Spell slot progression trade-off idea

[Totally Guy]

How come the level up tables for the spell casting classes never have any numbers that ever go down as your level goes up?

I mean even if a wizard's spell slots went from 4 4 3 2 1 to 4 3 4 1 2 from one level to the next it's still strictly a gain in power because you can prepare spells in lower slots than necessary.

Fluffwise the wizard would be gaining experience to use the same spell slot to house a more powerful spell.

It would have made some of the choices harder for those characters but I find making hard decisions to be where a lot of the fun is found for me in these games.

I'm just thinking that perhaps it could have been good to have that trade-off dynamic in the game. It wouldn't necessarily limit power as you could write the spell progression table to have just as many spells in it but for the requirement to switch something.

Has anyone homebrewed any content a bit like that?

[limejuicepowder]

Well I've never seen anything like that, but that's not saying much - I generally avoid other people's homebrew.

Are you suggested a reworking of the spell slot tables, or are you suggesting that casters get a pool of spell slots to add to whatever level they want? If it's the latter, I'm not sure how well that's going to work. For obvious reasons, the caster is going to put every slot possible dedicated to the highest level spell (and that's not a decision at all).

It'd look like 1/1/1/1/1/1/1/1/20

[Totally Guy]

The idea is reworking of the class spell table to make prepared caster make harder choices.

[Cranthis]

I wouldn't. This has the potential to just break everything.

[Darth Stabber]

Actually I like the challenge of ensuring that the massive number of low level slots are able to be used efficaciously. Altering it to ensure that you have your eggs concentrated in the big baskets makes the caster entirely too good. Seriously, even if you really want to use a certain lowish level spell, you can metamagic the crap out of it. Now I might as well quicken my haste spell, since keeping low level slots would be highly inefficacious, and inefficient.

[Runestar]

Not a bad idea. Most wizards either fill their low lv spells with buffs, retire for the night with most of these slots unexpended, or otherwise find some way to spend them (eg: arcane fire).

Psions get a similar feature, where their power point pool basically lets them spend it all on fully-augmented, higher-lv powers should they so desire. In context, it would like a high-lv wizard with only 8th and 9th lv slots.

ur-priest has a class feature which lets you 'trade-up' for spell slots. Think we can use that as a springboard? :smallsmile:

[BowStreetRunner]

While it sounds reasonable enough, if you think about it this logically leads to the Spell Point (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/spellPoints.htm) system, which is more or less a refinement of something along the lines of 0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/0/20.

[navar100]

The issue is not a problem and doesn't need fixing.