What is the point of the Sorcerer?

[The_Mad_Linguist]

Charisma = leadership = useful, no?

Okay.  There are uses for Charisma, but it's generally less useful than Int.  Aside from giving you bonuses to some social skills and fueling one of the best feats ever (good to the point where a lot of DMs don't like it), it's not that good.  Casting off or Int or Wis is a lot better.

I'd say cha gets more abuseable "stat to whatever", but it's hard to snag it while retaining full casting.

[Whisper]

Vancian's flaw is purely fluff based. It is about as 'unmagical' as you can be for a wizard, since theres very few fictional fantasy(and even less mythological) magic users who actually prepare spells like that(Jack Vance's stuff is much closer to science fiction).

What it does to fluff is indeed horrible, but that's not the only problem.

Vancian has a significant mechanical flaw, i.e., the notion of leveled spell slots. This leaves you with a bunch of spell slots that are either irrelevant if their effects don't scale by caster level, or too scare compared to higher-level slots if they do. It also frequently puts one in the ridiculous situation of being out of Light Candle By Glaring At It for the day, but still having enough juice to Summon DeathStar MK II, or Rend Veil Of SpaceTime.

Also, by forcing spells to be of a particular "level", it forces false parity between spells that aren't necessarily comparable. Meteor Swarm wouldn't be such a bad spell if it didn't have to compete with Shapechange, Gate, and Black Blade Of Disaster.

Not to mention that any other feat or class feature that a caster might have, when it has to access some notion of a mana pool, has to burn spell slots of some level or other, in what I can only describe as a triumph of awkwardness. 

The real reason they started with vancian was because D&D used to be a minis wargame. They simply took rocket launcher ammo out and replaced it with fireball slots, and after that it was legacy.

Yeah, that sounds just dumb enough to be true.

[Eldritch_Lord]

The real reason they started with vancian was because D&D used to be a minis wargame. They simply took rocket launcher ammo out and replaced it with fireball slots, and after that it was legacy.

Yeah, that sounds just dumb enough to be true.

In addition to the wargame modification reason, I've heard that they deliberately went out of their way to avoid anything resembling "real" magic, because they were already borrowing heavily from RL mythology and didn't want to piss anyone off more than necessary; given the whole "D&D = Satanic" scare later and the whitewashing of demons and devils into tanar'ri and baatezu in 2e, I can see why they'd want to do that.  Wargame roots + unrealistic magic = fire-and-forget spells.

Personally, I think Vancian magic fits nicely with D&D fluff-wise, or at least don't think it's as incongruous as some others do.  Both Vancian magic and D&D are post-apocalyptic.  The Dying Earth was a dying wasteland where magically-created monsters roamed the earth and the best years of humanity are long gone, and the spells resembled computer programs, almost, in that they were independently-intelligent entities that wanted to be run/cast.  D&D revolves around finding the artifacts of long-dead civilizations that can no longer be created, fighting magically-created monsters in subterranean tombs and wastelands, and so forth; just like in LotR and the other inspirations for D&D, everyone looks to the past as a "golden age" and modern humanity (or humanoid-ity) can't recreate the wonders of the past.  In that context, fire-and-forget magic and magic items that both resemble technology from the past (Clarke's "Sufficiently advanced technology...") with, I don't know, spellbooks as user manuals ("Having problems casting a fireball?  RTFM!") isn't all that incongruous or flawed after all.

[AleksanderTheGreat]

It also frequently puts one in the ridiculous situation of being out of Light Candle By Glaring At It for the day, but still having enough juice to Summon DeathStar MK II, or Rend Veil Of SpaceTime.

You can use a higher level slot to cast a lower level spell.

[Lycanthromancer]

It also frequently puts one in the ridiculous situation of being out of Light Candle By Glaring At It for the day, but still having enough juice to Summon DeathStar MK II, or Rend Veil Of SpaceTime.

You can use a higher level slot to cast a lower level spell.

So it's a choice between The Apocalypse is Nigh and Chill My Wine Goblet?

Wow. And I thought American automobiles were a waste of fuel.

[veekie]

It also frequently puts one in the ridiculous situation of being out of Light Candle By Glaring At It for the day, but still having enough juice to Summon DeathStar MK II, or Rend Veil Of SpaceTime.

You can use a higher level slot to cast a lower level spell.

Not if you're a wizard and a higher level spell is sitting there in that slot. Which it will be.
The Pathfinder Alchemist COULD pull it off, but only because of the 1 minute per extract preparation, letting them leave half their slots open as wildcards.

Edit: Not to mention the effort imbalance. Trading down means you're losing quite a lot of efficiency, as a higher level slot is worth 2 lower unless you're talking the crudest direct damage.

[Whisper]

So it's a choice between The Apocalypse is Nigh and Chill My Wine Goblet?

Wow. And I thought American automobiles were a waste of fuel.

It's a good thing I had my office door closed when I read that, because otherwise I would have interrupted the thought process of everyone within earshot. 

[Tenebrus]

Of course leveled spells are bullshit.  So are leveled classes, or classes at all for that matter.  It's just that spells are the most obviously stupid application of the level theory because they scale in effectiveness so much more drastically than anything else.  You would think the purpose of levels would be so that everything called Level 10 (or gained at Level 10 or whatever) would be more or less equal but that is not the case, and most clearly not the case with spells.

It is the price you pay to play D&D.  I've seen numerous proposals to re-balance, but I am unaware if there is a commonly accepted one.

[Sinfire Titan]

It also frequently puts one in the ridiculous situation of being out of Light Candle By Glaring At It for the day, but still having enough juice to Summon DeathStar MK II, or Rend Veil Of SpaceTime.

You can use a higher level slot to cast a lower level spell.

So it's a choice between The Apocalypse is Nigh and Chill My Wine Goblet?

Wow. And I thought American automobiles were a waste of fuel.

Note: One of those is a Cantrip. The other is also a Cantrip, this time named Prestidigitation.

[Pteryx]

The point of sorcerers?  To appeal to the rather loud contingent of 2nd Edition players who were baffled by the fluff of "memorizing" spells only to "forget" them as they were cast (this is why the fluff changed to "preparation" in 3e, too), resented having to "waste" their limited slots on utility spells when what they really wanted to do was blast things, and didn't think they got enough slots to do said blasting with.  Read the Forum section in older Dragons and you'll find that these sorts of complaints surfaced often.  The Sorcerer was WotC's very first attempt at appealing to that crowd.  -- Pteryx