What if Metamagic reduced CL rather than increased spell slot?

[Segev]

Say that you cast a spell at -2 CL per +1 slot adjustment. So a Maximized Fireball would be (CL-6)*6 but still take a 3rd level spell slot.

Maybe it would need to reduce the DC of a spell by a similar amount, either instead of this or in addition.

Too good? Not good enough? Interesting enough for a feat or class feature?

[ryu]

Say that you cast a spell at -2 CL per +1 slot adjustment. So a Maximized Fireball would be (CL-6)*6 but still take a 3rd level spell slot.

Maybe it would need to reduce the DC of a spell by a similar amount, either instead of this or in addition.

Too good? Not good enough? Interesting enough for a feat or class feature?

How does that interact when CL determines a duration, but you persist?

[Segev]

Hm. Good question. Any other oddities like that that this would create?

[bjoern]

Say that you cast a spell at -2 CL per +1 slot adjustment. So a Maximized Fireball would be (CL-6)*6 but still take a 3rd level spell slot.

Maybe it would need to reduce the DC of a spell by a similar amount, either instead of this or in addition.

Too good? Not good enough? Interesting enough for a feat or class feature?

So a maximized fireball would be CL -6 So at 7th level it would do 6 damage from a 3rd level slot. At 12th level it would do 36 damage from a 3rs level slot.

It seems like it would make MM even harder to use in early and mid level play. Plus it would break stuff wide open that wasn't dependant on CL. Like persistent spell for a -12 CL on buff spells.....lots of potential for abuse there.

Plus you could just keep on piling up the CL penalties to put every MM on a spell at once.

[Qwertystop]

I'm sure there's plenty of spells that don't scale by caster level but could be helped by metamagic. Or at least that don't scale in a way that matters. Anything that's useful as wands or potions or magic items could be really broken with this.

[eggynack]

I don't much like it. It feels like you're nerfing the high-damage style of metamagic use, while buffing everything else, which seems backwards. For example, what if you skipped fireball, and instead went with enervation. Now that variety of crazy is way more powerful, and it doesn't need that. Increased spell level is something that impacts everything, and it does so in a similar way most of the time. Sure, there may be a case where you don't care about spell level, say because you're extending a 24 hour spell and are thus unimpacted by the slot cost, but those cases are rare. Decreased caster level does not in any way impact everything equally, which means that this rule can be way more exploited than the original.

[Segev]

Fair enough. I suspected that might be the case. Making them suffer -1 DC per MM slot instead would also not work on ones where you're just putting up persistent buffs.

[Amphetryon]

Say that you cast a spell at -2 CL per +1 slot adjustment. So a Maximized Fireball would be (CL-6)*6 but still take a 3rd level spell slot.

Maybe it would need to reduce the DC of a spell by a similar amount, either instead of this or in addition.

Too good? Not good enough? Interesting enough for a feat or class feature?

Heightened Spell just got weird.

[nedz]

FWIW you just broke Fortify Spell.