How Would You Make Magic Better from a Mechanic & In-Game Standpoint?

[sammyp03]

Personally, I feel that magic is a bit weird for a Prepared spell caster in the game. Why should a wizard,who spends his entire life in study, just automatically forget how to cast a spell? Oh i have 3 spell slots left but only memorized Fireball once, therefor I cannot cast it again?

I believe Magic should be more physically taxing. You can't cast fireball again, not because it is removed from your memory, but because you do not physically have the juice left to put forth that kind of power. In other words, everyone is a spontaneous caster. Classes would still differ from one another. IE a wizard knows more spells for a given situation, but a sorcerer can cast more spells.

I also like the Idea of re-routing power in 5e,

. You can expend 3 slots of a lower level spell to gain one slot of a spell one level above the spell slots you expended
This approach works both ways. A caster can use higher-level slots to power lower-level spells as well. One slot of a given spell level can be used to power two spells of the next lower level. Thus, the “exchange rate” of spell slots to power higher-level spells is not the same as that for spell slots powering lower-level spells, because magical energy is expended in the transfer. Further, lower-level spell slots resulting from a caster using the power of higher-level spells cannot be used to power spells of a lower level still!

My question is, how would you make magic better from a gameplay/mechanics standpoint in your world?

[(Un)Inspired]

Drop negligible cost M components from the game. I think they're stupid thematically and spell component pouches are absolutely ridiculous.

[Lightlawbliss]

I have found a great way to tune magic is to have a "military grade weapons" sort of restriction. Essentially, the governments of the world don't allow just anyone to have certain spells. You want to cast a spell that can destroy a small town? There is a wall of red tape to do so legally. That sort of thing. For added fun, different governments have different restrictions.

[sammyp03]

I have found a great way to tune magic is to have a "military grade weapons" sort of restriction. Essentially, the governments of the world don't allow just anyone to have certain spells. You want to cast a spell that can destroy a small town? There is a wall of red tape to do so legally. That sort of thing. For added fun, different governments have different restrictions.

I follow the same path. ANythingabove 3rd level spells is considered HIGH MAGIC. In order to cast these spells, they have to be spoken in the language PRIMEVAL ( language of the elder gods) and research through ancient tomes called songbooks of power.

[Tohsaka Rin]

I just use Psionics.

No, seriously. Don't giggle.

Unearthed Arcana has a variant for spell points, if you'd rather not just dump one system for another. The scaling isn't perfect, but it doesn't have the (apparent) widespread Alzheimers epidemic among mages feel to it.

[LoyalPaladin]

I just use Psionics.

No, seriously. Don't giggle.

I'm sorry. I laughed.

I would drop components... most people don't bother to keep track after day one, if that. As far as being prepared casters, it always made sense to me. You weren't prepared to cast fireball 3 times. Wizards man, can't live with them, cant live without them.

[sammyp03]

I'm sorry. I laughed.

I would drop components... most people don't bother to keep track after day one, if that. As far as being prepared casters, it always made sense to me. You weren't prepared to cast fireball 3 times. Wizards man, can't live with them, cant live without them.

I understand from a game mechanics standpoint. It just never made sense to me. Michael Jordan spent his whole life perfecting his craft of basketball. Do you think after his first shot attempt, hes's just going to forget how to shoot?

[LoyalPaladin]

I understand from a game mechanics standpoint. It just never made sense to me. Michael Jordan spent his whole life perfecting his craft of basketball. Do you think after his first shot attempt, hes's just going to forget how to shoot?
I like to think of it less like forgetting and more like being thrown a curve-ball. He knows how to shoot a hoop, he's good at shooting a hoop, but he's walking down the street and all of a sudden someone tosses a ball at him while yelling "Quick! The hoop is on that moving car!"

[mythmonster2]

Vancian casting has multiple explanations that can be given. Forgetting a spell after you cast it is just one way to fluff it. One that I rather like basically goes, when you prepare your spells in the morning, you're actually casting about 99% of the spell. When you cast it later in the day, you're basically just giving the command for the spell to be finished and giving it the last 1%.

[Karl Aegis]

Wouldn't it be cool if you could just sit down in the middle of the battlefield with your computer and keyboard and just rewrite reality with a computer program? Sure, you might have some Grognards who complain about how back in their day they used spell books and clumps of bat guano to rewrite reality, but you're still rewriting reality. You just use a computer.

[lsfreak]

I understand from a game mechanics standpoint. It just never made sense to me. Michael Jordan spent his whole life perfecting his craft of basketball. Do you think after his first shot attempt, hes's just going to forget how to shoot?

I wouldn't think of it like this. It's more like a spell requires a huge amount of casting time, and the spellcaster does most of it ahead of time. Then at a later time the last few bits are put in place and the spell goes off. You could cast spells spontaneously, but they take a long time. That's effectively what leaving a few spell slots open, rather than preparing them all at the beginning of the day, is: allowing yourself the ability to spontaneously cast spells if you need to. It just takes 15 minutes to do.

[sammyp03]

I wouldn't think of it like this. It's more like a spell requires a huge amount of casting time, and the spellcaster does most of it ahead of time. Then at a later time the last few bits are put in place and the spell goes off. You could cast spells spontaneously, but they take a long time. That's effectively what leaving a few spell slots open, rather than preparing them all at the beginning of the day, is: allowing yourself the ability to spontaneously cast spells if you need to. It just takes 15 minutes to do.

This makes a certain amount of sense I guess.

[Kaidinah]

Spheres of Power and Psionics both give off the spell vibe better in my opinion.

Akashic Mysteries/Incarnum and Pact Magic give off a different feel that feels very magical in the non-iconic way.

[saxavarius]

If you want a system that works on a physical strain system the Slayers d20 runs on exactly that. You can learn a certain number of spells based on you INT modifier+ bonus points from certain classes and you can cast all day but you need to make a save or two to resist the tiresome effects of working magic. I highly recommend giving both the D20 system and the anime series a look.

[Arbane]

I wouldn't think of it like this. It's more like a spell requires a huge amount of casting time, and the spellcaster does most of it ahead of time. Then at a later time the last few bits are put in place and the spell goes off. You could cast spells spontaneously, but they take a long time. That's effectively what leaving a few spell slots open, rather than preparing them all at the beginning of the day, is: allowing yourself the ability to spontaneously cast spells if you need to. It just takes 15 minutes to do.

That's pretty much how Roger Zelazny explained it in the later Amber novels, and it's my go-to rationalization for D&D magic.

Anyway... how to make magic better. That's a hole with no bottom, as there's multiple problems with D&D magic.

1: It's too easy. Yes, you need to spend an hour a day getting your mojo working, but after that, it's just a matter of not getting hit in mid-casting. Very few hours-long rituals, and none that can only be cast at specific astrological conjunctions. Under normal circumstances, there is no risk of debilitation, mutation, insanity, damnation, mystic backlash, bad karma, unwelcome spiritual attention, dimensional rupture, or hair loss from spellcasting.
2: It's too powerful. See any Caster Supremacy discussion, we all know the drill by now. There's nothing in D&D that a non-caster can do that a spell can't do faster and probably better. There are (almost) no situations where NOT using magic is a better choice for any reason other than a shortage of spell-slots.
3: A lot of people just don't like Vancian fire-and-forget magic. So use spell-points or invocations or something.
4: It's too plentiful. I get the impression this is specifically a problem with 3.X, as prior to that, magic items weren't nearly as commoditized, and things like wands, potions and scrolls were hoarded rarites. Spell slots/day is meant to be a limiter on magicians' power, and D&D3 blew that limit right off.
5: It's too safe. I already mentioned the lack of weird side-effects from casting, but there's also (very little) way to have a spell backfire on you - fireballs don't set scenery on fire any more, teleport can't land you inside a wall, and so on.
6: Magic is too dependable. Skills need a skill-check to use. Attacks need an attack roll. Spellcasting just works.

There's plenty more where this came from....

[Rowan Wolf]

After reading this thread and many other it got me thinking a lot of the issue with magic is the effort to effect with in the nature of the action economy. Not sure how to 'fix' this in such a way that the game remains fun though I guess a lot of it is dependent on the DM and the players.

[Dysart]

It's not that you forget, it's that you expend your focused magical 'pool' portion of that days allowance.

For instance, a level 1 wizard (in pathfinder) knows many spells and keeps a note of their intricacies in his Spell book.
How ever due to his level (his literal life experience) and his physical ability (aka bonus spells per day) he's able to amass a certain amount of prepared magical power. Like psionic focus only that it's a lot more taxing and can only be done a certain amount of times per day.

Then when he levels up (aka by expending and replenishing this focus/pool) he finds a way to stretch this pool to additional uses per day.
Yet with 0 level spells they can use them over and over again because they use hardly any spell power but still at the beginning of the day they have to focus their minds and prepare that pocket of their mind for use on those spells.

Where as a Sorcerer or none-preparing spell caster has a literal font/pool of magic that drains each time a spell is cast. I would describe to the player that when they run out of spells of a certain level they feel empty, like a hunger that is centered somewhere other than their stomach.


As for changes, nah, no changes needed really. Yes spells can do make other classes null and void... that is until they get taken out by a marginally competent goblin or aggressive house cat.
Straight up arcane casters like wizard and sorcerer only get to become reality warping demi-gods because the fighter got in the way of that bugbear that time, or the rogue disarmed the trap that would have done triple their HP or even they got resurrected because the cleric knew exactly how to sweet talk his god into bringing him back... again.

Remember, it's easy to get carried away with "what's the bestest" on these forums but DnD, Pathfinder and most RPGs in general are a team effort and although some classes seem super cool, they all taste the same to a Colossal Red Dragon.

[Darth Ultron]

Personally, I feel that magic is a bit weird for a Prepared spell caster in the game. Why should a wizard,who spends his entire life in study, just automatically forget how to cast a spell? Oh i have 3 spell slots left but only memorized Fireball once, therefor I cannot cast it again?


Fluff wise, I say: A spell is a lot like a recipe, where you have slightly different recipes for the same dish for different climates, times of year and altitudes. The written spell is the same but for magic ''climates and times and altitudes'' So when the wizard memorizes a spell, what they are doing is checking the magic flow and then memorizing the spell the right way. For example, Fireball might have a different verbal component for each time of year, plus a different somatic hand movement for each zodiac sign, plus a finger movement for each planet in the sky, and so on. Each spell is very complicated and has like a dozen dozen variations. That is why the wizard has them all written down in his spellbook.

So what the wizard is doing is figuring out all that stuff ahead of time, and memorizing the right spell for that day.

[Barmoz]

The magic system in the Black Company campaign setting book and also published stand alone in the True Sorcery book from Green Ronin has an excellent, albeit complicated, magic system that I think is a superior alternative to fire & forget.

[torrasque666]

6: Magic is too dependable. Skills need a skill-check to use. Attacks need an attack roll. Spellcasting just works.

This is my major grip with it, excepting ray spells. Those do require an attack roll at least. Spellcasting should require some sort of roll. Probably something involving Casting Stat and something else. Have to hit a DC in the first place to even attempt to cast the spell(possibly 15+Spell level+Extenuating circumstances) with said roll. removes some of the dependability. fail the roll? slots still expended.

[Dysart]

This is my major grip with it, excepting ray spells. Those do require an attack roll at least. Spellcasting should require some sort of roll. Probably something involving Casting Stat and something else. Have to hit a DC in the first place to even attempt to cast the spell(possibly 15+Spell level+Extenuating circumstances) with said roll. removes some of the dependability. fail the roll? slots still expended.

Problem with that is it totally messes up the spell slot mechanic.
The major difference between attacks and skills is that if you mess it up you can still use it again... unlike spells which run out.

[Qwertystop]

Something I saw in an unrelated work, adapted trio fit a D&D context:

Traditionally, spells are written on scrolls or in books - but you never use both sides. When the spell is cast from the page, the energy burns away the page. This applies to other recording media as well - an emergency tattoo of a spell, in case you lose your spellbook, will leave a scar after casting.

This is why exceptionally powerful Wizards are generally mad. Even if you memorize the spell, something still holds it, and something still burns.

To get the "safe" magic that's typical of D&D, say that the spell-prep time is time spent writing copies of a spell - cheap scrolls, written in ordinary ink on ordinary paper, that won't last more than a day, where the copy in your spellbook is effectively a scroll. You can thus always get one more casting of any spell in your book - but that was your master copy, so you'd better hope you can find someone else who'll let you copy theirs.

Sorcerers are then those who, due to whatever it is that makes sorcerers happen, have more resilient minds - able to take some of the burn from memorized spells without too much damage.

[sammyp03]

It's not that you forget, it's that you expend your focused magical 'pool' portion of that days allowance.

For instance, a level 1 wizard (in pathfinder) knows many spells and keeps a note of their intricacies in his Spell book.
How ever due to his level (his literal life experience) and his physical ability (aka bonus spells per day) he's able to amass a certain amount of prepared magical power. Like psionic focus only that it's a lot more taxing and can only be done a certain amount of times per day.

To me this can be acomplished by a spell slots approach rather than the fire and forget method that are generally thought about 3.5 prepared casters. Although I do hear what you are saying.

[sammyp03]

The magic system in the Black Company campaign setting book and also published stand alone in the True Sorcery book from Green Ronin has an excellent, albeit complicated, magic system that I think is a superior alternative to fire & forget.

Have'nt got to check those out. Could you elaborate a bit?

[Segev]

Similar to the Amber example, the way I ran it in one campaign was that spellcasters are not really casting the whole spell at the time of casting.

I also changed the paradigm: wizards are not engineers or scientists, discovering and manipulating fundamental forces of the universe. They're lawyers, invoking ancient (and not so ancient) contracts with the (semi-)sentient beings that are the animist embodiments of those fundamental forces. Generically, I tend to call them "spirits."

All magic is, effectively, calling upon the spirits that make up the forces of the universe for aid in some fashion. Some may view it as ordering about servants, while others might think of it as calling upon friends for favors, while still others might consider it no more or less mysterious than why a trained dog obeys its master's commands.

The actual mechanics divide Arcane and Divine magic by how they derive the authority/allegiance needed to get the results they desire.

Arcane magic is generally contractual, and always reliant on personal relationships and responsibilities between caster and spirits, unrelated to direct membership or allegiance to particular courts/factions/whatever (at least on the caster's side of the issue).

Wizards are lawyers. Their tomes and libraries are filled with contracts, legal discussions, analysis of the letter of agreements, and terms and conditions and just plain names of who owes what to whom and how to become party to existing contracts.

Their spellbooks are filled with notes on how to perform specific acts which make them party to existing treaties and agreements, and which obligate the spirits who are also party to it to respond in specific ways. Casting the spell involves deliberate and exact invocation of the wizard's rights under the contract, and possibly one or two key components to finishing establishing his rights (often, this is what material components are).

As a wizard gets more knowledgeable and skilled in his craft - gains more levels - he becomes more adept at performing more complex rites to prepare himself, and more talented at balancing obligations and conditions so that he can prepare more and higher-level spells without violating any of his terms and conditions in enacting others.

Researching spells as a wizard can involve any of the following:

He could simply find an old spell and copy it down. He makes no changes or differences to it, and just enacts it. Alternatively, it could have conditions that are impossible to meet (membership in specific Arcane Orders which are no longer extant, for example), but he researched some loopholes to make it work anyway.
He could go out and actively seek greater powers of the spirit realms, researching their names, proclivities, needs, wants, allegiances and enmities, and bargain with them for specific new contracts and treaties. Offer preparatory rites which he knows from precedent have certain value to them, and ask for specific services in return. Bargain over offers and counter-offers until a pact is sealed and a new contractual spell exists.
He could research through many different existing contracts, treaties, and laws of the spirit realm, and construct from those a set of rites which offer certain privileges heretofore never combined, and through an invocation that meets all the requirements of the portions of the contracts he invokes, he creates a new spell effect.


Sorcerers and bards are less legalistically-minded, as a general rule. Their Spellcraft still represents their knowledge and understanding of the theories and principles and ability to parse these things, but they tend to be poor at refining the skills at meeting particular contracts' requirements and selecting them carefully to balance with each other and forge the complement of magics they will command that day.

Instead, they tend to use their knowledge of the ways of the spirit realms to make their own compacts. Whether they become well-known friends of higher-up spirits or negotiate through the force of their personality specific rights and privileges to call upon the spirits for aid, sorcerers and bards gain specific spell effects they can invoke. They call upon their friends, allies, or servants of the same, and get the effects they have negotiated (formally or informally). Their limits per day tend to be based on how much they've in general called upon these bonds; if you call people too often in too short a period of time, they eventually start ignoring your calls. And obligation only carries so far.

Higher-level sorcerers and bards are more persuasive and often are owed greater favors or are better friends with more influential spirits.

Divine spellcasting involves actually signing on as a member, in some fashion, of the very spirit courts one hopes to command. Clerics and their ilk are servants of their gods, and have specific rank and authority in their gods' hierarchies. When they pray for their spells, they're requisitioning service from their superiors, who give them authority over other members of the hierarchy (who happen to be spirits).

Invoking that authority requires less precision than casting arcane spells because arcane magic is all about exactly following the rules in order to enforce their desires. If a wizard - or even a sorcerer or bard - flubs a gesture or a word, the contract is not invoked properly and even their friends might figure they didn't play along quite right.

A cleric doesn't have to worry about it; he and the spirits he commands not only both serve the same divinity (and thus would answer to the same person for failure of the cleric's service), but typically will share goals an ethos. So all the cleric has to do is be clear enough that the spirits he's invoking know what he means. This is why clerics can cast in armor while arcane magics tend to have ASF.

Obviously, higher-level clerics have more authority and are regularly authorized to use more magic with greater personal discretion, hence getting more spells per day.

Druids are also divine casters rather than arcane, despite having something which might appear to be a sorcerous relationship with their spirits. They are friends and allies rather than servants in the same hierarchy. The difference between them and sorcerers is, however, that druids fully sign on to the spirits' "side" of things. They're agents of Nature, not merely friends thereto. They live the life and seek the same kinds of goals. When a druid commands Nature, it's because he's got the bona fides and reputation as somebody who is of a like mind with them. IF he's directing a new goal, it's because he's argued for it in their spiritual society as one of them. He's the Last Samurai or the Avatar-wearing soldier who's gone native.

Druids don't so much "pray" for spells as they plan things out with their allies. Despite being part of the society, it's obvious they're not spirits, themselves, so they have to rely on their spiritual brethren to do a lot of things. So they ask and discuss and plan what it is they're going to call upon them to do.

Druid spellcasting is still invocation of these spirits and the agreements. Whether it's pre-arranged signals or simply saying "hey, like we agreed, do this," they still need to communicate in the language of the spirits and do so clearly. Their allies, like the clerics', will not falter because the druid flubbed a gesture or stumbled on a word; they're not looking for excuses. But druids joined the society by making certain vows and commitments, and basically by living "like" the spirits do, by their social codes. Wearing metal armor, amongst other things, therefore offends the spirits who perform their magic, so druids cannot cast spells while doing it. It'd be like asking your Jewish friend for a favor while wearing a swastika. He might forgive you for having worn it, but he's almost certainly going to ask you to take it off BEFORE he'll help you.



So that's how I tend to reconcile it, myself. Spellcasting isn't about manipulating fundamental forces in a scientific way, nor about having some supernatural power others do not; it's about knowing the spirits and hwo they work, and either being a part of their society/hierarchy or being able to manipulate them or their obligations to get what you want.

[Barmoz]

I'm doing this from memory so I'm probably going to get some of it wrong.

Instead of set spells, you gain "talents" as you level, which are somewhat similar to seeds in the epic spellcasting system. One example talent would be Create Energy: Fire. You can create a fire ray, a fire ball, any type of fire that you can imagine, but the more complicated or powerful the fire, the higher the spellcraft check needed to cast it. Each talent has a base DC for a base effect, such as creating x amount of fire. Casting that spell requires you to make that DC and you take 1d8 points of temporary HP damage called Drain. If you want to augment that base effect, it raises the spellcraft DC needed to cast the spell, and the higher the DC relative to your spellcraft total the more drain damage you take. There are also ways to offset that DC, such as taking more time, or adding VSM components, reducing the drain you have to withstand. You also have a pool of spell energy that increases as you level that can be used to offset drain, but it's not very large so you wouldn't want to use it every time you wanted to cast a spell, and you can only use so much energy per spell depending on your level.

You can also blend talents together, to create more complicated effects. There's a talent for animating dead, if you blended that with fire, you could have a fireball that reanimates the corpses of it's victims, etc.

The end result is that you have a system with almost limitless flexibility, not just in spell creation and design, but in player decision. It allows you to big things by planning ahead and / or being willing to absorb lots of drain and risking having used all your power for a while, and it allows you to do something minor very quickly and easily but still have to pay some amount of personal cost.

[sammyp03]

I'm doing this from memory so I'm probably going to get some of it wrong.

Instead of set spells, you gain "talents" as you level, which are somewhat similar to seeds in the epic spellcasting system. One example talent would be Create Energy: Fire. You can create a fire ray, a fire ball, any type of fire that you can imagine, but the more complicated or powerful the fire, the higher the spellcraft check needed to cast it. Each talent has a base DC for a base effect, such as creating x amount of fire. Casting that spell requires you to make that DC and you take 1d8 points of temporary HP damage called Drain. If you want to augment that base effect, it raises the spellcraft DC needed to cast the spell, and the higher the DC relative to your spellcraft total the more drain damage you take. There are also ways to offset that DC, such as taking more time, or adding VSM components, reducing the drain you have to withstand. You also have a pool of spell energy that increases as you level that can be used to offset drain, but it's not very large so you wouldn't want to use it every time you wanted to cast a spell, and you can only use so much energy per spell depending on your level.

You can also blend talents together, to create more complicated effects. There's a talent for animating dead, if you blended that with fire, you could have a fireball that reanimates the corpses of it's victims, etc.

The end result is that you have a system with almost limitless flexibility, not just in spell creation and design, but in player decision. It allows you to big things by planning ahead and / or being willing to absorb lots of drain and risking having used all your power for a while, and it allows you to do something minor very quickly and easily but still have to pay some amount of personal cost.

This sounds very very interesting. I must have a look!

[Der_DWSage]

I'm also going to shill for Spheres of Power here-the spellcasting there is so much more flavorful, even for the basic Wizard/Cleric equivalent that has no (innate) class features beyond spellcasting. It also takes everything I've ever said about making spellcasting more flavorful and logical, and runs with it. 99% of what I'm saying here, Spheres of Power does.

The first big thing is to make spells need to build on each other. You need to learn minor illusions before jumping straight to Major Image, for example. And even though it's an awful thing to build towards, you should learn Fireball before you learn Delayed Blast Fireball. As it is, there doesn't need to be any rhyme, reason, or rhythm to what spells you learn and prepare unless you're a Beguiler or Warmage, and they all have the same list, making things a bit more boring between them.

The second thing is that not every mage should cast spells the same way-Bards and Sorcerers probably cast Major Image in very different ways, seeing as how one can sing to maintain it and can cast it in light armor, while the other gets flustered if he's wearing anything heavier than a hoodie. Allow people to build their own casting traditions-some people need to not wear armor. Some people need to sing. Some people need to paint illusions in the air, requiring a craft(Painting) check. Magic is standardized in D&D, which makes it less magical and more like physics. But if they see a whimsical Bard literally painting a picture with words, that's going to have a very different feeling from the Dark Mage whose eyes glow green and who raises the graven symbol of his dark god against you when he casts Major Image. (The first requiring a skill check, the second being a spellcasting focus and an obvious source, both of them casting the same spell.)

The third is that there should be ways to mix spells-anyone that plays Gestalt can tell you that a wealth of options opens up when you can mix-and-match between even a limited set of components, and mixing spells would be a lot less work than creating individual components that could then be made to build spells. While I like the talent system above, it'd be even more terrifying/confusing to newbies of the system, and we want the hobby to grow.

Lastly, there should be more class features that play with spell effects. Please not raw numbers, raw numbers are boring. But things like the Shadowcraft Mage (Without shenanigans) that can make Illusions X% real, or Evokers that can manifest raw elements even when their regular spellcasting power runs out, or Abjuration specialists that can throw up protective spells as an immediate action.

(Also, I'm not a fan of Vancian casting in the first place, and feel like most spontaneous casters should have the actual Spell Point option found in the Unearthed Arcana.)

[Coidzor]

It's unbalancing, but since you're asking, one thing I'd thought about once was the idea that just casting straight out of a spellbook would be more along the lines of a 5 minute to 15 minute ritual + the regular casting time, which would afford for more utility casting and make building a fortress of solitude out of walls of stone and iron a bit less time consuming.

[ExLibrisMortis]

Well, I always thought it would be fun to give people spell/power points equal to their ability score total, and every point you expend temporarily lowers an ability score by one (so casting a 9th-level spell lowers your ability scores by 17 total, divided up as you wish). Regenerate points per minute, hour or day, as balance requires. Belts of magnificence all around, but you're still going to be stuck at low everything-but-casting stat at the end of the day.

[sammyp03]

Well, I always thought it would be fun to give people spell/power points equal to their ability score total, and every point you expend temporarily lowers an ability score by one (so casting a 9th-level spell lowers your ability scores by 17 total, divided up as you wish). Regenerate points per minute, hour or day, as balance requires. Belts of magnificence all around, but you're still going to be stuck at low everything-but-casting stat at the end of the day.

How would you balance this? It seams like it would be very powerful early on but not so much later in levels.