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View Full Version : Probably the shortest Wizard fix...



Phosphate
2012-02-19, 12:27 PM
...or is it?

Seriously, I have no idea how much would this fix affect the Tier of the wizard. Basically, I'm trying to power them down without touching the spell list, but just their spellcasting itself. Ohwell, here goes:

Spells

A wizard casts arcane spells which are drawn from the sorcerer/wizard spell list. A wizard must choose and prepare her spells ahead of time (see below).

To learn, prepare, or cast a spell, the wizard must have an Intelligence score equal to at least 10 + the spell level. As an additional prerequisite, to prepare or cast a spell that has been altered by metamagic a wizard must have a Spellcraft score of at least initial spell level + 2*(level increase due to metamagic).The Difficulty Class for a saving throw against a wizard’s spell is 10 + the spell level + the wizard’s Intelligence modifier.

Like other spellcasters, a wizard can cast only a certain number of spells of each spell level per day. Her base daily spell allotment is given on Table: The Wizard. In addition, she receives bonus spells per day if she has a high Intelligence score.

Unlike a bard or sorcerer, a wizard may know any number of spells. She must choose and prepare her spells ahead of time by getting a good night’s sleep and spending 30 minutes focusing her energy and 1 hour time studying her spellbook. While studying, the wizard decides which spells to prepare. Each spell is prepared individually, and the time needed to prepare a single spell is equal to 1 minute*(spell level)^2.

To prepare a spell that has been altered with metamagic, apart from the normal time needed due to spell level (new spell level), a wizard must also spend 5 extra minutes for every metamagic feat he has applied.

Spellbooks

A wizard must study her spellbook each day to prepare her spells. She cannot prepare any spell not recorded in her spellbook, except for read magic, which all wizards can prepare from memory.

A wizard begins play with a spellbook containing all 0-level wizard spells (except those from her prohibited school or schools, if any; see School Specialization, below) plus three 1st-level spells of your choice. For each point of Intelligence bonus the wizard has, the spellbook holds one additional 1st-level spell of your choice. At each new wizard level, she gains two new spells of any spell level or levels that she can cast (based on her new wizard level) for her spellbook. At any time, a wizard can also add spells found in other wizards’ spellbooks to her own.

Arcane Spells And Armor

Wizards do not know how to wear armor effectively.

If desired, they can wear armor anyway (though they’ll be clumsy in it), or they can gain training in the proper use of armor (with the various Armor Proficiency feats—light, medium, and heavy—and the Shield Proficiency feat), or they can multiclass to add a class that grants them armor proficiency. Even if a wizard is wearing armor with which he or she is proficient, however, it might still interfere with spellcasting.

Armor restricts the complicated gestures that a wizard must make while casting any spell that has a somatic component (most do). The armor and shield descriptions list the arcane spell failure chance for different armors and shields.

If a spell doesn’t have a somatic component, an arcane spellcaster can cast it with no problem while wearing armor. Such spells can also be cast even if the caster’s hands are bound or if he or she is grappling (although Concentration checks still apply normally). Also, the metamagic feat Still Spell allows a spellcaster to prepare or cast a spell at one spell level higher than normal without the somatic component. This also provides a way to cast a spell while wearing armor without risking arcane spell failure.

In addition to this, increase the arcane spell failure by 10% if the wizard is holding a one-handed weapon, by 25% if he is wielding two one-handed weapons and by 50% if he is wielding a two-handed weapon.

Backlash

A wizard can injure himself when casting particularly powerful spells. Whenever he casts a spell that is level 5 or higher, he must succeed on a will save against the spell's DC. If he fails, he receives d6*spell level damage and is fatigued for spell level rounds. Even on a successful save, the DC of his spells for the purpose of Backlash only increases by 1, and this stacks. The only way to remove those stacks is to sleep for 8 hours.

Flickerdart
2012-02-19, 12:54 PM
The Spellcraft requirement on metamagic does nothing: preparing a 9th level spell with +9 levels of metamagic (which is of course impossible) is only 27. 23 of that is just from ranks, and every Wizard of that level is going to have more than +4 Intelligence modifier.

Forcing Wizards to spend nearly an hour and a half on every 9th level spell just turns the 15 minute adventuring day into a 15 minute adventuring week. The times that a Wizard is on the town, he's still as powerful as ever.

Withholding the bonus spells per level is pointless: Collegiate Wizard just gives free spells/level right back to the Wizard in question. The power of the Wizard isn't in the free spells, it's that he can go to the store and buy as many spells as he wants.

The weapons nerf does nothing as well, as all you're doing is shafting gishes.

Immunity to fatigue is trivial, and even without immunity, fatigue doesn't do much. All this rule does is encourage spellcasters to use spells without saving throws.

So what did you envision these nerfs would fix? Because they don't really do anything constructive.

Noctis Vigil
2012-02-19, 01:11 PM
The biggest problem I have is that using this method, a 20th level Wizard would take (4+16+36+64+100+144+196+256+324) minutes, or 1140 minutes to prepare his spells for the day, assuming absolutely no bonus spells and no metamagic. 1140 minutes to prepare spells is 19 hours a day. Nobody would ever bother casting high level spells because it would take so long to prepare them. Add in 5 minutes per metamagic, and nobody would use those either. If this got implemented, pretty much everyone would stop taking Wizard levels pretty early on, as after you break 9 hours a day spent to recover spells (8 for rest one for prep), it becomes a hassle. At most, I would say spells take one minute a spell level, for a total of (4+8+12+16+20+24+28+32+36) or 180 minutes of prep time a day, plus your half hour of added DBZ-style power up time every day. Three-and-a-half hours as compared to 19 is a much better fix, and even that pushes the limit pretty high. As you have it stated now, you spend more than an hour a day preparing spells starting at 8th level. The first levels are actually a slightly more attractive dip to meet PrC and feat prerequisites, though, as it takes you only 31 minutes to prepare spells at 1st level, and 32 at 2nd.

TL;DR summary: What your fix actually equates to is making the class so unattractive at levels above roughly 10 that nobody would play it because it's such a hassle and drag on the party, but makes the class more dip-friendly.

Phosphate
2012-02-19, 01:26 PM
The Spellcraft requirement on metamagic does nothing: preparing a 9th level spell with +9 levels of metamagic (which is of course impossible) is only 27. 23 of that is just from ranks, and every Wizard of that level is going to have more than +4 Intelligence modifier.

Sorry, that was a typo on my part. I meant ranks, not score (so no adding Int).


Withholding the bonus spells per level is pointless: Collegiate Wizard just gives free spells/level right back to the Wizard in question. The power of the Wizard isn't in the free spells, it's that he can go to the store and buy as many spells as he wants.

This really depends on the campaign you're on. In a world with poor magic or even reasonable magic, you wouldn't find anyone selling spells above level 6 in the average metropolis.


The weapons nerf does nothing as well, as all you're doing is shafting gishes.

Maybe. It just never made sense to me that a shield adds spell failure, but a claymore doesn't.


Immunity to fatigue is trivial, and even without immunity, fatigue doesn't do much. All this rule does is encourage spellcasters to use spells without saving throws.

Backlash is not dependent on what the spell does. You must save against it ANYWAY, regardless if its effect has a saving throw or not. Also, don't forget the damage (which doesn't seem like much until you realize that you're currently in combat, and probably using a spell per round, if not 2).


Nobody would ever bother casting high level spells because it would take so long to prepare them.

Bingo. :D...or they would only prepare 1 or 2.

Siosilvar
2012-02-19, 01:49 PM
The Spellcraft rank requirement does literally nothing. Skill ranks advance twice as fast as spell levels and with two extra ranks to boot. Also, you can't cast while holding two weapons anyway (without a feat like Somatic Weaponry or Still Spell, that is), and the two-handed quarterstaff is fairly iconic for a wizard.

Aside from that, your fix does basically the opposite of what's intended. You encourage the wizard to use only the most effective spells, since they take so long to prepare. Expect to see more one-spell encounters, where the wizard casts Sleep or Grease or Web or Solid Fog and wins by default. Except that you've made the wizard totally reliant on the DM for spell selection, which is just a bad design choice, because nothing else in the game requires a player to confer with the DM to play. Leadership? Optional. Spells on a wizard? Not so much.

By the way, none of the game-winning spells use metamagic to be effective. Blasting, on the other hand, is suboptimal without it (and usually won't win encounters by itself with it).

Yitzi
2012-02-19, 01:50 PM
The biggest problem I have is that using this method, a 20th level Wizard would take (4+16+36+64+100+144+196+256+324) minutes, or 1140 minutes to prepare his spells for the day, assuming absolutely no bonus spells and no metamagic. 1140 minutes to prepare spells is 19 hours a day. Nobody would ever bother casting high level spells because it would take so long to prepare them.

Not true. They wouldn't cast many high level spells, but they would cast the occasional perfect-for-this-situation one. After all, you can prepare in downtime, and then just refresh them when you cast them. You still get a benefit from many spell slots, as it allows you to prepare more different spells so that you have more options.

Now, if you also lost a spell after 24 hours whether you cast it or not, then what you said would be 100% correct.

Noctis Vigil
2012-02-19, 01:53 PM
Bingo. :D...or they would only prepare 1 or 2.

This response bothers me on a fundamental level as a homebrewer. At the point your fix revolves around making a class so unappealing people won't want to play it, you've totally missed the point of fixing the class. Any class should be fun to play at any level; the fact that many of them aren't is why we homebrew. Deliberately making a class unfun is not fixing it, because D&D first and foremost is a game, and at the point it's no longer fun, there's no point in playing it.

Siosilvar
2012-02-19, 01:54 PM
This really depends on the campaign you're on. In a world with poor magic or even reasonable magic, you wouldn't find anyone selling spells above level 6 in the average metropolis.

Metropolis GP limit: 100000gp.
9th-level scroll cost: 3825gp.


Anything having a price under [the community's gp limit] is most likely available, whether it be mundane or magical. While exceptions are certainly possible, ... these exceptions are temporary; all communities will conform to the norm over time.

So basically, you're dead wrong unless you're defining "reasonable magic" as "in my campaigns", which you're free to do in your campaigns, but you have to tell us that you're changing that too, in which case your "shortest Wizard fix" gets a whole lot longer.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-02-19, 01:57 PM
I don't know... apart from backlash (the wording of which is extremely unclear), you're not really making the wizard weaker, just more annoying to play. All of the usual high-level tricks with time manipulation and planar travel can still be pulled off. But even if the DM doesn't allow those (and he really shouldn't), the vastly increased time in preparation forces the wizard to either play at a fraction of his power, or for the party to bend over backwards for him. Neither choice is fun for players.

Want to keep the wizard's power down? Don't let him scribe scrolls into his spellbook. That way, if he wants more spells, he has to either research them himself (which takes time and money, but adds satisfaction), or negotiate with wizards directly. Or maybe rule that all spells of above, say, 5th level must be independently developed.

When trying to nerf... well, anything, really, it's important to remember that D&D is a game. Reducing theoretical power is good, but the process should never, ever make the game less fun to play.

Ashtagon
2012-02-19, 05:27 PM
Spellcraft: Worst case scenario is a 1st level spell with 8 levels of metamagic on it, for a required 17 ranks of Spellcraft. If you aren't maxing out your Spellcraft anyway, you aren't playing a wizard sensibly. And if you are, this requirement is meaningless.

No bonus spells: eh. Doesn't matter. Not like you were going to cast them all in a day anyway.

Study Time: Welcome to dungeons and spreadsheets. Quite apart from this turning the 15-minute day into a 15-minute week, you're going to need a spreadsheet to play a wizard past a certain level. fwiw, AD&D 1e said 10 minutes per spell level. Even so, it's the power of a spell to end a fight on a single die roll (or sometimes, no die roll) that makes a wizard powerful.

No Free Spells on level-up: If you have no scrolls for purchase and the DM doesn't drop spellbooks for the PC to find, this is a major nerf. But then it becomes a campaign-dependent fix, not a class-based fix.

Somatic Component: You do realise that a somatic component means the wizard must have a hand free, right? That means if wielding a two-handed weapon, or two one-handed weapons, he can't cast spells with somatic components at all.

Backlash: I know I wouldn't even consider using a class ability that could kill my character. This wouldn't weaken wizards. This would make all players decide you simply don't want wizards, and they will refuse to play them. If you don't want wizards in the party, be up front about it, and ban them.

Deepbluediver
2012-02-19, 09:46 PM
One of the biggest issues with the wizard is that they can vast virtually any spell in existence with no more than a nights rest.

If you want to limit any particular build of a wizard, without screwing up the entire class, just do the following:

Spell Specilization: A wizard chooses certain schools from which he learns spells; he can only prepare spells for this daily allotment from schools he has selected. A wizard chooses his first school at level 1. At this time, a wizard must also choose one school to ban. A wizard cannot prepare spells from any school he has banned, nor can he use any magic items that would cast spells from a school he has banned.
A wizard selects another school to specialize in, and another school to ban, at levels 2, 5, and 10.


This will limit any particular wizard to no more than 4 schools, or about in line with what a sorcerer can do. It's not a complete fix, but without going in and changing/banning individual spells and altering the mechanics of spellcasting, you won't be able to do much better. Magic is just to powerful/broken.

Kane0
2012-02-19, 10:07 PM
You might also want to add that a wizard can only add so many spells to his spellbook per level or per (time period here).

Also make sure there is no way he can take his entire spell list into the field. If you read Complete Arcane youd find that there is usually a Grimoire (someone please check speling) and a Field Spellbook, which has far less (and more used) spells as opposed to the Grimoire that contains the Wizards entire collection. If you stop them from bringing along every spell they have ever transcribed, then you gain control over his power level.

Grod_The_Giant
2012-02-19, 10:21 PM
Somatic Component: You do realise that a somatic component means the wizard must have a hand free, right? That means if wielding a two-handed weapon, or two one-handed weapons, he can't cast spells with somatic components at all.

Two one-handed weapons, yeah, but it's not hard to hold, say, a quarterstaff in one hand for a few seconds while casting a spell. It needs two hands to wield the weapon, not to merely hold it.

Anyway, it's also worth remembering that the "always have the right spells prepared" relies on divination spells and clever guessing. Don't allow players to use spells to find out what spells they need and throw in the unexpected now and again, and watch the wizard squirm.

Ashtagon
2012-02-23, 08:12 AM
Two one-handed weapons, yeah, but it's not hard to hold, say, a quarterstaff in one hand for a few seconds while casting a spell. It needs two hands to wield the weapon, not to merely hold it.

Good point about double weapons. However, this rule effectively says "wizards shouldn't carry quarterstaves". The quarterstaff is one of the most archetypal weapons wizards have been armed with throughout (pre-modern) literature. If your houserule all-but-bans the most recognisable archetype of a class, it's probably not a good one.