Naturally Silent Spells or the Lack Thereof.

[Masema]

[Insert usual beginning about perusing the rules and noticing a lack of logic/clarification/something else.] There is a nearly complete lack of spells which lack a verbal component. In total, there are four and they are Gaseous Form, Glibness (the only bard spell that the bard doesn't have to sing for, but that's another rant), Hide from Animals, and Mislead. Is there a good reason to have so few spells which don't have a Verbal component, or is this just a design fault?

In other words, are Naturally Silent Spells really that big of a threat to the balance of the game?

[GilesTheCleric]

[Insert usual beginning about perusing the rules and noticing a lack of logic/clarification/something else.] There is a nearly complete lack of spells which lack a verbal component. In total, there are four and they are Gaseous Form, Glibness (the only bard spell that the bard doesn't have to sing for, but that's another rant), Hide from Animals, and Mislead. Is there a good reason to have so few spells which don't have a Verbal component, or is this just a design fault?

In other words, are Naturally Silent Spells really that big of a threat to the balance of the game?

In the AD&D PHB, the only spells I saw without V are Invisibility to Animals, Hypnotic Pattern, and Shadow Door. It's probably just a holdover, like a lot of 3.5.

[Masema]

In the AD&D PHB, the only spells I saw without V are Invisibility to Animals, Hypnotic Pattern, and Shadow Door. It's probably just a holdover, like a lot of 3.5.

So a home-brew design adding more Naturally Silent Spells wouldn't break the balance? I know it would bend it because spells like Silence would be marginally less useful, as well as gags and whatnot, but the balance would not be broken.

[Flickerdart]

Is there a good reason to have so few spells which don't have a Verbal component, or is this just a design fault?
There are many more spells than just those four. Just look outside of the SRD.

[GilesTheCleric]

So a home-brew design adding more Naturally Silent Spells wouldn't break the balance? I know it would bend it because spells like Silence would be marginally less useful, as well as gags and whatnot, but the balance would not be broken.

Well, it's one less feat requirement for casters in order to cast spells with no components at all. If casting spells with no components at the cost of just one feat (still spell) would be considered overly powerful at your table/ for your playstyle, then yes, balance would be broken. In my opinion, the way to treat balance in 3.5 is by determining what works at your table.

You might also consider fluff beyond balance. Magic in D&D is an involved affair, albeit one that can be done quickly. With no or fewer components, there's less drama in the act of casting magic. Maybe that would take away from some of the fun of it for your table, I don't know.

[Zaq]

Also, the idea of "magic words" is fairly pervasive. It's honestly hard, at least for me, to not think of magic spells as involving some kind of chant or invocation or, well, verbal component.

Now, I'm not going to say that you can't find counterexamples in fantasy/fiction. They absolutely exist. But my unscientific gut feeling is that those counterexamples are the exception and not the rule. (Maybe that's because fiction is written for the benefit of the reader/audience, and magic words are a nice way to signal to the audience that a character is doing something noteworthy and unusual?)

[Flickerdart]

Also, the idea of "magic words" is fairly pervasive. It's honestly hard, at least for me, to not think of magic spells as involving some kind of chant or invocation or, well, verbal component.

Now, I'm not going to say that you can't find counterexamples in fantasy/fiction. They absolutely exist. But my unscientific gut feeling is that those counterexamples are the exception and not the rule. (Maybe that's because fiction is written for the benefit of the reader/audience, and magic words are a nice way to signal to the audience that a character is doing something noteworthy and unusual?)
Silent magic is fairly common, actually. Most of the time, including in myths, there's no "magic system," and the magic people tend to be antagonists. What they do is generally brief and the focus is on the result, not the action. Did the Wicked Witch of the West utter a spell to use her magic sight or minions? Did the White Witch of Narnia need incantations to turn her foes to stone? Hell, even protagonists outside of superhero comics (Elsa in Frozen) don't usually need mumble jumble words to make things happen.

To think of magic systems that are silent, we can look at the Wheel of Time books, Kingkiller Chronicles (name magic does exist but is very rare), the Mistborn books, I think maybe Eragon too. The only ones I can think of that explicitly have incantations are Harry Potter (and even then, not always), Lord of the Rings, and Earthsea.

[ryu]

Silent magic is fairly common, actually. Most of the time, including in myths, there's no "magic system," and the magic people tend to be antagonists. What they do is generally brief and the focus is on the result, not the action. Did the Wicked Witch of the West utter a spell to use her magic sight or minions? Did the White Witch of Narnia need incantations to turn her foes to stone? Hell, even protagonists outside of superhero comics (Elsa in Frozen) don't usually need mumble jumble words to make things happen.

To think of magic systems that are silent, we can look at the Wheel of Time books, Kingkiller Chronicles (name magic does exist but is very rare), the Mistborn books, I think maybe Eragon too. The only ones I can think of that explicitly have incantations are Harry Potter (and even then, not always), Lord of the Rings, and Earthsea.

Of COURSE Frozen magic is heavily verbally based. This is Disney. Any caster's power increases in conjunction with the quantity and quality of singing they are doing.

[Zaq]

Silent magic is fairly common, actually. Most of the time, including in myths, there's no "magic system," and the magic people tend to be antagonists. What they do is generally brief and the focus is on the result, not the action. Did the Wicked Witch of the West utter a spell to use her magic sight or minions? Did the White Witch of Narnia need incantations to turn her foes to stone? Hell, even protagonists outside of superhero comics (Elsa in Frozen) don't usually need mumble jumble words to make things happen.

To think of magic systems that are silent, we can look at the Wheel of Time books, Kingkiller Chronicles (name magic does exist but is very rare), the Mistborn books, I think maybe Eragon too. The only ones I can think of that explicitly have incantations are Harry Potter (and even then, not always), Lord of the Rings, and Earthsea.

We can play point-and-counterpoint all day, but I will point out that there are, indeed, myths that mention what D&D would call a verbal component to spells. In "Sayings of the High One," for example, part of the Poetic Edda, Odin is describing a handful of spells that he has access to, and he explicitly (at least in the translation I have) mentions "chanting" as part of it. "I know a fourth one if men put chains upon my limbs; I can chant so that I walk away, fetters spring from my feet, and bonds from my hands. [. . .] I know a seventh one if I see towering flames in the hall about my companions: it can't burn so widely that I cant counteract it, I know the spells to chant." (I'm using the translation by Carolyne Larrington.)

Also, sometimes perception is as important as anything else. I'm reminded of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. When Hank is trying (successfully, mind you) to bamboozle the gullible locals into thinking that he is performing strange and terrible magics to restore water to a dried-up fountain (he's actually using explosives to demolish a blockade, of course, but that isn't how he sells it to them), he punctuates his fireworks display with dramatic invocations of comically overwrought German compound nouns. The reader knows that Hank is just engaging in showmanship and deception, but the other characters in the book think that these weird and eldritch utterances are part and parcel of the magical process. The reason that it's enjoyable to read, though, is because the reader doesn't find it especially strange that the gullible Arthurians expect magic words to be an important part of "casting a spell," even though we know that Hank isn't actually in possession of magical ability (except in the form of Sufficiently Advanced Technology).

The point I'm trying to make with this example is that even when it's being subverted for laughs, the audience is familiar with the concept that magic comes with magic words. It's entirely plausible that this baseline familiarity (regardless of any one specific source) was enough to plant a conscious or unconscious expectation in the heads of the D&D devs that magic should usually involve a verbal component. (To be clear, I am not saying that this is 100% the case—there's no way to prove that without talking to the devs, and since D&D spells were developed over many years with many different teams of designers, even interviewing a couple of them wouldn't necessarily prove conclusively where that particular pattern came from.)

As I said originally, there's plenty of counterexamples. There are absolutely fictional universes in which magic doesn't require what we might recognize as a verbal component. Magic isn't real, so the specifics of each fictional example of magic will differ with the writer/artist in question. But even if it's not universal, you can't really tell me that there isn't an element of recognition in play, you know? Not every instance of magic requires magic words, but you probably aren't super surprised when you encounter magic that does require magic words. That's enough.

(Hell, even in D&D, there's plenty of magic that doesn't involve magic words. SLAs other than utterances rarely do, for example, and we all know that psionic powers have easily suppressed displays rather than components. But the whole point I'm trying to make is that it's not uncommon or unusual to encounter fiction in which magic comes with words of power, and so it's not surprising that D&D would display some element of that trope.)