What is the differance between arcane and divine magic in d&d? Should bards heal.

[AlexanderML]

Hello everyone on the forum, I've never made a thread on here before so bear with me.

I've got a DM who has been a 2ad edition only kind of guy, and he's recently gotten interested in playing 5th. Me and him have been arguing over the fact that bards can heal, with them being said to use arcane magic. He thinks that in any D&D game the gods are the only ones to heal, and that divine magic is somehow special to arcane magic. This has risen to me having a few questions to give (for all editions not just 5th):

-What is the difference between arcane magic and divine magic? Is it just the source of the power for the magic?

-Why can't arcane magic heal unless a bard uses it? Why can't wizards heal then? Game balance is the only reason I can think of.

-Do you think that bards should be able to heal (fluff and balance wise) in the editions it is in (or the ones it is not)?
Would bards need something to compensate?


I've always liked to give my worlds different sorts of magic, to avoid the whole arcane vs. divine magic fight with the guy to try to get him to enjoy it more (but that only makes things worse ).

Note: He is my father and he will be reading this so please say nothing bad.

[Morcleon]

-What is the difference between arcane magic and divine magic? Is it just the source of the power for the magic?

-Why can't arcane magic heal unless a bard uses it? Why can't wizards heal then? Game balance is the only reason I can think of.

-Do you think that bards should be able to heal (fluff and balance wise) in the editions it is in (or the ones it is not)?
Would bards need something to compensate.

Answering in order:
1. Divine magic comes from the gods, arcane magic comes from the self/Weave/universe/whatever fluff your setting has. That's it. You can learn normally divine effects as arcane spells and vice versa.

2. "Balance" (at least on the surface to separate the roles of arcane and divine casters), and fluff. Bards are usually support, thus, healing. Also, 3.5 has wizard spells that can heal.

3. There's no reason why they should not. In 3.5, they don't get 9th level spells, so it's not like giving them healing is overpowered.

[LibraryOgre]

Really, there's no good reason that arcane magic can't heal. Heck, it's been able to heal, in one form or another, since AD&D at least (since Polymorph: Self has an explicit healing side-effect). It's a hold-over from earlier editions, and, IMO, wasn't even really necessary then... scarce resources balance healing needs far better than class restrictions.

[Kurald Galain]

-Why can't arcane magic heal unless a bard uses it? Why can't wizards heal then? Game balance is the only reason I can think of.

That is correct. The only reason why clerics exist in the first place is so that there are two separate classes for Offensive Caster (i.e. the wizard) and Healer/Buffer (i.e. the cleric).

Now of course a cleric also has offensive spells (but the wizard's are better) and the wizard also has buffs (but the cleric's are better). In any RPG that doesn't have a cleric-type class, wizards can heal just fine.

So traditionally, arcane casters can heal, and divine casters cannot. However, also traditionally, the bard isn't a pure arcane caster but a hybrid. So that means that bards should be able to heal (but it's not going to break the game if they can't) whereas wizards should not be able to heal (but it's not going to break the game if they can, either). HTH!

[NRSASD]

One of the best explanations for why Arcane magic can't heal but Divine can boils down to this:

If a priest heals someone, it's a miracle of divine intervention
If a wizard heals someone, it's playing with someone's life force

It's only really cited for the older editions of D&D. In a more recent edition, you could just argue that healing with Arcane magic is the next logical step down the field of medicine.

[Anonymouswizard]

-What is the difference between arcane magic and divine magic? Is it just the source of the power for the magic?

Depends on the campaign setting, in some it's a different source, some a different style, some different requirements, some different requirements, some something else, some all of the above.

I've considered reworking the classes so they work differently, priests being more like warlocks with a 'patron' and limited at-will spells, and magicians have a spellbook, work with ritual magic requiring components, and are primarily support casters.

-Why can't arcane magic heal unless a bard uses it? Why can't wizards heal then? Game balance is the only reason I can think of.

Game balance is the main reason.

-Do you think that bards should be able to heal (fluff and balance wise) in the editions it is in (or the ones it is not)?
Would bards need something to compensate?

No, to both, but I don't really think they should get anything beyond illusions and enchantments. Remember, in 3.X and 5e they have limited spells known, whereas with 2e they can in theory access to every wizard spell they can cast (and in 1e had druid magic? I never really got why they need to be a class, especially in 5e where they could be a background (which I'm using in my reworking of 3.5).

[Devils_Advocate]

My understanding is that there used to be arcane spell list and a divine spell list, and a character's spellcasting ability was described in terms of access to one or both of those lists. But over time the exceptions and special cases added came to complicate things to the point that it was decided that it would be better to give each class its own spell list. And yet, the arcane / divine division was retained despite, um, no longer really making sense under the new model. (And then they recreated the original problem by making prestige classes and then base classes that grant access to the spell lists of other classes...)

But even then, there were several spells that appeared on both lists, I do believe, and functioned pretty much the same regardless of who they were cast by, which kind of undermines the whole "divine magic and arcane magic are completely separate things" idea. As does divine casters needing to prepare spells, use spell components, etc., in ways that are much more like arcane casters than unlike them. Probably because clerics actually had limited magic-user casting at an early point in their development. They even used spellbooks, I believe. But then spellcasting was divided into arcane and divine.

Basically... D&D is a great big pile of kludges that only pretends to "simulate" anything. You can see this in all sorts of stuff. Like, the way that only every other point of Ability score "counts" for most purposes? That's something that gradually developed over time from a system that originally had multiple weird tables of modifiers for each Ability. Why not just have everything scale linearly in the first place, one might wonder, given that that would be more intuitive and make more sense? Well, to rig things so that most randomly rolled stats actually function the same for most purposes, and only exceptionally high or low numbers make a big difference. I'm not even joking; I look at the relevant charts and see the rules at war with each other, the bizarre implementation of random quantitative character traits actively working to mitigate the impact of their randomness.

You can add a bunch of house rules to "fix" the bits of nonsense that you personally dislike, but that's really just adding more kludges to the kludge pile, accruing a bunch of new nonsense some of which is likely to offend the sensibilities of one player or another. If you want an elegant ruleset -- one in which, for example, each trait on a character sheet corresponds directly to something in the actual game world, to toss out one crazy possibility -- best to jettison the rules of every D&D edition, forgetting about all that class, level, race, alignment, etc. silliness. Find or build a system more suitable to whatever you're trying to accomplish. I'm not aware of anything that any edition of Dungeons & Dragons does especially well; I gather that the main advantage to D&D is that it tends to do a large number of popular things passably.

He thinks that in any D&D game

No true Scotsman, eh? That one got pretty popular with the D&D crowd in the wake of 4E, I gather...

So traditionally, arcane casters can heal, and divine casters cannot.

Other way around, you mean. [/pedant]

[Yuki Akuma]

Bards can heal because originally they cast from the Druid spell list.

That is to say, it's traditional for Bards to be able to cast healing spells. They've always been able to, after all. It doesn't matter that they're Arcane magic users now - Bards can heal.

[Magic Myrmidon]

If it helps at all, 5e doesn't actually explicitly seperate "divine" and "arcane" magic. It's just magic. So if it's easier to swallow, a bard can use divine magic just as easily as a cleric can be using arcane magic. Really, it all depends on the character and the fluff.

[JBPuffin]

If it helps at all, 5e doesn't actually explicitly separate "divine" and "arcane" magic. It's just magic. So if it's easier to swallow, a bard can use divine magic just as easily as a cleric can be using arcane magic. Really, it all depends on the character and the fluff.

They do - via fluff, which is about as thin as 3.5's method.

If your dad doesn't like the way rules are, he has options: decide it's not too big a deal, not play 5e because of it, or simply fix it by trading them having healing for, say, more skills or something. They are supposed to be 5e's super-support class, but relieving them of healing isn't a huge world-ending thing; it might make them less high-OP, but probably not. Whatever the case, if his opinion ends up changing how the two of you and your group play DnD, oh well, it's a game. Not something worth debating.

[goto124]

I just took it that the system is allowing for flexibility, such that you don't have to bend the crunch or fluff too much to play [class] with [bunch of abilities].

[Mastikator]

One of the best explanations for why Arcane magic can't heal but Divine can boils down to this:

If a priest heals someone, it's a miracle of divine intervention
If a wizard heals someone, it's playing with someone's life force

It's only really cited for the older editions of D&D. In a more recent edition, you could just argue that healing with Arcane magic is the next logical step down the field of medicine.

The only reason magical medicine isn't common in the D&Dverse is because D&D is laser focused on adventuring through dungeon crawling, trying to simulate anything other than heroes crawling through dungeons with D&D instantly fails.

[charcoalninja]

The only reason magical medicine isn't common in the D&Dverse is because D&D is laser focused on adventuring through dungeon crawling, trying to simulate anything other than heroes crawling through dungeons with D&D instantly fails.

As someone who has been using D&D to simulate every type of story under the sun from Political romance drama to Dragon Ball Z for more than 20 years allow me to simply say that you're wrong and even a cursory glance at D&Ds history demonstrates this.

[goto124]

Charcoal, could you kindly provide detailed examples of how you managed to handle the many different kinds of settings? Did they all have the 'DnD high-fantasy' feel, or did each setting have slightly adjusted mechanics for different 'feel's?

[Anonymouswizard]

As someone who has been using D&D to simulate every type of story under the sun from Political romance drama to Dragon Ball Z for more than 20 years allow me to simply say that you're wrong and even a cursory glance at D&Ds history demonstrates this.

Well you can, but not was well as GURPS (if you want grittiness), or Savage Worlds (if you want pulp) can (other generalist systems with other 'feels" exist). D&D focuses on combat so roughly 90% of all class abilities are combat based, and the skill system is a couple of steps away from tacked on.

EDIT: now I'm on the computer, I'll say that the difference between D&D and a system that can do several types of campaign well is that the first competency is measured by Class Level, while in the second it is normally measured by Skill Level. Raising your Class Level/Character Level in D&D makes you better at combat first, and then gives you points to optionally spend on courtly intrigue, whereas the latter makes bonuses to combat and bonuses to courtly intrigue come out of the same pool.

[Thrudd]

The difference between divine and arcane is determined only by the setting and the DM. There is no mechanical game difference, the only difference is in the classes and how they recover their spells and what spells they get access to. If your DM decides in his setting that there should be no arcane healing spell, he can do that. In terms of class balance, I dont think its a problem for bards to have cure spells. If he really has a problem with it, suggest fluffing it as the bard being able to dabble with both types of magic, they just have their own way of praying and studying that is unique to them.

[Zalphon]

The difference between divine and arcane is determined only by the setting and the DM. There is no mechanical game difference, the only difference is in the classes and how they recover their spells and what spells they get access to. If your DM decides in his setting that there should be no arcane healing spell, he can do that. In terms of class balance, I dont think its a problem for bards to have cure spells. If he really has a problem with it, suggest fluffing it as the bard being able to dabble with both types of magic, they just have their own way of praying and studying that is unique to them.

That's how I figured it was. Bards are just natural dilettantes.

[Mastikator]

As someone who has been using D&D to simulate every type of story under the sun from Political romance drama to Dragon Ball Z for more than 20 years allow me to simply say that you're wrong and even a cursory glance at D&Ds history demonstrates this.

Because it makes sense for noncombat people (read, most people) to only become better at their profession by becoming more powerful in battle? D&D is good at simulating fantasy adventure, it's very bad at simulating normal people doing normal things.

[unbeliever536]

Class levels have nothing to do with how combat focused you are. Class levels indicate a focus on vertical advancement, where you have a character who begins as a novice of X, and grows to become a master of X. Skill-based systems are more focused on horizontal (or no) advancement, where your character begins as a master or at least professionally competent user of X and can grow to dabble in Y and Z.

That said, D&D is somewhat class focused, in that it generally takes some skill or ingenuity on the part of the players and GM to make the system do non-combat things. But you can hit stuff with sticks all day without trying.

[Anonymouswizard]

Class levels have nothing to do with how combat focused you are. Class levels indicate a focus on vertical advancement, where you have a character who begins as a novice of X, and grows to become a master of X. Skill-based systems are more focused on horizontal (or no) advancement, where your character begins as a master or at least professionally competent user of X and can grow to dabble in Y and Z.

That said, D&D is somewhat class focused, in that it generally takes some skill or ingenuity on the part of the players and GM to make the system do non-combat things. But you can hit stuff with sticks all day without trying.

It depends on the system, I played a homebrew skill-based system where vertical and horizontal advancement were encouraged (we have a character who was a jack and concentrated on her useful skills, a 'ninja' who began with high combat skills and just increasing them, and I played a diplomancer who stuck to horizontal advancement due to a gentleman's agreement [I had already abused stacking rules to get stupid bonuses]). My argument was that in D&D competency is measured by class level (I believe we can agree this is true), and that class levels primarily give more combat ability (I believe that we can agree that this is true as well), with practically all classes having skills as secondary (I think we can agree this is at least all PhB classes except for maybe the rogue). A system like Dark Heresy, which I love to bits, has class levels but to me always measured your competency by your Characteristic/Skill levels, with class being a limit to how quickly you can advance. I'd prefer it if there was less limited access to skills at the lower ranks of Dark Heresy, but the system still measures your competency by skill levels (I can theoretically play a guardsman who has never raised his Ballistic Skill since rank 1).

I will agree that systems that don't put limits on starting skills or have Dark Heresy's 'you must be X high to take' system (which means you can use level to roughly gauge competency, but you have no guarantee) tend towards horizontal advancement.

I was more making a point about the D&D system, where competency in your roll is mostly measured by 'what class levels do you have', and due to the design of the system most of your competency is focused on combat. Otherwise I have no problem with promoting vertical advancement. I like the guy who begins as a competent user of X and grows to be a master of X who dabbles in Y and Z.

[unbeliever536]

Oh; in that case we're in agreement. I read your post as a claim that class based systems were inherently combat focused, which is just the wrongiest wrong. I happen to like both vertical and horizontal advancement, for different purposes. And of course most systems have a way to do a little of both, though they lean in one direction or another. I just wish I could find a system that did a good job with vertical advancement - D&D seriously struggles with the problem of tissue-paper starting characters and invulnerable endgame characters, and Dark Heresy has even more of a tissue-paper problem. It's worse in D&D, where the characters sometimes can't handle what the game expects them to.

[Psyren]

In Forgotten Realms, arcane magic is called The Art and divine magic is called The Power.

I have no idea what that might imply but I thought it was interesting

[Mastikator]

It depends on the system, I played a homebrew skill-based system where vertical and horizontal advancement were encouraged (we have a character who was a jack and concentrated on her useful skills, a 'ninja' who began with high combat skills and just increasing them, and I played a diplomancer who stuck to horizontal advancement due to a gentleman's agreement [I had already abused stacking rules to get stupid bonuses]). My argument was that in D&D competency is measured by class level (I believe we can agree this is true), and that class levels primarily give more combat ability (I believe that we can agree that this is true as well), with practically all classes having skills as secondary (I think we can agree this is at least all PhB classes except for maybe the rogue). A system like Dark Heresy, which I love to bits, has class levels but to me always measured your competency by your Characteristic/Skill levels, with class being a limit to how quickly you can advance. I'd prefer it if there was less limited access to skills at the lower ranks of Dark Heresy, but the system still measures your competency by skill levels (I can theoretically play a guardsman who has never raised his Ballistic Skill since rank 1).

I will agree that systems that don't put limits on starting skills or have Dark Heresy's 'you must be X high to take' system (which means you can use level to roughly gauge competency, but you have no guarantee) tend towards horizontal advancement.

I was more making a point about the D&D system, where competency in your roll is mostly measured by 'what class levels do you have', and due to the design of the system most of your competency is focused on combat. Otherwise I have no problem with promoting vertical advancement. I like the guy who begins as a competent user of X and grows to be a master of X who dabbles in Y and Z.

If you have to use house rules and gentlemans agreements just so that your diplomat won't automatically become Rambo then I reaffirm my statement that D&D is bad at simulating anything that isn't medieval fantasy adventure.

[Fyndhal]

Hello everyone on the forum, I've never made a thread on here before so bear with me.

I've got a DM who has been a 2ad edition only kind of guy, and he's recently gotten interested in playing 5th. Me and him have been arguing over the fact that bards can heal, with them being said to use arcane magic. He thinks that in any D&D game the gods are the only ones to heal, and that divine magic is somehow special to arcane magic. This has risen to me having a few questions to give (for all editions not just 5th):

-What is the difference between arcane magic and divine magic? Is it just the source of the power for the magic?

-Why can't arcane magic heal unless a bard uses it? Why can't wizards heal then? Game balance is the only reason I can think of.

-Do you think that bards should be able to heal (fluff and balance wise) in the editions it is in (or the ones it is not)?
Would bards need something to compensate?


I've always liked to give my worlds different sorts of magic, to avoid the whole arcane vs. divine magic fight with the guy to try to get him to enjoy it more (but that only makes things worse ).

Note: He is my father and he will be reading this so please say nothing bad.

Old, old school:

Bards in AD&D (First Edition) had the Druid spell list, including the Druid healing spells.

So, yes, Bards can heal.

[GungHo]

I've gone down the White Mage, Black Mage, and Red Mage paths more than a few times. The farther you depart from the base D&D expectations around what a "mage" is supposed to be able to do, though, the more you have to adapt to maintain "balance" (or at least the perception of it... which is already a problem). Good or bad, the system sets up two different apparatuses around what they expect to see out of clerics and wizards, and giving wizards cleric things and clerics wizard things does weird things or eventually leaves some "oh, I didn't think of that" gaps.

[TheThan]

In dnd 3.5 there is no mechanical difference between arcane and divine magic. They function exactly the same. All core spellcasters with the exception of bards and sorcerers have to prepare their spells ahead of time. The only difference is the fluff, clerics have to pray to their god(s) for their magic, and wizards have to study a spellbook. But they use the same mechanic (spend time prepare spells).
Even in 4E the mechanics are the same, since everyone uses the same mechanic to do just about anything.

Now I don’t know about 5E, I imagine it not being too terribly different from the norm.

[NichG]

So to get this out of the way: as written, there aren't hard separations between arcane and divine magic in terms of scope anymore. The game, as it is, doesn't make a strong distinction. There are soft delineations - divine casters tend to have far more healing spells of various sorts compared to arcane casters - but that's basically it.

However, I think this is mostly a consequence of the game passing through the hands of many different authors without having very well-defined guidelines about what each part of the system is trying to do. So one author has in mind some idea like 'maybe only the gods can heal' and writes the system like that, but then another author looks at the system and says 'huh, we don't have any arcane casters that can heal for some reason, and we need to give the Bard some special niche, so why don't we make the Bard an arcane caster who can heal?' or 'I need to invent 20 new wizard spells for this splatbook, what hasn't been done already?' or things like that. In some author's mind, the fluff was well-defined, but in the minds of a pool of dozens of authors over 5 editions and multiple sub-settings, there's no such hard lines.

Now, there's the question 'should there be harder delineations?'.

Personally, that'd move in a direction that I'd prefer. For one thing, without hard delineations, different ability sets tend to blend together and become equivalent. The consequence of that is that whomever has a way to maximize access ends up overshadowing everyone else. In D&D, since divine casters get access to their entire spell list that means that the most generalized divine caster ends up overshadowing the specialized ones (so a Cleric or Druid ends up being far more flexible and able to fill multiple roles compared to e.g. a Favored Soul, and an Archivist who can get spells from both a divine and arcane spell list ends up being even more flexible than them; or, in the case of Wizards, its the ability to turn gold into an expanded spell list). That's part of the reason why its popular to run Tier-limited campaigns (in 3.5ed), such that casting classes are restricted to limited-list specialized casters like the Dread Necromancer, Beguiler, Bard, etc - because they're more conceptually well-defined and so they tend not to step on the other characters' toes as much, allowing the party to develop more distinct roles.

Also, fluff-wise, when the delineations are soft like this and there are all sorts of exceptions strewn around its hard to develop the feeling that there's something behind the system other than just a list of one-off abilities. If there are a bunch of hard rules that nothing ever breaks (like 'arcane magic cannot heal') then it means you can better develop an intuition for the underlying 'why' of each type of magic, and that can lead to more integrated use of mechanics and fluff into the plot or into other unexpected ruling situations. For example, if its a hard rule, then it naturally leads to things like having NPC spell researchers constantly trying to do magical experiments to break the rule (which usually go horribly wrong), uproar from the churches for encroaching into the domain of the gods, etc, etc. Or if a player wants to invent a new spell, it gives you a much better set of guidelines as to what they should or should not be able to do with a spell of a certain type.

It also helps you get around the un-definedness of 'magic' if there are hard rules about what magic cannot do. If all you do is say 'this is magic' and ask 'what can it do?' then many people's answer is 'well, its magic, so it can do everything'. That's in stark contrast to something like 'this is the ultimate sword, what can it do?' or 'this is a powerful merchant guild, what can it do?'. One way to get around that vagueness is to make very strict rules that block out the boundaries - 'magic cannot do X by any means' type rules. The more interesting literary magic systems have things like this - general rules which characters try to play at the borders in the specifics. That can often lead to interesting consequences or moments of clever invention. For example, if 'magic cannot heal a wound', maybe you can get around that by instead accelerating the passage of time and thereby allow natural healing to happen quickly in exchange for aging the target?

[Psyren]

If you have to use house rules and gentlemans agreements just so that your diplomat won't automatically become Rambo then I reaffirm my statement that D&D is bad at simulating anything that isn't medieval fantasy adventure.

Of course it is, but even houserules and gentleman's agreements can be much, much easier than (a) trying to brew an all-new system from whole cloth or (b) trying to vet numerous other, lesser-well-known systems that may have the greatest rules since sliced bread but no way to try them without purchasing them and hoping for the best. So even a system that is quite bad at certain things can be the best alternative.

[hiryuu]

This question is extremely difficult to answer without breaking forum rules, but I'm going to try.

In a word? None.

In more words:

Set the wayback machine to the 1970s, back when Arneson and Gygax were putting together the rules for Chainmail, which would become D&D in the future; the first editions were crude approximations of what we would call a role playing game, had almost no rules for anything other than complicated combat cobbled together from war games the designers liked, and races were classes. The designers had a problem: there were no easy examples of what could be called "clerics" in any of the heroic or fantasy fiction they had access too, and the primary reason was one of inability to see the forest for the trees.

They settled on making figures like Merlin and Gandalf a separate entity from the undead-scaring priests, and the problem inherent with this is that those figures are religious figures, imbued with the powers of gods (typically because they were gods, Gandalf definitely so). If any class is an interloper into the cultures from which the original writers of D&D and games like it, it's the mace-carrying priest, created rather artificially in a void of their own making. The people they were trying to emulate with wizards are already priests - the template here is cunning folk, alchemists, engineers, witches, and the like. I could go into further detail, but can't talk about real-world religion on these forums, and it is to certain real-world religions that the idea of "priest" and "magician" are separate entities - in nearly every culture except for a tiny, vocal minority, all magic comes from gods or god-like beings, and all those who possess it are tied to them in various, inextricable ways.

Press forward into later editions, when the split requires some monkey work to continue marching on, and nebulous memes begin propagating in regards to what arcane magic can't/doesn't do, almost all of them rooted in lack of understanding as to why the trappings of "arcane magic" are the way they are - part of this is rooted in the stories of Lovecraft and Howard, which are functionally atheist universes in which "magic" of any kind is actually contact with the technologies of alien beings so advanced that it cannot be understood and attempting to shoehorn these things into role playing game rules and "spell lists." Even today, there are no clear definitions, no hard and fast rules, about what arcane or divine magic can and can't do, or even what they are - the choice between whether a class uses arcane or divine magic seems to be up in the air: would you call a class that specializes in mathematics, alchemy, and geology because it's centered around trying to determine the methods by which the gods created the world in order to carry on their works while helping the common folk live through plagues, heal the wounded, and frighten away monsters "arcane," or "divine?" Because that is the cultural place anything we might call, in D&D terms, a "wizard" resides.

[JAL_1138]

While 1e bards got the druid spell list, 2e bards, where your DM is coming from, only got access to the wizard spell list, and were something of a rogue/wizard hybrid with a tiny splash of fighter. The wizard spell list had no healing but the Polymorph loophole (if that even existed at the time; I don't remember the spell text verbatim).