I appreciated all the responses to yesterday’s warlock thread!
Today, let’s talk about sorcerers. How do your sorcerer class and subclass provide needs, wants, and personality to propel the narrative?
I’m fascinated with how people use & expand upon the text, so share! Sorcerers are a place where I’ve struggled to find character concepts. You really need to lean in to Metamagic and their subclasses (Wild Magic really does it for me, Draconic much less so).
Most of their class identity was left behind in 3e because of how spell prep works now.
— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) April 20, 2019
I always resisted the idea of playing a Draconic sorcerer, because the narrative felt so ham-handed and trite – which is a shame, since the actual class mechanics are pretty strong. The whole “blood of dragons” thing just felt stereotypical.
I did eventually create one, but in a highly unconvenitional manner. I wanted to play a Kobold, and their innate connection to (and cultural reverence for) dragons had me considering the idea. That said, I still wasn’t sold on it – I couldn’t come up with a hook for the character that seemed decently interesting at first.
Eventually, I settled on the idea of a kobold with a stronger than normal draconic ancestry specifically tying him to blue dragons. The idea was that he managed to avoid inheriting much in the way of draconic wickedness and greed, but got some degree of their intellect and magical prowess.
This made him smarter than the average kobold – enough to actually question their brutish existence and try to push for social reforms. He was something of a kobold communist – he wanted a freer, more just society where instead of fighting each other for scraps and sucking up to bullying and tyrannical strongman leaders, his brethren worked together for the common good, to elevate themselves out of the squallor and ignorance of their wretched lives. He even advocated establishing friendly relations and mutually beneficial trade with humans, elves, dwarves, et cetera.
This naturally got him thrown in a cage by the petty warlord leading his little tribe. Which was a good hook for getting him into a party of adventurers – they were clearing out a kobold infestation in an old mine, and found a pissed off would-be revolutionary locked up and willing to help them overthrow the warlord. And of course it helped that the little guy could shoot lightning from his hands.
Really, that’s the detail that finally made everything click for me – I chose to artificially limit my options, and imposed a rule on myself that all of my sorcerous powers would have to tie back into my blue dragon heritage of lightning powers. I tried to have an even mix of both damaging lightning spells and illusion magics, because that’s what blue dragons are famous for. I even took Mold Earth as a later cantrip, since blue dragons are known for burrowing.
That said, I did quickly find out that… uh… there really aren’t very many Lightning related spells in 5E. Shockingly few, you might even say. So I ended up using a lot of multi-element spells and restricting myself only to Lighting / Thunder options, as well as doing a lot of reskinning of other minor spell effects, to give them more of a lightning theme. It took some thinking, but I worked out in the end.
I also gave him a ridiculously long and difficult to pronounce name which he invented for himself in order to play up his draconic ancestry, but I made sure it was a name which had an obvious and funny short-form nickname. He’s a bit egomaniacal and self-aggrandizing at times, but it’s fine because everyone else calls him the equivalent of “Schnookums”, much to his chagrin. He wants to be taken seriously, but he’s just too much of a goofball.