Has anyone played a game with spell points and vitalizing?

[tedcahill2]

It's from Unearth Arcana. Spell points immediately appear to offer too much flexibility to spell casters, of course, allow numerous high level spells to be cast in a day.

Vitalizing fatigues a caster when their spell points reach 1/2, and exhausts them at 1/4 spell points. When a mundane source fatigues of exhausts a caster, it reduces their available spell points.

Vitalizing seems to offer a good balance against spell points, but has anyone played with this system, and what did you think?

[DMVerdandi]

It's from Unearth Arcana. Spell points immediately appear to offer too much flexibility to spell casters, of course, allow numerous high level spells to be cast in a day.

Vitalizing fatigues a caster when their spell points reach 1/2, and exhausts them at 1/4 spell points. When a mundane source fatigues of exhausts a caster, it reduces their available spell points.

Vitalizing seems to offer a good balance against spell points, but has anyone played with this system, and what did you think?

Personally I have not, BUT... The Spell point wizard is essentially the 5e wizard (In how they prepare), mixed with a psion. Nothing truly bad comes from it. Lets say a caster Nova's right. Throws out big gigantic spells for one battle (Not using long duration buffs and single encounter one shotters ...hmm), and voila, they have blown their reserves.


Flexibility isn't a bad thing, and to be honest, the more you give to the classes, the less they hunt for crazy loopholes that ACTUALLY break the game.

[Fizban]

Spell points as presented in Unearthed Arcana (or the SRD link here (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/spellPoints.htm)) are not great. Making the Wizard into a spontaneous caster with a massive changeable spell list is a significant upgrade, the Cleric even moreso as they don't have any spellbook to put a semblance of a spells known limit on them. Meanwhile the Sorcerer barely gets one extra spell's worth of spell points to make up for their cripplingly terrible spells known in comparison.

Sorcerers don't get bonus known spells for high ability scores, so prepared casters shouldn't get bonus prepared either (they're already getting bonus spell points). You could give sorcerers the bonus spells, but they're still worth less because they can never change them. Clerics and Druids just get stronger and there's not much to do about it without making them keep spells known lists.

The spell point progression clearly seems to think Sorcerers only have one more spell per day than Wizards, which is true- if all Wizards are specialists. Thus, all Wizards must now be specialists, with no gains other than their unfairly large spell point base. Alternatively you could reverse-engineer the spell point formulas and just give the sorcerer more to start, but that's more effort to end up with a higher power level. Clerics have the same bonus spell as specialists from their domains, but Druids should just have less.

And finally, fix the Sorcerer in general. Give them a bonus feat progression and an Extra Spell feat that isn't garbage (pick a spell of any level up to that you can cast, possibly even two if they're lower than that [as Pathfinder] or from any spell list [as Expanded Knowledge for Psions]). Bards could use the same, their class feature list is anemic already.

You could also take a look at Ernir's Vancian to Psionic (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?194002-3-5-A-Translation-of-Vancian-Spellcasting-to-Psionic-Mechanics) conversion, where he attempts to go over the standard casters and properly convert them to match. It bugs me because he put in a bunch of other personalized class changes, but the spell point work all seems solid enough (though I haven't read all the spells and did have my disagreements).

Yeesh, yeah so many changes. It's easy enough to make "pure" conversions though. Wilder (with ACFs to taste)-> Sorcerer, remember that Wild Surge is effectively a bunch of free power points. Psion-> Mage, which is actually just a non-wild Sorcerer (Psion is basically Sorcerer with a non-terrible spell progression). And Erudite-> Wizard, requiring xp to master spells found or copied from books which may or may not cost money to scribe. Rip the Psywar power progression for Bards, and the Divine Mind power progression for Paladins/Rangers, cutting it off at 4th level spells (don't know why Divine Mind goes past that, except for it's having 3/4 BAB because wha?).


The Vitalizing variant is an altogether different problem. They say right in the recovery mechanics that spells can recover your fatigue and restore your spell points to 2/3 maximum, it has infinite loops built in as soon as you can cast Lesser Restoration (or Ray of Resurgence [LEoF] for arcanists, so literally 1st level, and there's a bard song for it too). Remove that mind-numbingly obvious stupidity and you're good. With Spell points only recovered by natural rest, you end up with only a modest increase in daily staying power. With spell points and spells that last for 10 minutes or an hour per level, any two hour or even one hour rest is enough to fully reload your in-combat spells and effectively start a new "day." Plan accordingly and you'll be fine.