Why wouldn’t your setting have potatoes? Does your setting have Peru in it? No, no Peru? Gee, then it sure sounds to me like you get to decide where potatoes come from in your setting; they don’t have to be a “new world” food if you world doesn’t have or has a different “new world.”
It’s force of will combined with self-confidence. Sorcerers cast magic using “The Secret,” basically. They believe in themselves hard enough that they manifest power into being. That’s the idea of charisma spell-casting. It’s okay if you think that’s dumb, but that’s the idea at play here.
edit for an analogy: where a Wizard has a magic book full of spells, the Sorcerer has a glitter-dusted vision board.
second edit: added links to give context for anyone unfamiliar with relevant terminology
I only played a one-shot with the guy; it was just a fun-run kind of game so I didn’t get a chance to see a lot of character, just the one day worth of OP-ness.
In 3.5e one of the strongest builds I’d ever seen was a hummingbird wild shape air-domain caster druid with the natural spell feat (I believe that is what it was called). They’d fly around the battlefield in bird form which gave them such insane AC bonuses as to be basically unhittable, then they’d just cast Call Lightning and Ice Storm and destroy the enemies while remaining untouchable. It was honestly insanely OP
They don’t for me, tbh. Part of what was fun about prestige classes for me was that there was multiple ways to get to them. It was something a character, theoretically any character in most cases, could work towards regardless of where they started. Like a Bladesinger may have started as a fighter, a bard, a wizard, or more. It felt like a whole world of character possibilities. Archetypes feel more like a doctor picking their specialty of study, at least to me
Until prestige classes are a thing I’m sticking with 3.5
My immediate thought too
Yeah when I was DMing 5e we just house ruled that only underground races had darkvision, most races currently with darkvision had low light vision (from 3e) instead, and I think I stripped a race or two of even that. All of my players agreed with the changes. Darkvision in 5e is stupid.
I mean who doesn’t have dark vision these days?
5e was absolutely devastating to the torch-seller economy
Sausage (at least forcemeat in casing) dates to Mesopotamia, 3000BCE.
I don’t think the innovative leap to put that sausage in between bread is a world-breaking defiling of historical accuracy, personally.