Vancian Magic

[David Bofinger]

Originally Posted by DarkPumpkin

"Vancean" magic changed quite a lot over the course of the books. In Rhialto the Marvelous, published after D&D was released, magic revolves around summoned entities. I'm sure you could argue that Vance just focused on different aspects, but it seems quite an evolution.

Sandestins are a separate and more powerful system of magic. The magicians of Rhialto the Marvellous are more powerful than the wizards in Dying Earth or the Cugel books: they do cast regular spells occasionally but mostly they just tell a sandestin to do it.

There's a throwaway line that all magic consists of putting a request to an entity capable of and willing to perform a task. But in Dying Earth this is never shown. And it's not stated the entity is always a sandestin: for instance, there are gods in Dying Earth which probably did things you could call magic.

Also there's lots of magic items.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

Vancian magic is fundamentally equivalent to having (say) eight rings on your belt, and every morning you pick one grenade for each ring. When stuff happens, you hope you have a grenade left that has something to do with the problem at hand.

I think the main effect is to convert the resource management problem from one resource (energy, spells per day, whatever) to one per kind of spell you prepared, plus some for picking which options to prepare.

Sometimes this speeds play (we brought the spell for this, no need to decide if we need to save the energy because we might need it in a moment), sometimes it slows it (we can't start yet, we're still picking spells to prepare), sometimes it changes the tactical options (we only have one copy of this spell, so if we use it to pass this obstacle on the way in, we can't get back out...)

Overall I suspect if you think resource management is the best part of the game, prepared spells are a clear win, if you think it's a chore that gets in the way of the fun, it's a loss, and somewhere in the middle there's a crossover point.