Making spellcasters less overpowered (am I being to harsh?)

[DMwithoutPC's]

It is an almost universally accepted fact that many spell casters are way more powerful then mundane classes. Also, WoTC seem to love spell casting or abilities mimicking spell casting. Only four of the Core Classes lack any form of casting ability. And in the bonus material, Manifesters, Initiatiors, Binders, Shadowcasters, Meldshapers, Invocation users all have some form of basically magical or magic-like abilities.

A lot of attempts to balance things try to make mundane classes better (often by giving them magic, like ToB); what I propose is magic wielders worse and drastically so.

I'm starting with Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer and Wizard

Arcane

Wizards Wizards only gain access to three schools, automatically Speciasing in one of them. Once they obtain 4th level spells, they lose one of their schools to choose from, and when they obtain 7th level spells they lose another.

Example: Mialee is a wizard and chooses her school of magic at first level: She chooses Illusion, Enchantment and Abjuration and Specialises in Abjuration. She now learns spells from these schools when she levels up. Upon reaching level 7 she has to choose one of these schools to drop. She chooses Enchantment. She can from this point on only learn 4th level or higher spells from the schools Illusion and Abjuration. However, she can still learn new 0, 1st, 2nd or 3th level spells from Enchantment. At level 13 she learns her first 7th level spell. She now has to drop Illusion, because she specialised in Abjuration. However, she can still learn new Illusion spells for all Spell levels below 7th.

Sorcerer

A sorcerer picks 1 school and learns all spells from that particular school. He gets bonus feats at level 4 and every fourth level afterwards. This can either be a Heritage feat a Metamagic feat or the Extra Spell feat. The spells chosen with Extra spell can be from any school.

Divine

Cleric
(For this adjustment, I recommend vastly enlarge the number of Domains per god.)
A First level cleric chooses 4 Domains corresponding to his or her god. These spells form there spell list, supplemented with a very stripped down Cleric Spell list. Their spell list only contains spells, that aren't on domain spell of any domain, and no none-core spells are allowed)

Druid
Full spell casting, AND the Ability to turn into different animals AND a full progression Animal companion. That's just too much! I, however have no experience playing Druids, so aren't sure how to fix this...

My guess would be to improve their Wildshape Ability, let them keep the Animal companion, but lose spell casting all together.

Any comments? thought? AM I being too harsh?

P.S not a native speaker, so I may make spelling or grammar errors occasionally, please notify me politely

[hydraa]

What do you do for the Elf Generalist Wizard ACF? (ROTW p 157)

[eggynack]

Are you sure that sorcerer thing actually makes them worse? I don't know the particulars, but a sorcerer who has all of conjuration or transmutation as their spells known list could possibly do better than the regular sorcerer, who has few spells known from every school. I mean, at the very least he'd be able to do the whole druid thing, where he can spontaneously cast a massive amount of summon monsters at every level. I just don't think it's necessarily a reduction in power.

[ahenobarbi]

What do you do about Sorcerer who picked conjuration or transmutation and now wrecks just about everyone?


I don't think that really fixes anything. It blocks many nice characters but if someone is out to break game those rules help very little. Polymorph is as good as it was. Calling/summoning creatures to cast spells for you still works ...

[soapdude]

This also assumes that all spell schools are created equally, which they are completely not. A wizard with only Evocation, Conjuration, and Transmutation is as good as a wizard with everything.

[JusticeZero]

Honestly, I think the Druid class should have been cut into two or three classes. A Nature themed stealthy and fighty medium BAB Summoner /Pet user, and a nature based caster with wild shape.
That said, if magic is rare, even weak spellcaster will be very potent.

[Icewraith]

Your fix disproportionately punishes wizard specs that already can have hard times, like enchanters and illusionists. Transmuters and Conjurers will get along just fine.

Also, everyone still gets Wish. A lot of the issues with spellcasting are the individual spells. Melee just need more nice things, and a ban on the really broken spells would work better.

[lsfreak]

The problem with fixes like these is that the end up making optimization mandatory, which is the exact opposite of what you want to happen. While I like the idea behind the wizard fix, the problem is that three schools (conjuration, transmutation, and illusion) are so wildly versatile that they invalidate most of the other schools. Someone who picks these three as their schools will be more limited than normal, but not noticeably so. On the other hand, someone picking necromancy, evocation, and enchantment will potentially face a lot of problems.

The problem with spellcasting is the spells, and anything short of going in and redoing the spells themselves is going to have problems. At which point you might as well save the headache and stick with the problems of spellcasting as-is rather than just shifting to a new set of problems.

[ericgrau]

When you make casters unplayable the only thing you accomplish is ruining the player's fun. And the high optimizers who were breaking them before can work around those restrictions and continue to break the game. Limiting schools tends to mostly hurt common players and not the abusive ones.

I'd suggest playing/DMing a few games before you believe everything you hear online. Then adjust according to your specific group. People on the internet love using hyperbole (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hyperbole?s=t) to make a point. In 99% of real life games I've seen, you don't need need to do anything. If you see people going for particular classes a lot, then do something minor to slightly discourage them like -1 or -2 caster levels once they reach higher level or -1 or -2 something else. That's not trying to fix anything because it assumes players are already playing normally. It only gives a small push. Do this instead of running over the rules with a steamroller, parking the steamroller in a considerate spot away from traffic, casually walking back to the rules, then stomping on them a few times more for good measure. Usually all you do is make a mess of them. See? I can use hyperbole too.

[Twopair]

Your wizard fix is very variable. For a low to mid optimisation player, the restriction will be pretty crippling- without proper planning the wizard's main advantage, versitility, will disappear. For a highly optimised character, it's trivial to get around it- for a start Conjuration can already do pretty much anything the other schools can do, and then you get into stuff like Shadowcraft Mage...

For sorcerer, I agree with eggynack. One of the Sorcerer's main limitations is Spells Known. Yeah, he's now restricted to one school, but as I said above, Conjuration can do a little bit of everything, and Transmutation is pretty awesome too. Whether it's a boon or a penalty depends on how smartly it's played I guess, but it seems more powerful than the base class to me.

Cleric... Well, your recommendation is basically to turn them into a magical Ardent. It's certainly a power decrease, but not a major one. This one seems fair.

As for Druids, Wild Shape is good, but a lot of it's power comes from being able to buff yourself on top of the Wild Shape, as well as continuing to sling spells in beast form thanks to Natural Spell. Cutting out casting completely is a huge power drain, but the fact that it excels in melee, as well as having a scaling animal beastie who is also a frontline fighter puts them ahead of most pure martial classes. It seems pretty similar to the Wildshape Ranger from UA.

All in all, I'd say how harsh you're being varies wildly from class to class. I like your Cleric fix, and playing a non-caster Druid might be fun. I'm not sure that the Sorcerer fix actually fixes anything though, and the Wizard fix can also be easily circumvented.

[Osiris]

I know that yes, casters are OP. However, I think your ideas have gone a bit too far. Instead, perhaps the world is cursed, and you roll some die to see if A) your spell functions, B) your spell fizzles, but is still prepped, C) you accidentally fireball yourself (or some thing nasty :), d) your spell fizzles and is wasted and gone, or E) some odd effect {Rod of Wonder} takes place. What do you say to THIS?

[cerin616]

What we need to do is figure out what tier we all think is clearly the best for balancing. I personally think that is tier 3. tier 3, you are very good at one thing, and have some use when that one thing isn't available. Or you are ok at a large number of things.

The problem is that a wizard can do anything, and do it better than anyone else. What we need to do is twist that down to "can do anything, but not as good as anyone built for that one thing(OK at everything)", or make them good at one thing while still having a use when that one thing isn't available (IE very good at one, good at another)

[ericgrau]

The problem is that a wizard can do anything, and do it better than anyone else. What we need to do is twist that down to "can do anything, but not as good as anyone built for that one thing(OK at everything)", or make them good at one thing while still having a use when that one thing isn't available (IE very good at one, good at another)

This is a good approach that doesn't kill the game so much, and how it often tends to go already in low optimization. It's difficult to balance apples and apples, but when you're dealing with apples and oranges you don't need to precisely balance them. As long as they have variety someone can be a little weak and still contribute. Someone abusive can still break the game with so many options, but those people you deal with outside of the game rather than with rules. Just don't nerf casters into the ground in expectation of abuse, or you'll hurt the normal players too much.

[ahenobarbi]

What we need to do is figure out what tier we all think is clearly the best for balancing. I personally think that is tier 3. tier 3, you are very good at one thing, and have some use when that one thing isn't available. Or you are ok at a large number of things.

The problem is that a wizard can do anything, and do it better than anyone else. What we need to do is twist that down to "can do anything, but not as good as anyone built for that one thing(OK at everything)", or make them good at one thing while still having a use when that one thing isn't available (IE very good at one, good at another)

Didn't WotC kinda do this with Beguiler, Dread Necro and Warmage?

[Snowbluff]

This also assumes that all spell schools are created equally, which they are completely not. A wizard with only Evocation, Conjuration, and Transmutation is as good as a wizard with everything.

This is absolutely wrong. You would not have Abjuration. I would say sway out the redundant Evo for Abj or Div.

[cerin616]

Didn't WotC kinda do this with Beguiler, Dread Necro and Warmage?

Yea, pretty much, but i wouldn't want to ban anything that isn't tier 3 in a game.

I would rather make the wizard have the strength of any of those classes, but do it a bit differently. Or wizards should have just changed wizards so that wizard makes you pick to be beguiler like, necro like, or warmage like.

[eggynack]

Yea, pretty much, but i wouldn't want to ban anything that isn't tier 3 in a game.

I would rather make the wizard have the strength of any of those classes, but do it a bit differently. Or wizards should have just changed wizards so that wizard makes you pick to be beguiler like, necro like, or warmage like.
That just seems kinda like a roundabout way of accomplishing the same thing. The real drawback of tier 3 games is that they're not quite all encompassing enough. You need some sort of limited list versions of the other schools (I know in my heart that a conjuration or transmutation focused caster could theoretically be balanced), some cleric type guy, and maybe something with archery. Other than that, you've got just about every archetype hanging out in there, and factotum might even be able to cross archer off that list. Another thing missing is a prepared caster, but I don't know how big a loss that is. You could always just change one of the higher powered limited list casters into a limited list prepared guy, to lower his power a bit. The upside is that your limited list would mostly be conjuration, and the downside is that you can't cast your whole list spontaneously. In any case, it seems like a trivial task to just hand someone a beguiler, and call it a wizard.

[Namfuak]

The nerf I've considered for druids is to take out animal companion, and then have to choose between specializing in spellcasting and wild shape. Specializing in spellcasting gets you normal progression but only medium and small wild shapes and a slower per day progression, while taking WS as specialization causes your spellcasting to drop down to ranger progression. Natural spell is also banned.

[eggynack]

The nerf I've considered for druids is to take out animal companion, and then have to choose between specializing in spellcasting and wild shape. Specializing in spellcasting gets you normal progression but only medium and small wild shapes and a slower per day progression, while taking WS as specialization causes your spellcasting to drop down to ranger progression. Natural spell is also banned.
That still sounds like a tier one class to me. A low tier one, granted, but a tier one nonetheless. Prepared casting off the druid list is just that good. The wild shape version is around tier three.

[Namfuak]

That still sounds like a tier one class to me. A low tier one, granted, but a tier one nonetheless. Prepared casting off the druid list is just that good. The wild shape version is around tier three.

I realize it is still tier one, but I don't think spellcasting can be brought down without a total overhaul, and I don't like solutions that severely limit general choice of spells or take away 7th level and up spells.

[cerin616]

Thats why i prefer to change up how wizards/ wizard spells work rather than hand them a beguiler and call it a wizard. T3 imo is where the game is fairly balanced still and doesnt just get silly.

[eggynack]

I realize it is still tier one, but I don't think spellcasting can be brought down without a total overhaul, and I don't like solutions that severely limit general choice of spells or take away 7th level and up spells.
Fair enough. I suppose that if this does nothing else, it would mean that druids no longer just replace fighters. They'd still be much better than fighters, but they wouldn't be better than fighters, while simultaneously also being fighters. In any case, you could probably ditch the wild shape entirely on the caster version, and ditch the casting entirely on the wild shape version. In fact, why not just split it into three entirely separate classes? There could be a third class that just gets an animal companion. You could even go the summoner route, and toss the ranger casting onto the animal companion druid. That sounds like a halfway workable solution, though the purely casting based druid is still the clear winner of the three.

[cerin616]

So make a casting druid, a shapeshifting druid, and a ranger?

[eggynack]

So make a casting druid, a shapeshifting druid, and a ranger?
Basically, yeah. I'd buff the ranger a bit, to get him closer to tier 3. It could basically be a ranger, except with a druid animal companion. That certainly wouldn't be imbalanced, and you could probably go even further with it. You might even want to go all out on the animal companion part of it, and give the ranger free natural bond at some point. You could also buff the non-animal half of the equation, if you want.

Edit: I'd say that at a certain point after buffing the ranger, he'd probably hit tier 3. Then, the only aberrant case is the caster. How do you folk think the druid's tier would be effected if he were given the chassis of a wizard? I'm not saying that that's the plan, just that it's an interesting nerf to consider. You could probably get him down to tier two somehow, and that'd be fine balance-wise.

[TuggyNE]

Didn't WotC kinda do this with Beguiler, Dread Necro and Warmage?

They did, except that there's no generic broadly-capable T3 Wizard substitute, only specialists.

[rafaruggi]

I know that yes, casters are OP. However, I think your ideas have gone a bit too far. Instead, perhaps the world is cursed, and you roll some die to see if A) your spell functions, B) your spell fizzles, but is still prepped, C) you accidentally fireball yourself (or some thing nasty :), d) your spell fizzles and is wasted and gone, or E) some odd effect {Rod of Wonder} takes place. What do you say to THIS?

In my opinion, that's a very good idea. Also nice for a setting. I think it should work something like, you have a certain chance of your spell failing, and if it fails you roll the dice to see what odd effect you'll get.

Some work could be put into that to create a subsystem around that. Maybe at lower levels your chance of failing would be really great (50% sounds fun, but I think something around 30-35% at level 1 sounds fair) and then maybe you could reduce that chance by taking feats or by reducing your spellcasting power (Less spells, or slower spell progression, dunno.)

Also, the higher the level of the spell, the bitter the consequences. Imagine casting a Wish with a 10-15% chance of failing, just to **** up the dice and find out you made a mess of a big part of the world.

(That actually reminds me of Burning Wheel.)

[ahenobarbi]

In my opinion, that's a very good idea. Also nice for a setting. I think it should work something like, you have a certain chance of your spell failing, and if it fails you roll the dice to see what odd effect you'll get.

Some work could be put into that to create a subsystem around that. Maybe at lower levels your chance of failing would be really great (50% sounds fun, but I think something around 30-35% at level 1 sounds fair) and then maybe you could reduce that chance by taking feats or by reducing your spellcasting power (Less spells, or slower spell progression, dunno.)

Also, the higher the level of the spell, the bitter the consequences. Imagine casting a Wish with a 10-15% chance of failing, just to **** up the dice and find out you made a mess of a big part of the world.

(That actually reminds me of Burning Wheel.)

Only problem is that it doesn't help balance.Unoptimized casters will suffer and optimized won't care.

[GreenSerpent]

To deal with Druid, I seriously suggest the Totem Druid variant from Dragon Magazine. They get Wild Shape sooner, but can only Wild Shape into their Totem animal and the Dire version.

So an Eagle Totem druid can only become an eagle and a dire eagle. it reduces the power of Wild Shape substantially but keeps the flavour. Bear in mind that you still need to meet the HD requirement for the creature.

[Wings of Peace]

With skillful play and optimized choices the Wizard could probably still function. That said, my issue with your Wizard fix is that for me your Wizard would be in no way fun to play as. If I played a Wizard under those restrictions it would in no way be for fun but rather because I possessed a militant desire to rock as hard as possible just to spite your limitations.

[Eslin]

All of these fixes screw over non optimised characters. Nerf specific spells, not the classes themselves.

[Eldan]

The Basic idea isn't bad, I think, if a bit simple. What I'd look into is some Kind of grading Schools by power and versatility and making specialists lose different amounts of opposing Schools, like they did in 3.0 (though 3.0 also thought Evocation was amongst the most powerful schols).
Especially Transmutation and Conjuration have to give up more than others.

[undead hero]

Honestly, I think the Druid class should have been cut into two or three classes. A Nature themed stealthy and fighty medium BAB Summoner /Pet user, and a nature based caster with wild shape.
That said, if magic is rare, even weak spellcaster will be very potent.

They did that in 4e more or less.

Druid
Warden
Shaman

But what I never understood is why the 3.5 druid wasn't a Cha based caster...

[GreenETC]

Instead, perhaps the world is cursed, and you roll some die to see if A) your spell functions, B) your spell fizzles, but is still prepped, C) you accidentally fireball yourself (or some thing nasty :), d) your spell fizzles and is wasted and gone, or E) some odd effect {Rod of Wonder} takes place. What do you say to THIS?
This sort of idea I have seen suggested before, and I'd hazard to say it is completely awful. It's fun, don't get me wrong, but the fact that you have to roll for every spell, even ones that don't do anything, like Endure Elements, and then if you Rod of Wonder yourself, you have to roll AGAIN. All this hassle seems like a real way to discourage people from playing not only T1 casters, but T2, T3, T4, and T5 casters. Paladin with Rod of Wonder spells just turns a Knight of Holy Justice into a joke (not that he wasn't really already, but at least he gets cool stuff like Mark of Justice), potentially wiping out his allies or obliterating a captured enemy he's supposed to take into custody.

To deal with Druid, I seriously suggest the Totem Druid variant from Dragon Magazine. They get Wild Shape sooner, but can only Wild Shape into their Totem animal and the Dire version.
The only problem I can see is this still allows the Druid to be a B52 bomber, casting spells from up in the air because they're still an eagle all day.

[Deepbluediver]

A lot of these are quite similar to things I suggested for various class fixes.



Arcane
Wizards Wizards only gain access to three schools, automatically Speciasing in one of them. Once they obtain 4th level spells, they lose one of their schools to choose from, and when they obtain 7th level spells they lose another.

Example: Mialee is a wizard and chooses her school of magic at first level: She chooses Illusion, Enchantment and Abjuration and Specialises in Abjuration. She now learns spells from these schools when she levels up. Upon reaching level 7 she has to choose one of these schools to drop. She chooses Enchantment. She can from this point on only learn 4th level or higher spells from the schools Illusion and Abjuration. However, she can still learn new 0, 1st, 2nd or 3th level spells from Enchantment. At level 13 she learns her first 7th level spell. She now has to drop Illusion, because she specialised in Abjuration. However, she can still learn new Illusion spells for all Spell levels below 7th.

Cutting down the number of spells that a wizard can learn is definitely a good idea. That way the class still has power and variety, but any particular player isn't quite as overwhelming.

What I did was scrap the specialization mechanic entirely and just give them access to one new school at 1st, 2nd, 5th, and 10th. That way their versatility increases with level, instead of getting 100+ pages of spells (from the PHB alone) dumped on them with their first HD.

I left in the capacity for the wizard to supplement his casting with magic items, because there are no banned schools. In a magic-market style of gameplay the limitations then are less restricitive, but I've always preferred the DM to take a more active hand in item-distribution anyhow.


Sorcerer
A sorcerer picks 1 school and learns all spells from that particular school. He gets bonus feats at level 4 and every fourth level afterwards. This can either be a Heritage feat a Metamagic feat or the Extra Spell feat. The spells chosen with Extra spell can be from any school.

The biggest problem is that some spell schools are more powerful than others. Part of that is because many of them are poorly defined, and spell-school selection isn't very consistent. But it might be workable, if you fix that other stuff first. In the meantime, 2 schools instead of 1 could help; that way it's still less variety overall than the wizard, but enough to not get pigeonholed to much.

Finding a way to link certain groups of sorcerer spells thematicaly is a nice idea, I never managed to come up with anything workable though. Also, there are already several sorcerer-on-a-stick classes: Beguiler, Warmage, Dread Necromancer, etc.
Frankly, I'd vote we just keep going- with a few more names and special abilities, we could probably divide all the full-casting spontaneous arcane spells up that way. And the sorcerer either gets a complete makeover, or is just scrapped.

Adjust the spell-schools each special spontaneous caster has access too a little, and you might end up with something like:
School|Classs
Abjuration|Warmage
Conjuration|Summoner*
Divination|Oracle*
Enchantment|Beguiler
Evocation|Shugenja
Illusion|Beguiler
Necromancy|Dread Necromancer
Transmutation|Warmage
*Like the PF versions



Cleric
(For this adjustment, I recommend vastly enlarge the number of Domains per god.)
A First level cleric chooses 4 Domains corresponding to his or her god. These spells form there spell list, supplemented with a very stripped down Cleric Spell list. Their spell list only contains spells, that aren't on domain spell of any domain, and no none-core spells are allowed)

Grod_The_Giant had the best idea for this that I've seen yet (and it's similar to yours anyhow): A cleric learns the spells of all 5 of his/her dieties domains; then 1 spell from the whole cleric spell list every other level. That way, similar to the wizard, the cleric class has lots of potential, but any one player is much more restricted.


Druid
Full spell casting, AND the Ability to turn into different animals AND a full progression Animal companion. That's just too much! I, however have no experience playing Druids, so aren't sure how to fix this...

My guess would be to improve their Wildshape Ability, let them keep the Animal companion, but lose spell casting all together.

It depends on what you want to do with the druid. I could definitely see splitting the class into two seperate archteypes- one with full spellcasting and the other with a more involved Wildshape (scrap the animal companion piece; its the least interesting and least powerful, IMO).

For the casting-version, there should probably be some limit on how many spells they can learn. If you stick with just core, then I can see why the designers did what they did, but once you start automatically adding every splatbook to the druid's list, it rapidly grows to the point where it's impossible to keep track of half of it (and spending 15 minutes flipping through books looking for that one perfect spell isn't fun for the rest of your group).

[rafaruggi]

Only problem is that it doesn't help balance.Unoptimized casters will suffer and optimized won't care.

I think it could help balance. It makes spellcasting much more unreliable, and you get no way around that, period. You can lower your chance of failing the spells, by the cost of less powerful.

> reliable, < powerful
> powerful, < reliable.

The numbers, feats, the way it would work would require some thinking, but I'm pretty sure it could be pulled off.

[Deepbluediver]

It's fun, don't get me wrong, but the fact that you have to roll for every spell...

You have to roll a dice for pretty much every attack, sill check, and interaction in the game; why does manipulating the cosmic aether get a pass? And why would it really be that much worse? :smallconfused:

[DMwithoutPC's]

Alright, the general tone seems to be that I’m harsh on Wizard, and I can accept that. But I do think the solution should be something like this. Like many of you said, the power of a Wizard is that it can do EVERYTHING. I wanted to limit this by giving them less Schools, but I did not take into account the inequality between the Schools. IMO the schools should be of equal strength...would giving Transmutation, Illusion and Conjuration a -1 on caster level and giving Necromancy and Enchantment a +1 fix this?

Sorcerer: ok so this isn't functional. My reasoning was that Sorcerers, because magic is in their blood, should be bound to a certain theme, in this case a School of magic. Perhaps limiting them to only one school, but giving them a few extra spells known?

However I am also interested in balancing the several schools, until they are of equal strength. But how should I do this? And what's exactly the sequence of the schools from strongest to weakest?

[Eslin]

Again, it's not the schools themselves (though obviously some are stronger than others, transmutation/conjuration>evocation/enchantment and all that), it's specific spells. It's impossible to apply blanket fixes to the wizard without screwing over low optimisation levels, the only true solution is fixing every spell or not using the wizard.

[Deepbluediver]

However I am also interested in balancing the several schools, until they are of equal strength. But how should I do this? And what's exactly the sequence of the schools from strongest to weakest?

That's debatable to some degree; Conjuration is usually on top, just because of how many different things it can do. Transmutation is highly ranked because its versatile, and its most often the school that lets casters ignore the normal glass-cannon limitations that where supposed to balance them.
Evocation is decent at what it does, but many other schools can replicate it's effects so it's really got nothing special. Illusions and enchantments tend to get poo-poo'd because of the number of different creature types that are just flat-out immune.


I've had threads on this topic before, but I'll try to lay out my basic ideas here:

Abjuration- lately, my thinking is that this school needs to be scrapped, and it's effects divided up or pushed into Universal. It's a school defined more by intent than effect, and it's always been tough to find good things that fit here.

Conjuration- loses any energy-based spells (like the orbs) to evocation; loses healing to Necromancy
creation spells aren't permenant, but fade out after a certain duration.

Divination- no changes

Enchantment- all the "control" and behavior-affecting spells go here (control plants, control undead, cause fear, etc)

Evocation- all the blaster type spells, especially those with elemental modifiers go here (including stuff like the orbs & disintegration)
also includes anything with the "force" descriptor

Illusion- few changes; I don't like the "shadow" spells, but I think that's just me

Necromancy- is "life and death" magic; positive energy healing, raising the dead, creating undead, etc.

Transmutation- few changes (most via stuff lost to other schools)
toolbox spells like polymorph and shapechange should probably be more limited

[DMwithoutPC's]

The nerf I've considered for druids is to take out animal companion, and then have to choose between specializing in spellcasting and wild shape. Specializing in spellcasting gets you normal progression but only medium and small wild shapes and a slower per day progression, while taking WS as specialization causes your spellcasting to drop down to ranger progression. Natural spell is also banned.

I really like this; I think I'll adapt a version of this


The Basic idea isn't bad, I think, if a bit simple. What I'd look into is some Kind of grading Schools by power and versatility and making specialists lose different amounts of opposing Schools, like they did in 3.0 (though 3.0 also thought Evocation was amongst the most powerful schols).
Especially Transmutation and Conjuration have to give up more than others.
This, basically. But I do not know which school would be the most powerful and what they should lose. Though my guess is:

Transmutation
Conjuration
Illusion
Abjuration
Divination
Evocation
Necromancy
Enchantment

And, I belief the main problem with Enchantment is that it's so easy to get around (though I never played with a High level Enchanter before) would Enchantment be fixed if Mind Black gets banned?
(This is a rough list, if anyone has a better Idea I'd like to hear it)


In my opinion, that's a very good idea. Also nice for a setting. I think it should work something like, you have a certain chance of your spell failing, and if it fails you roll the dice to see what odd effect you'll get.

Some work could be put into that to create a subsystem around that. Maybe at lower levels your chance of failing would be really great (50% sounds fun, but I think something around 30-35% at level 1 sounds fair) and then maybe you could reduce that chance by taking feats or by reducing your spellcasting power (Less spells, or slower spell progression, dunno.)

Also, the higher the level of the spell, the bitter the consequences. Imagine casting a Wish with a 10-15% chance of failing, just to **** up the dice and find out you made a mess of a big part of the world.

(That actually reminds me of Burning Wheel.)

This was something else I was considering, what do you think about this?

Spells have a chance to fail equal to 5%Xspell level. (Ranging from 5% to 45%) Low level spells would almost always work, but higher level spells would be dangerous to cast, because, when you miss, half the time the spells reflects back upon the caster, or something like that.


All of these fixes screw over non optimised characters. Nerf specific spells, not the classes themselves.

You have a point, but I dislike being the "oh you found a really powerful Spell! it doesn't work" kind of DM. Fixing a system (like spellcasting) on the whole is better IMO than banning things case by case. But I haven't DMed that much, so maybe I'm wrong there.

[Komatik]

That's why we write a banned list prior to the game.

And seriously, you could have a character that knows nothing but Alter Self, Polymorph and Shapechange and be an omnipotent god. That's what people are saying. The versatility is fun, see Beguiler, Tome of Battle Classes, Binder, and so on. Being able to press many kinds of buttons is tons of fun. When those buttons are by themselves gateways to godhood or just win instantly? Then we have a problem.