Vancian Casting Flavour

[Draemr]

Hi, this isn't a particularly urgent post but I'm getting back into D&D (Pathfinder to be exact) after a few years out and I'm curious about something.

When playing arcane, I'd make Sorcerers because I liked their spellcasting system roleplaying-wise.

I'd like to play a Wizard this time around because I can't take the tragedy of always being a spell level behind :smallsigh: but I don't quite understand the flavour behind preparing spells and losing them as soon as you cast.

I was wondering, what is it that happens in-game when a wizard casts and how do people handle it RP-wise? Is it an issue? Do people have different takes/explanations?

Someone pointed out that wizards might be completing/triggering spells that they cast during their morning prep and that's what limits their spells per day. Is this the official explanation?

If so, does that reflect an evolution of magic (in-game) where spells used to involve lengthier rituals to cast and took effect once said ritual was complete? Contrasted with now when wizards can defer the activation of a spell?

[Psyren]

Initially I hated Vancian; the idea that a wizard or cleric would gain localized, selective amnesia for something that he does every day (even multiple times per day) was tough for me to reconcile.

But someone (I forget who) had an alternate hypothesis that I liked - rather than repeatedly committing spells to memory and then forgetting them during the day, wizardry instead involves "pre-casting" spells. In other words, casting wizard spells specifically is a long and involved process - so long, in fact, that the majority of each spell must be cast at the beginning of the day, prior to combat, lest magic itself be too impractical for use in stressful situations.

This explanation also covers divine magic and sorcery. Divine casters aren't actually casting the spells themselves - they are praying, i.e. asking a deity or other divine force to cast on their behalf. This is also why Clerics and Druids know their entire list - because their gods (or ideals etc.) do. As for Sorcerers - they can cast spontaneously because their force of will and magical heritage involve forcing (or fooling) the universe into believing that they followed the full process that a wizard does, and reacting accordingly. But they can only do this for select spells, while a Wizard (who actually knows what he's doing) has no limit on the spells he can learn how to cast.

It's not perfect, but I do like it better than the notion of wizards with Alzheimer's.

[kardar233]

But someone (I forget who) had an alternate hypothesis that I liked - rather than repeatedly committing spells to memory and then forgetting them during the day, wizardry instead involves "pre-casting" spells. In other words, casting wizard spells specifically is a long and involved process - so long, in fact, that the majority of each spell must be cast at the beginning of the day, prior to combat, lest magic itself be too impractical for use in stressful situations.

It's not my idea, but I had a post about this... let me dig it up.

Basically, at the beginning of the day when you prepare your spells, you're speaking the invocation of the spell (which is massive, taking up several pages) and then freezing it in your mind short one crucial section. You only prepare a certain number of these spells per day as limited by your memory and ability to hold massive frameworks of reality-rewriting power in your little tiny mind. When it comes time to cast the spell, you recall the nearly-completed incantation and add the final phrase, set of magical passes etc.

And scrolls are easily explainable here too. Instead of holding a whole mystical tapestry in your mind, you're committing it to paper. However, just writing the thing down leaves you with a powerless set of letters just like what's in your spellbook. What you actually need to do is to cast the (nearly complete) spell yourself and then splinter off a piece of your mind (specifically, the one holding the spell) into your specially-prepared scroll. If you're cutting off chunks of your mind to make these magical items, it's going to be hard to make enough room in your head to expand your repertoire.

[toapat]

Someone pointed out that wizards might be completing/triggering spells that they cast during their morning prep and that's what limits their spells per day. Is this the official explanation?

that is basically Vancian in a bag. the way they limit what you can prepare is kinda irritating, and has no real explanation in terms of why you are limited in such a way.

the real strength of vancian casting is how it "more" easily portraits a studious caster then spontaneous casting can. the disadvantage is of course vancian is incredibly bookkeeping intensive.

[Psyren]

It also doesn't explain why you can't just, if you get another hour of downtime during the day, re-prepare everything you've already cast. Especially since you CAN prep during the day, so long as you leave some slots open after you wake up, so it's not a simple matter of only having the proper mindset when you're fresh from sleep.

So there is still some mystical component to it. All x/day casters, including wizards, have an internal store/pool of energy, and no amount of studiousness can overcome that limit. But once you acknowledge the existence of energy pools, a points-based system becomes more appropriate.

[kardar233]

It also doesn't explain why you can't just, if you get another hour of downtime during the day, re-prepare everything you've already cast. Especially since you CAN prep during the day, so long as you leave some slots open after you wake up, so it's not a simple matter of only having the proper mindset when you're fresh from sleep.

So there is still some mystical component to it. All x/day casters, including wizards, have an internal store/pool of energy, and no amount of studiousness can overcome that limit. But once you acknowledge the existence of energy pools, a points-based system becomes more appropriate.

I don't know about you, but I've never tried holding massive mystical frameworks of reality-rewriting power in my head. I'd think that would be a fair bit more exhausting than cramming for a final, and I feel like I've forgotten everything I know after one of those.

[Inglenook]

Aside from the pre-casting spells in the morning/finishing them later by adding a word or phrase, I've also seen the following explanation:

Spells are "alive" in a sense, powerful and yearning to break free. And so the act of memorizing them is more akin to caging a wild animal than remembering a bunch of nonsense words (except the cage is your brain). The training to become a wizard involves learning to tame the magic without it destroying your mind, and the higher your intelligence, the greater your capacity to keep spells under control.

Casting a spell just means that you "release" it, and channel it in a way that's advantageous for you. The stress of having the spell pent up in your head all day leaves the mind exhausted, and you can't contain any more new spells until you've had proper time to rest.

Scrolls are similar, except the spell is caged inside a piece of parchment rather than your head.
Which doesn't really gel well with the fluff as written, but I quite like it. Add in some sort of mental fatigue after casting X number of spells, and possibly a small chance of wild magic (if your control over the spell slips), and it would fit nicely.

[SpaceBadger]

I'm not a fan of Vancian myself so I don't bother to rationalize it, but if you are looking for some way to fluff it or justify it to yourself, maybe read The Dying Earth (four novels in one volume) from which it came.

I seem to recall Cugel thinking about how memorizing a spell created some sort of magic trigger in his brain, which was released when the spell was cast. I don't remember Rhialto or various other wizards making that big a deal of it.

[Psyren]

I don't know about you, but I've never tried holding massive mystical frameworks of reality-rewriting power in my head. I'd think that would be a fair bit more exhausting than cramming for a final, and I feel like I've forgotten everything I know after one of those.

That's the problem with your analogy - cramming for a final once would indeed be exhausting, and leave you with little of the actual information you studied afterwards. But cramming repeatedly for the exact same final - all the questions identical and in the same order, day after day after day - should eventually become so easy that it demands nothing of you mentally. Rather like how your first driving test can be very stressful, but eventually driving itself becomes such a completely instinctive process after a long time of doing it every day.

Which is why I don't like "memorization" as being a part of Vancian at all - repetition is the key to memory, yet repetition has absolutely no bearing on the ease or difficulty of Vancian at all. Whether you prepare the same set of spells every day, radically change your layout every morning, or even prepare one spell over and over in all your slots for weeks, Vancian doesn't care. Thus there has to be more to it than simply holding the information in your head.

[Ianuagonde]

The fluff from the Dying Earth books and the Dying Earth RPG: you can cast spells from your spellbook. This takes about an hour, and is relatively easy. Since this is too long when faced with impending danger, there is an alternative. You can cast almost the entire spell from your spellbook, but leave out the last finishing incantations/gestures. When you speak the last few words and make the last few gestures (a matter of seconds), the spell is finished and you get the appropriate result.

This is hard, however. Your mind is bursting with nearly-released spell energy, demanding constant focus and concentration to keep bottled up. A starting magician can manage to keep two, maybe three of these in his head. A more experienced wizard is, of course, able to keep more of these spells in his mind. This also explains the need for rememorization: you did not commit the spell to memory, you were casting it, delayed the last bits while you went to do other stuff, and then finished casting.

To use the second best analogy: compare it to using a gun. You can keep two pound of pressure on a three pound trigger for a few seconds: easy enough. Can you keep doing that for an hour? For a day? Without it interfering with your everyday activities?
Now consider using two guns (one in each hand), and trying to keep two pounds of pressure on each of the three-pound triggers. It gets very hard very fast.

It is not a matter of information, but of energy and focus.

[IncoherentEssay]

I originally wrote this in the 5e thread in response to "Vancian wizards don't make sense" arguments so it might read a bit clunkily but it's still perfectly servicable here:

For making Vancian casting make sense in-setting, i like to compare it to electron shells. Every creature has some personal ambient magic surrounding it (whether it is "anchored" by the soul or the truename is hotly depated in wizarding circles). A wizard prepares spells by imprinting the patterns for his spells into these spell-shells, and cast spells by triggerin those patterns so that they react with the Weave/equilavent to produce the desired effects. A smarter/more experienced wizard uses the available shell-space more efficiently and can prepare more spells/level, and a more expirienced wizard learns to reach further out into the spell-shells where he has more space for more complex configurations (higher level spells).
Vancian spells are so specific because they are the stable effects (initially discovered more-or-less by poke-it-with-a-stick guesswork) that can be reproduced reliably, sort of llike command in a developer's console for reality.

Now, by this model it's entirely possible to make up random patterns and hope you discover a new spell or to reach out into spell-shells beyond your skills. This is roughly equilavent of throwing random input into the console: most of the time it does nothing and occasionally will screw you over horribly. The odds of landing on something actually useful are pretty much zero, so no new mechanics are required to represent this.

Similarly, discharged patterns can't be reused immediately because discharging them doesn't drop them to their zero-state, leaving them cluttered with the remnants of the spell. Trying to prepare spells over used ones tends to corrupt them, bringing us back to "throw random input at reality, hope it doesn't backfire".
All of this is only necessary to know for wizards though. Spontaneous casters
instictively know a limited number of patterns they can set up and discharge on the fly, though they still need to "reset" the spell-shells before use. Prepared divine casters connect to their source (wheter deity or cosmic principle) and request their spells, effectively outsourcing the preparation.

[TuggyNE]

I don't know about you, but I've never tried holding massive mystical frameworks of reality-rewriting power in my head. I'd think that would be a fair bit more exhausting than cramming for a final, and I feel like I've forgotten everything I know after one of those.

Not to brag, but I generally don't cram for finals, and I do manage to do quite well on them, nor do I generally forget most of what I learned immediately after. So why, then, are wizards (more intelligent than me, and more disciplined as well) so horribly incapable of recasting spells? I really don't think it's because they've universally spent their lives cramming. The alternate explanations, having to do with pre-cast spells, semi-living magic, or possibly magical valences, seem to be much more plausible.

[olentu]

Not to brag, but I generally don't cram for finals, and I do manage to do quite well on them, nor do I generally forget most of what I learned immediately after. So why, then, are wizards (more intelligent than me, and more disciplined as well) so horribly incapable of recasting spells? I really don't think it's because they've universally spent their lives cramming. The alternate explanations, having to do with pre-cast spells, semi-living magic, or possibly magical valences, seem to be much more plausible.

I personally prefer the one where your brain is replaced with magical revolvers.

[BShammie]

I don't know about you, but I've never tried holding massive mystical frameworks of reality-rewriting power in my head. I'd think that would be a fair bit more exhausting than cramming for a final, and I feel like I've forgotten everything I know after one of those.
Not to brag, but I generally don't cram for finals, and I do manage to do quite well on them, nor do I generally forget most of what I learned immediately after.
That's because cramming doesn't work. My Psych teacher was talking about this last week, she said that cramming doesn't give your brain enough time to turn the new info into memories.
I don't have a link at the moment, but I'll try and find one.

[Morty]

I've always favoured the version with casting spells in the morning and firing them off later. Not only does it make sense, it's also supported by the SRD. (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicOverview/arcaneSpells.htm#preparedSpellRetention)

[TuggyNE]

I personally prefer the one where your brain is replaced with magical revolvers.

Or, perhaps, preloaded (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/weaps/mk-41-vls.htm) rocket tubes (http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/weaps/mk-41-vls.htm)*? :smallwink:


*I attempted to find terser links, but failed.

[ThiagoMartell]

Both 3.5 and Pathfinder don't use vancian fluff, actually.
Casting a spell is a long and detailed process. Most of this process is done as you prepare spells in the morning - you're "pre-casting", if you will. Actually casting the spell is just adding some finishing touches.

EDIT: ninja'd

[Jack_Simth]

Someone pointed out that wizards might be completing/triggering spells that they cast during their morning prep and that's what limits their spells per day. Is this the official explanation? In 3.5, yes. It wasn't always that way.

Myself, if I'm explianing magic, I'm fond of:

When someone asks me?

For the most part, Wizard's can't touch magic directly. Sure, they can do a few things every here and there, and they can apply mystic energy.... but mostly, they're stuck powering the awkward "magical circutry" which is their spellbook. Apply energy here, here, and here for fifteen minutes, putting a variance in the energy then to control certain options, and the painted "circuts" manipulate the energies into an energy packet which can then be picked up and maintained with almost no effort. In a scroll, the energy packet is tied to the parchment; the spellcraft roll to copy represents figuring out how that particular packet of energy was shaped; the spellcraft roll to familiarize yourself with it for later casting represents tracking down which tabs for triggering are appropriet; the caster level check for activating a scroll with a caster level higher than yours represents seeing if you can manage the force needed to activate the stored spell. When using a borrowed spellbook, the Spellcraft check represents tracking down where to apply energy properly (they don't come with instructions) and how to pick up the resultant packet. The Wizard doesn't so much cast a spell as build and invoke one. It's something he picks up and uses, not something that's a part of him. This explaination also covers why it takes a 20th level specialist Wizard with in excess of fifty spell slots and 227.5 spell levels (counting 0th level spells as half a level) a full fifteen minutes to prepare a cantrip in an empty slot; fifteen minutes is the minimum needed to run and retreive a "spell program"; it's just that the Wizard is capable of running more than one such at a time, so he can run (prepare) his fifty spells in an hour. As a bonus, this explains why scribing a spell into a spellbook is expensive - the wizard is painting magical circutry onto the pages... possibly using things like gold and platinum directly.

A Sorcerer's magic is virtually a part of him. He touches it directly and shapes it through raw mystic force. Like most cases of the biological vs. the mechanical, it's a lot more effecient; the spell a Wizard takes fifteen minutes to put together via his spellbook, a Sorcerer sets up in one standard action. The downside, though, is that it's a lot less flexible. He can only put his impromptu packets together in so many ways, as he has to remember them all personally (they are partially instinctive, but do require practice and expirimentation). He can do it more often, though, as he only has to gather a pool of energy, there's less maintenence involved in holding an energy pool together than there is in trickle-charging a bunch of spell packets.

The bard constructs his spells on the fly, similar to how a Sorcerer does. But in the Bard's case, he's using verbal memory tricks to remind himself of exactly how the spell goes, in a musically "learned" fasion, rather than drawing on instinct. He's got a lot of other things to focus on, though, and doesn't have quite the energy to apply to packet-making as the Wizard or Sorcerer.

A Divine spellcaster gets these packets handed down pre-made; the Cleric need only invoke them (Causes, if permitted, are [quasi-]dieties under this Theory of Magic; perhaps Causes are what the dieties were originally born of, or there's an awful lot of dieties out there and you don't actually need a diety's name to pray to one [and thus a Cause cleric is actually getting spells granted by a diety who's name he doesn't know] - it is techncially possible for a Cleric to have no ranks in Knoweledge(Religion), after all - or whatever).

The verbal and somatic components of spells are not all the same - that's why you need a Spellcraft check to identify a spell as it's being cast. Each Wizard sets up a slightly different trigger mechanism - and, indeed, sets up slightly different trigger mechanisims even for copies of the same spell, so he doesn't fumble two spells trying to supply the right bit of extra push to the same triggers and coming up short (the Quicken Spell metamagic feat partially revolves around aranging for less "push" and redundant triggers). Much of the Spellcraft check to identify a spell on the fly is involved in tracking the energies as they come into play in order to predict the final result; the energy packet has something of an effect on the outside world while it's still being given that final push.

Spellcasters need the material and focus components because some energy packets require a pattern to draw off of; there's a little more information needed to finish the effect than can be easily contained in the energy packet (in the case of "complex" material or focus components, such as a live spider or a cocoon; Eschew Materials aleviates the need for some of it by putting a bit more info into the spell); others require something physical for a slight boost in energy or focus (for "simple" components like the copper coin for Detect Thoughts or the copper wire for Sending; Eschew Materials aleviates the need for some of it by putting a bit more force or focus into the spell). Sorcerers still need them because sometimes, there's just too much to remember, or some of it really does need to be channeled outside the body, for whatever reason. Other components are either a source of energy to power certain portions of the spell that are only quasi-magical in and of themselves, a bribe of sorts to certain forces,
or even a form of insulation against backlash. A divine caster avoids the need for most such trappings with help from above... but there are limits to what they can be bothered to do for their followers.

[Chambers]

I like to think of Prepared Casters as doing the same kind of magic that Merlin uses in the Amber series. He's a mage and has access to raw blasting power, but in order to be more efficient he's got to prepare individual spells, like an Invisibility Spell, a Heart Attack Spell, a Fourth of July Fireworks Spell, etc.

He calls the process 'hanging' a spell, as he works within his Logrus Vision (read: Arcane Sight) to directly manipulate the magical formula (read: lines of code) in order to produce the desired result. He calls it hanging a spell because each spell is actually 90% cast in the process of preparing it. The spell is held together by 3 or 4 lynch-pins, or magical words & gestures, that when said complete the casting of the spell.

The process seems to take about 15-20 minutes to hang a few basic spells, and they last that way for a decent amount of time before they degrade into uselessness. The time isn't specified if I remember correctly, but I think it's somewhere in the time frame of a day or two.