An alternate spells per day rule

[zlefin]

bah, had a draft written up but lost the long type-up I had, so just making a shorter one :(

basic idea:
for the high tier full casters
Spell levels per day = 2 + (2 * class level) + ability modifier

you can mix and match the levels however you like as long as you don't go over the total.

maximum available spell levels would be the same as normal (haven't figured out what to do about sor/wiz distinction yet)

just an idea I had and have kicked around a bit; haven't played it.
looking for thoughts/analysis/results from anyone who's tried it (others have probably got the same idea before)

notes:
1. it's essentially a spell point system with a different number setup.

2. many pathfinder abilities use a similar rule for scaling.

3. classes get 4/day of their highest level spell; and a little bit extra.

4. it means high level casters still have to conserve spells and don't have such a glut.

5. rather high number of level 1 spells; not sure if good or bad.

6. at high levels where you don't gain a new level of spells, the +2 may not feel like much of a boost; as you're just going from say 28 to 30 levels of spells a day.

7. ease of implementation is a plus. it's a pretty simple rule to understand/explain/follow.

8. it's not meant to change what tier things are in; just tone down the power growth rate.

[heavyfuel]

Whatever. It works for Psionics and they aren't any much more broken than regular Spellcasting. Honestly, I'd be easier to straight up convert vancian spellcasting to power points. Just call them magic points, or MP for short (be sure to have blue potions characters can drink to replenish it)

[BowStreetRunner]

...easier to straight up convert vancian spellcasting to power points. Just call them magic points, or MP for short (be sure to have blue potions characters can drink to replenish it)Pretty much Spell Points (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/spellPoints.htm) from UA.

[heavyfuel]

Pretty much Spell Points (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/variant/magic/spellPoints.htm) from UA.

And there you go.

[zlefin]

I'm familiar with UA spellpoints; they don't address the key goals though:
keeping caster scaling a bit more reasonable and preventing a late game glut of power/abilities.

and i'd say this is about equally easy to implement as that (actually a tiny bit easier).

[King of Nowhere]

I worry for how it would impat lower levels of optimization. A skilled player may manage to prepare only 3 spells of his higher level and a handful of low level buffs and be fine with it for the day, but your random player cannot.

Plus, it also nerfs a lot of party functions like healing and buffing, which require the large number of low level spell slots. Basically, I'm afraid instead of hitting the god wizard, you'd be hitting the teamplayer wizard and the buffing cleric.

[noob]

I worry for how it would impat lower levels of optimization. A skilled player may manage to prepare only 3 spells of his higher level and a handful of low level buffs and be fine with it for the day, but your random player cannot.

Plus, it also nerfs a lot of party functions like healing and buffing, which require the large number of low level spell slots. Basically, I'm afraid instead of hitting the god wizard, you'd be hitting the teamplayer wizard and the buffing cleric.
You never did read the god wizard handbook
The concept is that it is called the god wizard because instead of solving problems directly he manages to make sure the allies win by boosting the allies or debuffing the opponents or shaping the battlefield.
So a god wizard by definition is a teamplayer wizard unless you consider teamplaying is not boosting allies nor debuffing opponents nor shaping the battlefield to give an advantage to your allies(which then means that you consider that teamplaying is only blasting and minionmancy and everybody hates the blasting wizard because it ends the encounter immediately and everybody hates the minionmancer because it plays 50 turns in a row).

The wizards that spends the most spell slots are the blasting wizards but the blasting wizards that can make an entire party obsolete will probably just find a way to get more spell slots.

The god wizards (which are by the way teamplayer wizards unless you consider team playing is making giant armies of undead or blasting) are among the wizards that spends the least slots because no rules says you have to cast one spell per turn and you no longer need to cast spells once half of the opponents are blind and the other half have been clubbed by allies.

The wizards that spends the least slots and that everybody hates(but that people does not always hate as much as the blasting wizard) is the minionmancer: he spent all his slots in the previous days to make simulacums of mirror mephits that then makes more of themselves that then make tons of copies of the minionmancer then the copies of the minionmancer all spams undead then there is an army of thousands of creatures and the minionmancer does not needs to spend any spell slot for having its army roll over its opponents.

[Fizban]

Sticking to spell levels instead of power point costs reduces the need to rewrite everything into properly augmenting power point costs/hamfist a rule for damage spells that ignores tons of other spells. Doesn't eliminate the problem, but when you consider how many free lower level slots vancian casters already have with free scaling, they number they can have with a spell level pool isn't so crazy- as long as you fix some of the more obviously broken 1st-3rd level "this is a higher level spell but slightly smaller" spells.

Whether you have a bigger problem or not depends on your game. High op games that depend on vancian cheese obviously hate this. If your game already gives out perfect gear sets with everything on the list of "necessary" magic items, then reduced spells will be fine. Low op/games that actually have spells fail and unexpected things happen will naturally do worse until people git gud. When the game does occasionally expect you to just Death Ward x4 and instead of a pile of 3rds, 2nds, and 1sts all you have is a couple 2nds, you're gonna be underpowered. But if you already expect everyone to be a spellcaster because reasons, then reducing caster power will make it a lot easier to actually challenge the party without a total marathon.

[King of Nowhere]

You never did read the god wizard handbook

Ok, I'm not the greatest expert in optimization and especially in specific dictionary of wizard subspecialization.
The basic principle is, I worry that some of the healty ways to play a wizard would be penalized by this modification, more than some of the unhealty ways, thus pushing people to play unhealty builds. If you are confident that you analized the possibility and it's not a problem, by all means, go ahead

[Fizban]

The main reason people play "unhealthy" builds is because they're the kind of people that want to play those builds.

The "arcanist" role has two primary functions: crowd control, and bypassing physical defenses. Neither of these actually require top level spells, so a slot pool is just giving you a choice. People who like using high-efficiency spells of lower level will be rewarded, but those people were already rewarded by vancian casting. People who only want top level spells are also rewarded to a certain extent, since normally you don't get four of your top level of spells.

The only people penalized are spontaneous casters (as usual), and Focused Specialists (which were broke anyway).

[Jay R]

Any increased flexibility for any character type makes them somewhat more powerful.

Since I do not think casters are underpowered, I would not introduce a rule to make things better for them.

[zlefin]

Any increased flexibility for any character type makes them somewhat more powerful.

Since I do not think casters are underpowered, I would not introduce a rule to make things better for them.

I'm not sure what your point is; since this rule would not make things better for them.
if you think it's a buff to them rather than a nerf, you'd have to explain why. (and no, what you did was insufficient to do that, since it ignores the other effects this change would have)

[Zaq]

When making big houserules like this, it’s important to clearly lay out in black and white exactly what problem you’re trying to solve and why you’re hoping that your change will make things better. One conclusion I’ve drawn over the years is that while the 3.5 rules are very, very much not perfect and can very much be improved upon, they’re sufficiently complex that making big changes to fundamental assumptions about the mechanics (especially magic) tends to create unforeseen problems if not approached very carefully and deliberately.

I see glimmers of that in your opening post. I see a comment about “ton[ing] down the power growth rate” and a comment about forcing high level casters to conserve spells. So the goal is to basically reduce the number of spells per day that high-level casters get? Or am I misreading you?

If the primary goal is to cut back on the numbers of spells per day that high-level casters get, why is this rule (which, although it potentially reduces the total number of spells per day, opens up the option for bigger novas than the base rules, which is problematic for several reasons) preferable to simply reducing the number of spell slots granted by full caster class progression?

You asked if anyone else had tried this. Did you pull your formula from anywhere in particular? It’s unlikely that anyone else would have come up with precisely the same houserule as you (possible, but unlikely) unless there’s a common source.

[Jay R]

I'm not sure what your point is; since this rule would not make things better for them.
if you think it's a buff to them rather than a nerf, you'd have to explain why. (and no, what you did was insufficient to do that, since it ignores the other effects this change would have)

Whoops. You're right. I thought you were keeping total casting power equal while giving it more flexibility. My mistake

[zlefin]

When making big houserules like this, it’s important to clearly lay out in black and white exactly what problem you’re trying to solve and why you’re hoping that your change will make things better. One conclusion I’ve drawn over the years is that while the 3.5 rules are very, very much not perfect and can very much be improved upon, they’re sufficiently complex that making big changes to fundamental assumptions about the mechanics (especially magic) tends to create unforeseen problems if not approached very carefully and deliberately.

I see glimmers of that in your opening post. I see a comment about “ton[ing] down the power growth rate” and a comment about forcing high level casters to conserve spells. So the goal is to basically reduce the number of spells per day that high-level casters get? Or am I misreading you?

If the primary goal is to cut back on the numbers of spells per day that high-level casters get, why is this rule (which, although it potentially reduces the total number of spells per day, opens up the option for bigger novas than the base rules, which is problematic for several reasons) preferable to simply reducing the number of spell slots granted by full caster class progression?

You asked if anyone else had tried this. Did you pull your formula from anywhere in particular? It’s unlikely that anyone else would have come up with precisely the same houserule as you (possible, but unlikely) unless there’s a common source.
Aye, good cautionary notes; it's not a well-developed idea as yet; just an interesting seed that may bring forth fruit.

that's one of the goals yes, reducing the spells/day of high level casters. More generally it's about making a smoother power curve.
while it does not actually address linear warriors quadratic wizards that much, it helps a bit. As a pedantic note this is a linear formula, whereas the normal way is quadratic (if you convert to a spell point equivalent).


I once dabbled a bit in making a different table for caster progression which had fewer slots. But because I was aiming at a total amount of spells/day that was very low; the table looked quite funny. There would sometimes be 0's in it for levels of spells you'd since learned, because the slot was moved higher up basically. (i.e. you might lose a 2nd level slot and gain a 4th level slot). even if I set it up so there were no 0's for levels you have access to, it would be the case that at some levelups you lose a spell/day from some levels, since the slot was moved to a higher level essentially. It'd look weird for many people to see the number of spells/day go down for certain level slots.

It's still of course possible to use such a houserule. also it's not clear which of the many methods of constructing the table one should use.
there's the minor effect on ease of use: such a table requires someone to make a copy of it, as it's not so easy to reconstruct. whereas this rule is very easy to describe, and can be used from memory (at least in its basic form, a form which adds fixes to address issues it causes might not be so simple). It's certainly nicer when a houserule is easy to understand/use.


The formula was pulled from pathfinder. It's the same formula as for rounds of rage per day, and bardic music turns/day, and some other abilities by various other classes.

[Goaty14]

I tried something like this, in homebrewing The Conservationist (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?553963-The-Conservationist-3-5-Wizard-Nerf) (not at all a shameless plug; the attempt failed horribly). TL;DR spell slots equal to your casting MOD (not spell slots equal to your bonus spells!), so while a +5 mod would give 6 bonus spells in addition to all of the other spells/day, the "fix" gives them 5 spell slots.

I noticed that your system already benefits spontaneous casters. Since what they can use each day is limited to a maximum of their class progression, high level spontaneous casters looking to stock up on high level spells can do so more often than prepared casters. To a lesser extent, spontaneous casters stocking up on lower-level spells could use more of those. TL;DR Spontaneous casters can load up more of a single spell level than prepared casters with this variant rule, since all casters are limited by their table's spells/day.

[DeTess]

Have you seen the 5e spell slot progression? It's not quite as extreme as what you seem to be looking for, but it might provide some inspiration.

[Fizban]

Yeah, you wanna talk cutting spell slots, 5e took some huge leaps in that direction. Not only the slashing of everything higher than 5th and the removal of bonus slots from stats (and standardization of the spells/day table), but remember how 3.5 said you should have enough gas for four encounters? 5e expects you to do *six*, with fewer spell slots. You're supposed to lean on those daily "hit dice," at-will "cantrips," and actual, you know, attacks.

With what a lot of people do with their items and how they expect buffs to function, you could probably ramp 3.5 up to six encounters just fine, resulting in a 33% reduction in effective spell slots per encounter.

[Zanos]

Yeah, you wanna talk cutting spell slots, 5e took some huge leaps in that direction. Not only the slashing of everything higher than 5th and the removal of bonus slots from stats (and standardization of the spells/day table), but remember how 3.5 said you should have enough gas for four encounters? 5e expects you to do *six*, with fewer spell slots. You're supposed to lean on those daily "hit dice," at-will "cantrips," and actual, you know, attacks.
At-will cantrips in 5e scale and actually do solid damage, though. Generally at least as much as an unmodified weapon attack. A 3.5 wizard probably can't get through AC/DR by shooting at something with a crossbow.



With what a lot of people do with their items and how they expect buffs to function, you could probably ramp 3.5 up to six encounters just fine, resulting in a 33% reduction in effective spell slots per encounter.
I think at some point you start to just hit limitations of time; some off the groups I play in even 2-3 encounters was pushing our 4 hour window, although we usually had big fights.

[Fizban]

Oh I wasn't suggesting at-will cantrips or "hit dice" for 3.5, just proper rationing- but if people want them, Complete Mage/Champion already let the cat out of the bag with reserve feats, on top of other classes with unlimited abilities.

There's no link between a session and an adventuring day, as nice as it would be. Groups I've been in could barely get through 2 combats in 4-5 hours, while other groups play for 6-8. That's a big balance problem though, people who *do* make every session end within an in-game day, as it easily results in even fewer fights than the game is calibrated for. On the flipside, you get the problem where most of the party doesn't pay any attention to spells and just demands charging forward every session no matter how tapped out the casters are, because session end != magical full heal.