D&D Next

And to create a cheeseburger, a barbecue grill is best - but <insert fast food of choice> is more convenient. We live in a world where convenience is more powerful than quality.

Well. 3e took the spells, in many cases word-by-word, from AD&D and imported them directly into 3e. This had two implications: First, since spells essentially didn't change, an AD&D spell did the same damage as a 3e spell (say, 10d6 for a fireball), while 3e also significantly boosted the HP of player characters and monsters. This seriously tipped the balance in favour of "control" spells over "blasting" spells. Secondly, while 3e kept most of the old spells as-is, they removed most of the mechanics around spellcasting that was there to inconvenience spellcasters. Such as casting times and the ease of being interrupted in combat. I'm not saying AD&D perfectly balanced magic vs. martial classes (AD&D did very little perfectly ), but 3e basically just took the existing system and removed the old attempts at keeping it reigned in. For all the innovation in 3e, the magic system itself was barely touched at all.

Now, 5e seems to introduce some old mechanics to make spellcasting more inconvenient, or at least require more planning. Such as getting hit in combat having an adverse effect on your spellcasting in the following turn. There's also an article where that Mike Mearls guy is discussing nerfing spellcasting (or at least wizard spellcasting, because we all know druids/clerics are just fine), but I hope it doesn't come to quite that extreme.

Personally, I think the magic system worked fine in 3e. I'd hope that any attempt to "fix" the perceived imbalance between casters and non-casters would focus more on making spellcasting more inconvenient and/or harder to pull off, than on just nerfing spells into pointlessness.

I think they fixed some of those oversights in 3.5 but I could be wrong. I've been running my campaign in 3.5 for about 8 years or now and I've really noticed holes, the magic system seems well integrated with the rest of the combat rules and so on. This with two serious power gamers in my group of players.

3.5 did exactly the wrong thing to fix the issue. It nerfed specific spells (some warranted, some completely out of left field) rather than addressing the cause of the imbalance. 3.5 also got rid of most save-or-die spells, which I think was a positive move. Even if the replacement, save-or-take-a-bit-of-damage, was a kinda boring change.

Anywho, the magic chapter in this D&D Next playtest package is very brief, so we won't know what they will be doing for sure, yet. One thing of note, however, is the 'ritual magic' system, which essentially allow you to cast certain spells as rituals (which makes them take a long time to cast, and possibly have costly material components) without having memorized those spells. That's a neat feature for certain out-of-combat spells that can be painful to "waste" memorization slots on.

Additionally, there was a hint (though no examples provided) that certain spells cast with higher-level spell slots may have improved effects. Finally, I noticed that not a single spell provided in this package, with Magic Missile as the sole exception, scaled with caster level in any way. This worries me a little bit. Looking forward to seeing more of the magic system.