then, though, I usually prefer magic in Mage or Ars Magica or Shadowrun. That’s just me. lol
So how do you feel about D&D magic? Do you love it? If not, which system do you prefer?
I love talking magic systems, so talk to me! Let me know in the comments.
Game well, my friends.
Jonathan
