d20 Casters

A lot of ink was split over how overpowered the arcane casters were in d20. Being a veteran of the older AD&D format I found the class became significantly more powerful than earlier editions especially in comparison to other classes. I believe the aggregation of the desire to simplify the game and standardize the the classes incompletely without reducing the class to match.

Originally the class was the expert class. It required levels of play as a near useless character, was always levels behind most of the party, had a random array of weak to powerful spells, and was physically laughable in melee.

First the drawbacks to the spells themselves became much lighter; haste does not take a year of your life every use; teleportion has a risk of killing you outright, polymorph requires continual saves not to lose you mind, ect. These drawbacks made mages much less willing to use the overpowered spells. In the move to make the game more accessible at the end of 2nd edition and truly break from original D&D mechanics the designers made a lot of changes in order to make the game "better" and more accessible. A lot of these decisions conflicted with the basic design philosophy of arcane casters and were not jettisoned resulting in overpowered arcane casters, divine too but that is another article.

Then the decision to allow spell selection caused all sorts of trouble. Now mages who had to depend on finding/buying good spells could cherry-pick the best spells on each level. Critically this meant that rare & more powerful spells became the standard which made all of the other nifty but weaker spells suck.

The standardization of experience was a huge advantage for the casters as they now leveled at a much faster rate than previously where they were always levels behind their non casting allies. As a result access to higher level spells changed. Older editions tended to end by level 15 with the mages a level or two behind. As a result mages rarely got access to the higher 6th-7th level spells. 8th and 9th level spells were essentially never meant to be in PC's daily spell selection except in extremely high powered campaigns. They were the domain of spell-failure prone scrolls and the villains. As a result high powered spells with their penalties clipped were dropped into lower level campaigns creating enormous imbalances

Casts per day were vastly increased especially at low levels the addition of high intelligence allowing for many more casts per day again increased the power level a bit. This was not in itself the main problem. Combining it with the decreased encounters per day created one of the most problematic issues in d20. A culture where the caster was expected to be constantly casting. This created we adventure until the caster is out of spells mentality that trapped designers and player into excessive casting that eroded the value of endurance characters like the classic fighter who's hp was the old limiter.

Arcane casters maintained the increase of additional dice every caster level combined with faster level accumulation compared to the rest of the party led to increased damage production.

The mechanics of spell resistance and saves changed both in ways to make the casters more powerful. Certain high-level foes had 95% spell resistance; no feats or leveling to reduce that number also saves became much more sure for everyone since the save mechanic was roll an x or higher on d20 with rare spells that have a -2 to -4 on the saves. As a result casters usually had their high damage curve reduced by steadily improving saves for reduced effect. Conversely at lower levels the characters the few spells the mage had were very likely to work as foes had maybe a 15%-20% save rate. The creation of spells to get around golems and foes specifically there to keep casters in check yet again increases their power.

Another change was spell failure. In earlier editions spells could be disrupted by 1 hp of damage and required the caster to do nothing else at all that turn and long casting times for high level spells. The creation of concentration and defensive casting allowed casters much more impunity with their spells.

I my initial goal was to illustrate the why the partial changes between editions led to wild imbalances in d20 environment. Something I suspect designers did not want. They clearly learned from this and decided not to keep old stuff except for names in 4th edition. As a result they seem to of successfully addressed these power imbalance issues creating, with fanatical zeal, a level playing field for all the characters classes. The sated goal of making the game more accessible in 4th is a success. Perhaps that why it's so uninspiring for me. I liked the challenge of an elite class with a heavy price. It was tough going early on. You never got the really good stuff unless the DM was nice. It was a class filled with the power gamers, who worked hard for that power. All those difficulties kept the munchkin(1) population down. I do admit that biggest problem was you had to have a year long or more campaign for the rewards of a mage to truly kick in.

(1) Sadly despite how much I like d20 I feel it catered to munchkins more than any other edition.