Hello again! Continuing on my “reading more of the classics” swing, I moved on from Jack Vance to Michael Moorcock, diving into the latest of the new Elric novels to come out: The Citadel of Forgotten Myths. I’m only about halfway through, and I admit I’m just lukewarm on this one. I’ve read the “original six” Elric books again and again, and they’re a foundational part of the fantasy genre to me. The new one just . . . isn’t quite the same. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Anyway, I’m back with another look at my contributions to D&D across my career: the sorcerer character class.

The Sorcerer

Soon after Wizards of the Coast bought TSR and moved the creative staff out to Seattle, the company leadership moved ahead with updating D&D to 3^rd Edition. At that point, 2^nd Edition was close to 10 years old, and good new RPGs from the ‘90s were just better-designed games than the flagship game of the hobby. D&D needed an update—and we had a blank check from WotC leadership to make the best, most complete version of D&D that we could.

Three TSR veterans were tapped to serve as the initial design team for D&D 3e: Myself, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams (Jonathan Tweet was added to the team several months later). Monte, Skip, and I began with weeks and weeks of design discussions in which we took apart every system of the game, debated it, distilled it down to its core essence, and sketched out what it could be going forward. Initiative, death and dying, actions in combat, treasure, experience, magic items . . . pretty much everything the core rulebooks covered, we talked about at one point or another.

When the time came to start designing stuff, we divvied up the character classes for an initial 3e draft of each one. I wound up with the barbarian, cleric, fighter, and paladin. My first draft of those classes turned out to be the conceptual architecture that’s defined them since. For example, I decided the barbarian could include the concept of “berserker” and gave the barbarian class its rage feature.

Yeah—I’m the guy behind barbarian rage. Paladin smite evil? That was me, too.

I also decided that we should err on the side of making clerics just a little too good, so people would be excited about playing them and they’d find their way into every adventuring party. We knew the game was better with a cleric in the party! So, I gave the cleric two good saves. And I designed the first batch of 8^th– and 9^th-level spells for the class. CODzilla, kind of my fault.

Anyway, in looking at our draft, I realized that the most valuable real estate in D&D was simply “pages in the Player’s Handbook.” And, based on that viewpoint, the wizard class—with twenty pages of class-exclusive spells that no one else could cast—was hogging up a lot of very valuable real estate. The thought crossed my mind: Could there be another class that made use of this real estate? What would that class be?

And so the sorcerer was born.

I shared my idea with Monte and Skip, and they were more than happy to let me rough something out and see how it worked in playtesting. So, I wrote up a class description that worked like the wizard but different: Charisma instead of Intelligence, more spells but a slightly delayed acquisition of higher spell level, a restricted set of spells known that was a much tighter constraint than the wizard’s spellbook. I didn’t do much with sorcerer bloodlines—that came later. I just established the premise that the sorcerer was someone born to magic, an innate spellcaster rather than a student of the arcane.

Although it wasn’t really my intention, the sorcerer turned out to be friendly to new players. In earlier editions, many game groups actively discouraged inexperienced players from trying to play the party spellcaster. Learning how to play a wizard well meant learning the spell list backwards and forwards. When your character only knows a half-dozen spells, you don’t get stuck trying to figure out the right strategy for each challenge—you just work with the tools you’ve got. The sorcerer is a spellcaster with built-in training wheels.

There was one more thing the sorcerer did that was important for 3^rd Edition D&D. It was a Big New Thing for the audience. Longtime players opened the Player’s Handbook and found something cool that had never been in the game before. The new edition wasn’t just everything they thought they knew already; it was all that, and more. I felt that we had to make sure that our new edition did not come across as a diminished game, and including a new character class was a great step in the right direction.

So, what’s the value of the sorcerer in the current game? It’s still in the 5e Player’s Handbook, and there are thousands upon thousands of sorcerer PCs out there. In 5e it’s not really all that much simpler than the wizard anymore, but it’s still fun. Heck, I myself prefer playing sorcerers to wizards because I like casters with a tight “theme” of spells known. Working within a set of thematic constraints is more interesting to me than looking for the exact right spell for a particular obstacle.

And besides, if you don’t have a knock spell, a lightning bolt just might do the trick. Happy blasting!