There is this myth that D&D came fully formed out of the mind of Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson and the teams and companies that have owned the property since can only uphold their legacy or betray it. It’s really not that simple, as the early iterations of magic missile and sleep have shown. The first six years of the game was nearly unplayable by modern standards, and the only thing that kept it going, was the fact that the game’s interface allowed people to tinker with it. Variant rules abound, some of those rules variants became game systems of their own (Rolemaster chief among them), and through that conversation a category and industry were formed.But after a while, the dust begins to clear, and game assumptions are taken for granted or even taken as chiseled in granite. These days each D&D enthusiast has a fuzzy list of assumptions that they consider truly D&D. Most of these assumptions come from when they first started playing the game. They are things that make sense sometimes purely from the momentum borne from first contact, and it’s hard to get that player to challenge their assumptions. And since most of D&D first time enthusiasts jump on board in the 80s’ most of that decade’s game assumptions are on many people’s list of what it takes to truly be D&D. Later, and smaller groups, of first-time gamers often will differ to the assumptions of an earlier generation. How magic missile and sleep should work is often on that list of assumptions. I’ll freely admit that the auto-hit nature of magic missile is on my list.
A quick look at the 2e and 3e versions of sleep and magic missile (or even the Pathfinder versions of the spells) shows few changes from the spell in 1e AD&D and the Moldvey Basic Set. Now, I’m sure that during the development of all those later editions that there were variant versions floating around saw some internal playtests, but at the end of the day, someone pulled the trigger and decided on some small amount of clarification iteration rather than a rethinking of the spell. A different decision was made in 4e. In many ways, the iterations were there not to support the assumptions, but to favor its new matrix, as Spock would say.
I don’t know if this wizard illustration Heroes of the Fallen Lands is casting magic missile, but his caption reads, “A human mage casts from his spellbook.” That statement is nearly meaningless in its context, as mages don’t gain immediate access to the tomb implement and that’s not the way spellbooks work in Essentials (or in the earlier, dare I say edition, of 4e). It’s this kind of small stuff that aggravates and gives ammunition to hardcore edition warriors.
At first glance the sleep spell only has cosmetic changes in 4e. A daily spell, it is slightly less powerful in that on a hit or a miss, it merely slows (save ends), and on a hit it makes the target unconscious (also save ends), but there are two main differences. First it affects everyone, even undead. That’s not a huge change, really. It does make it more effective, or rather it takes out exceptions that make the spell useless in certain encounters. While some might question its ability to make skeletons fall asleep, that’s more there because someone decided that undead should not become drowsy—including vampires and mummies both of which rest sometimes for long periods of time in the literature. Hey, it’s magic! The other main differences have caused greater consternation—the inability of other creatures to awaken sleeping creatures. I’m sure this is a houserule in many games. The spell also doesn’t limit the number of creatures within the burst by hit dice or (with hit dice gone in 4e) level. This has caused many high level wizards to keep this level 1 spell long after they can swap it out. It’s just that good, especially with a wizard’s ability through itemization to affect a target’s saving throws. I’ve found that even long-term players who like this change, and use it to good effect (that’s you, Skaff) find it cheesy. Worse still, DMs tend to tolerate it or become aggravated with it. It can render large groups or—worse still—a powerful solo monster quite impotent. Its structure makes it a very powerful wild card. Limiting the creatures affect to “the wizard’s level or lower” and placing a wake up rule that allows a creature to automatically grant a save with a standard action (think of it as monster’s exception for the Heal skill use, since normal skill use does not work as well with monsters and other DM-controlled characters, to use some more new-fangled Essentials language) goes a long way to fix those nagging problems.
Unless you’ve been living in a cave, you know that magic missile has seen a pretty major overhaul lately. There are two new versions, one in the Red Box that I assume has been abandoned and one in the Essentials and presumably codified in the D&D Compendium. Once it had an attack roll, it’s now auto hit, which is IMO good, but in many ways the overhaul still misses the point of the spell, and maybe even the controller role. Instead of having the base damage scale by level, the spell should have had the number of missiles fired increase with level. At first level, that would seem more like the spell that people know and love, and would give the wizard their iconic plink for small amounts of damage that scaled well, especially since very few creatures resist force damage. A first level wizard would deal 6 or 7 damage with her magic missile, while a level 30 wizard would deal around 16 or 18 damage with three missiles, which even scales better than the paltry 19 to 21 damage against one target (something some fighters can achieve on a missed attack, and still have much higher damage output on a miss…even if those attacks don’t slay minions outright like magic missile does…but hey, minions at paragon and epic tier need help anyway), and seems firmly within the goals of a controller having a tendency for a damage spread rather than a concentration of fire.
So why didn’t I bring these up during the first round of 4e development? Well, to be honest, I think I did. Both of these were fights I lost, but in saying this I’m only pointing my finger at myself. Maybe I didn’t fight hard enough. Maybe I fought too hard. Maybe I didn’t state my positions as clearly as I could have. Maybe I was just happy with the arguments I won, and that was a placebo for what ailed me about other parts of the game. Maybe I was afraid of pissing someone off and being relegated to mail boy. But hindsight is 20/20, and to be honest the D&D game, after some years of being solidified into a definitive codex of rules is now in the same boat it was in during the 80s’ and part of the 90s’ with two different sets of rules loved and championed by two separate factions of the industry…and it’s a fight for hearts and minds. To be honest, I have no idea who is going to win…or if anyone will.
My guess is that you are going to see a number of the old assumptions of D&D being rehashed, reexamined, and rediscovered because of it. In many ways that may not be a bad thing for those of us who play the game iteration, questioning, and reexamination will create a better game, but D&D is more than just a game, it’s a phenomena, it’s a culture, and it’s a business, and when one company finds itself going back on assumptions, that can only mean one thing: the business is not doing as well as expected, most likely because it didn’t meet or properly manage expectations. “As expected” being the key phrase here.