the possibility to Cast a spell with a lower level slot, good idea?

[Red Bear]

5e

What do you think of the possibility of casting, say, a fireball with a second level spell slot, is it just too unbalanced? should it do 7d6, 6d6, other damage? what do you think in general of this concept?

[GalacticAxekick]

I love the idea, and I encourage you to make it a reality, but there are definitely going to be a couple hurdles:
You'll need to be creative about damage scaling. Fireball, for example, is a 3rd level AoE that deals 8d6 damage to its targets, and that gains 1d6 at higher levels. Intuitively, Fireball should lose 1d6 at lower levels. But that means a 1st level Fireball deals 6d6 (21) damage to its targets, versus the 3d6 (10.5) of Burning Hands. In my opinion, Fireball should loose 3d6 at lower levels, for 5d6 damage at 2nd level and 2d6 damage at 1st.
You'll need to be wary about range and area of effect. Even if you dial back Fireball's damage, for example, its ability to reach twice as far and cover twice the area of a 1st level AoE makes it leagues ahead of the competition. You'll either need to scale these factors back or really neuter Fireball's damage at lower levels.

Honestly, I'm most excited about non-damaging spells. Counterspell as a 1st level spell especially.

[Rerem115]

That's what I was thinking too; spells that have a set effect, one that usually doesn't do damage or scale would be the trickiest. For the ultimate example, what would a 1st level Wish look like? Although, come to think about it, I'm pretty sure that's just Prestidigitation. But, my point still stands.

[Anymage]

First, I'll assume that you need to be the appropriate level to cast the spell normally before you can downcast it. Otherwise, casters get early access to tier-defining abilities and martials get to spend another edition twiddling their thumbs.

I'll assume you've taken already existing advice and don't just allow downscaling to work like upscaling in reverse. Once you start doing that, though, you realize that players rarely need to squeeze every last drop of distance/duration/etc. out of their utility spells. And that lesser versions of many spells already exist; Teleportation Circle has significant costs and restrictions over just plain Teleporting to a known circle, and you'd have to pick through a ton of spells to make sure that simple downcasting is never clearly superior to picking up the level appropriate spell.

In the end it'd probably wind up a lot like 3.5 psionics, where you have a smaller number of base spells that get augmented in various ways when you spend a higher level slot on them. This is a slight boost to prepared casters, and a big one to fixed list casters who effectively get multiple spells for one known slot.

[Vogie]

I actually suggested it in the previous "Sorcerer Rework" (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?566431-Sorcerer-Rework) thread as a metamagic option:


Downshift Spell
When you cast a spell at first level, you can spend 1 sorcery point to cast it as a cantrip instead, without expending a spell slot.

We limited it to first level spells because there isn't an easy way to downshift scaling or nonscaling spells... and being able to Wish as an 8th level spell seemed really, really broken.

This allows the sorcerer to choose a new "core" ability (for example, spamming Chaos Bolt instead of Fire Bolt) while not completely free (costs 1 SP per cast, 1/2 the cost of a 1st level spell slot) and creating interesting interactions that uniquely happen with sorcerers (a quickened spell as a bonus action + a spell downshifted to cantrip on the same turn).

[Derpaligtr]

5e

What do you think of the possibility of casting, say, a fireball with a second level spell slot, is it just too unbalanced? should it do 7d6, 6d6, other damage? what do you think in general of this concept?

How about just make all spells connected.

Burning hands can be up casted, but, you cpuld Also turn it into fireball.

Would be great for the sorcerer and their limited spells known.

Restricting this to one class woupd work best.