What if spellcasting took longer than other actions?

[Segev]

This actually was the case waaaaay back when D&D started. I fully get why it has changed: waiting a whole round for your turn to come up only to say, "I'm still casting," is pretty boring. But let's ignore that for a moment; we can examine how to fix that later if we find there's worth in pursuing this line of reasoning.

I'm curious how much that would impact the "caster supremacy" consideration, and how one would have to change spell design to account for and accommodate it.

Specifically, the idea is that casting times are often more than one round long, and longer casting times are (as now) balance factors, but are not always designed to be either "1 action - combat usable," or "1 minute or longer - not combat usable." Instead, a number of them might be 2-3 rounds' actions, or at least "a full round action" like in 3.5 for a few. The idea here being that 1-action spells are weaker or are meant to interfere with other castings, and to let "hit the mage" be a way to try to disrupt spells.

If you say that sounds like no fun, I agree it probably would be without some very careful thinking about action economy, but for sake of discussion, I'd like to focus more on what it would alter in the balance of spellcasting in general, and how it might require rebalancing or even rethinking the spells that wind up being longer cast-time.

It would make longer cast-time spells be either "finishers" or "climax-inducers," I think, but it may not do that perfectly. If it took until round three of combat to get off a fireball, though, the dozen goblins would need to be herded into position for it and would still get two or three turns before it went off. Is this a worthwhile thing to seek? I'm not saying it is or is not; this is purely exploratory on my part.

So, what do people think? How would such a game look compared to what we know of in 5e? How would magic spellcasting need to be altered to work with that paradigm?

[Mellack]

I don't see it being workable in the current game system. Many combats only last a few rounds. If you require 2-3 rounds to cast a spell and combats only last 3-4, I certainly wouldn't play such. Too much changes from start of casting to end, and frankly it would be too boring. Three rounds of "I'm still casting" would send me to playing on my phone. I can't think of any other modern system that tries doing such a system. The most I can see is full round spells, but even such as that would probably need a lot of free adjustment while casting to be usable.

[Rukelnikov]

I think its doable, Full Round casting is punishing but manageable, 2 rounds I think is already too much, maybe worth trying for some of the most powerful spells (Hypnotic Pattern, Forcecage, and the like), but I think unless most spells are Full Round, it'll generally be better to get a spell off in your first turn, and a cantrip second turn.

[Greywander]

First of all, what I've heard is that the average combat only lasts 3 to 5 rounds. Some last longer, yes, but we would ideally like a spellcasting system that is usable in most combats, not just a few.

If combat is dragging on long enough to make such a spell worth using, it's probably because you've reached some kind of stalemate, though possibly a tenuous one. In that case, it would make sense for such a spell to be designed to tip the balance of that stalemate in your favor. These spells are then mostly for breaking a stalemate. If we're tweaking spellcasting, we might consider tweaking the combat rules, too, so that martial characters have more tools that help stall for time. Then it becomes of game of the martials defending the casters while the casters charge up their big spells. So that could be interesting.

One thing I would probably do is that casting a spell with a casting time longer than a single action would achieve this by using your action on your turn to continue casting the spell. This means you would still have a bonus action and reaction available. This way, you can charge up a big spell while still being able to do something on your turn. This means that casters would need to be geared more towards bonus actions, likely things with cantrip level damage or minor support effects. These are, after all, bonus actions, and thus shouldn't be as strong as what you could normally do with your main action. This probably also means changing the rules for bonus action spellcasting, and just making bonus action spells weaker (under the assumption that you're casting a big spell with your main action).

So probably combat opens up with the martials engaging the enemy while the mages stand back and drop a mid spell that only requires an action. The key is to do as much as you can on round 1 in order to shift the odds in your favor for the remainder of the combat. Come round 2, if it looks like you're winning, then you just clean up and you're done. If things look like they're not going as well as you'd like, that's probably when the mages start charging up the big, multi-round spells, while the martials shift into defending the mages until those spells drop.

[Eldariel]

This is my preferred means of balancing but it would mean rewriting the spells almost fully. A key thing is that this obviously shouldn't be the case for all spells. Fireball could take a while to cast as could Hypnotic Pattern while something like Magic Missile could afford to be a quick spell as could maybe Stinking Cloud or some such. I think spells having varying and often longer casting times allowing for more powerful combat spells would be both, flavourful and interesting.

3e style 1 round summons or Sleep are still good but definitely something where the casting time is an important balancing and gameplay element. 5e even has the Concentration-mechanic to make this work built into the system. And you could have some really big booms at 2 round casting times or even 3 rounds: something that turns the encounter from "We will try to defeat the enemy" to "If we can delay the fight and keep the Wizard protected long enough to get this spell off, we will win" could be interesting and up there in the fantasy of how a magic-using combat system should work.

[Leon]

Late 3.5 had a few spells that were variable cast times from a swift (Bonus in 5e) action to Two Full Rounds with the effect being more potent the longer you cast it upto a fixed cap depending on the spell.

Very workable but would need a lot looking at spells and effects how they would scale up or down.

[MoiMagnus]

So, what do people think? How would such a game look compared to what we know of in 5e? How would magic spellcasting need to be altered to work with that paradigm?

I've tried an homebrew system where failure at casting a spell meant that you had to take an additional round, and it was quite pleasant to play.

That wouldn't work in 5e for every spells (especially AoE ones) but that would mean the following:
+ If the target succeed at its saving throw, then you can start concentrating the spell and cast it again next round, without having to spend another spell slot, but using your action. And for spells that allow the target to break free, you can continue concentrating after they broke free to recast the spell on them the following round (without spell slots, but with an action).
+ To make this usable to every caster build, spells that are under concentration for a single round or less don't count under the limit of "maximum one spell concentrated". If you suffer damages while concentrating multiple spells at once, you make a different Concentration check for each spell.
+ As a compensation, Caster DC is lowered to 5+Mod+Prof instead of 8+Mod+Prof (i.e -3 to all spell DCs)

[EggKookoo]

I think if you were to implement something like this, then when the caster is hit and the spellcasting is disrupted, the caster shouldn't lose the slot. Otherwise it'll start getting too expensive to cast spells.

Another idea might be to make spellcasters declare that they're casting at the start of the round, and the spell goes off on their turn, and if they take damage during that time it's like a concentration check. It's not how I like to run games -- I like my players to be able to decide what they're doing when their turn comes up -- but people do play this way. It also incentivizes high init rolls for casters.

[Amnestic]

This does, sorta, kinda, exist in 5e, with one of the features of Slow.


If the creature attempts to Cast a Spell with a casting Time of 1 action, roll a d20. On an 11 or higher, the spell doesn't take effect until the creature's next turn, and the creature must use its action on that turn to complete the spell. If it can't, the spell is wasted.

Steady Aim exists as a feature where you can only use it if you don't move that turn, so equally that sort of 'clause' is not unheard of in 5e, albeit not for spells (yet).

I can't think of anything that uses both your bonus action and action on a turn off the top of my head...but I'm fairly certain one of my own subclasses somewhere has used that mechanic.

Thematically I like the idea of spells that you cannot move and cast in the same turn. Running 30' and flinging a fireball has a significantly different 'narrative' to someone forced to stand and chant in place.

[RSP]

What if you just implemented casting a spell goes last (in initiative order if multiple characters are casting) after all non-castings in a round? Would that achieve the desired effect?

[Segev]

Thanks for the replies so far. I see a couple focusing on the "no fun" aspect, which I agree with, but isn't the main focus I have here. Others noting how you could keep your other actions open are a good one. It's more, to me, about how changing this to having a duration might alter action interaction.

Maybe a multi-round casting takes your bonus action each round and you can cast cantrips while also caSting a longer spell. Or maybe (holding because I like this one more and want to draw attention) the casting time lowers your initiative score by some amount, and you're casting throw out the intervening initiatives. So if you go on 20, cast a five-count spell, anybody on initiative 19 through 16 goes while you're caSting. The spell goes off on 15, and 15 becomes your new initiative. (Or you don't reset your initiative, if you prefer.) Going to zero or below makes you cast that much after the first person in the next round. i.e.starting a 5-count spell at initiative 1 means the first person in the initiative order takes his next turn (in the next round), and four counts later (in said next round) your spell goes off.

This would make initiative order and timing more important than 5e cares for it to be, but we're exploring things, here.

What it does open up is more possibilities for interrupts without ready actions and reactions.

[RSP]

. Or maybe (holding because I like this one more and want to draw attention)[b] the casting time lowers your initiative score by some amount,

I was also thinking casting lowers your (effective) initiative count by 1, per spell level, when I made my prior suggestion/post.

So Cantrips do nothing to your initiative order, 1st level spells reduce it by 1, etc.

I’d keep the initiative order consistent (that is, it’s not permanently changed - a 20 is still a 20 next round) and, personally, I wouldn’t have anything go to the next round.

My previous suggestion of just having casters go last each Round was a simpler, less tracking of numbers, version of this.

[NaughtyTiger]

i liked the idea cuz it made big spells feel more grand.
i was toying with:

1 round per spell level,
to speed it up you have to make concentration checks, and
you can concentrate on multiple spells (+2 per spell concentrated on).

we didn't get very far into the campaign (only level 4 before covid killed the game) so i don't have a good feel for how well it worked


Many combats only last a few rounds. If you require 2-3 rounds to cast a spell and combats only last 3-4,

why does your combat only last 3 or 4 rounds?
in my experience the mages are the ones ending it so quickly.


I was also thinking casting lowers your (effective) initiative count by 1, per spell level, when I made my prior suggestion/post.

this is part of the speed factor initiative option in DMG. i used it quite a bit, and the players took to it well.

[Pex]

"You cannot, should not, balance something by making it annoying to use."

My take: Do not punish a player for doing something you said he could do. Spellcasters are entitled to cast spells and should not be punished for it by having a miserable time.

[Eldariel]

"You cannot, should not, balance something by making it annoying to use."

My take: Do not punish a player for doing something you said he could do. Spellcasters are entitled to cast spells and should not be punished for it by having a miserable time.

Does having powerful effects taking time equal to their power punish though?

[KorvinStarmast]

Maybe a multi-round casting takes your bonus action each round and you can cast cantrips while also caSting a longer spell. Or maybe (holding because I like this one more and want to draw attention) the casting time lowers your initiative score by some amount, and you're casting throw out the intervening initiatives. So if you go on 20, cast a five-count spell, anybody on initiative 19 through 16 goes while you're caSting. The spell goes off on 15, and 15 becomes your new initiative. (Or you don't reset your initiative, if you prefer.) Going to zero or below makes you cast that much after the first person in the next round. i.e. starting a 5-count spell at initiative 1 means the first person in the initiative order takes his next turn (in the next round), and four counts later (in said next round) your spell goes off. Too complicated, but I don't disagree with the idea. Just decrease initiative order by spell level, and any that have not gone off yet go off at the end of the round before the next round starts. Don't roll over into the next round.

While thematically I like your idea, you can see why they didn't do that: it's an added fiddly bit that someone has to keep track of. Does not streamline play.

I was also thinking casting lowers your (effective) initiative count by 1, per spell level, when I made my prior suggestion/post.
Yeah, too bad they didn't do that from the beginning. At this point it's a jarring change that will likely garner a lot of push back.

So Cantrips do nothing to your initiative order, 1st level spells reduce it by 1, etc.
yeah, making polymorph take a little time to come into play, for example, feels about right.
As to just having casters go last: why are they rolling initiative? and what about the alert feat? Gets in the way of the basic flow of the game.

Does having powerful effects take time equal to their power punish though? No, except for the matter of the expectations we've all established over the course of about 7 years. :smallwink:

[stoutstien]

I'd much rather see some spells prevent movement while casting then additional actions I know movement is sort of kind of an action but not so ...maybe?

I think it was a missed opportunity for them to differentiate casting between the classes because then you can have some classes that could cast while moving some spells based on the origin of the magic. Suddenly your wizard school gets really interesting.

[RSP]

Yeah, too bad they didn't do that from the beginning. At this point it's a jarring change that will likely garner a lot of push back.

yeah, making polymorph take a little time to come into play, for example, feels about right.
As to just having casters go last: why are they rolling initiative? and what about the alert feat? Gets in the way of the basic flow of the game.


Well in my first suggestion, only characters casting spells go last, so rolling initiative would still matter. It would also determine order for when more than one character is casting a spell.

I like the idea of the spell level delay as it gives the in-game feel of “oh crap, it’s a spellcaster! Take cover!” And some might be able to make it to cover in time (those who act before the spell going off), while others aren’t quite able to react in time.

Note: this is also something that can be added by using some form of action declaration before the resolving of Turns starts at the beginning of a Round: characters are all generally aware of what others are trying to do that Turn.

[loki_ragnarock]

This actually was the case waaaaay back when D&D started. I fully get why it has changed: waiting a whole round for your turn to come up only to say, "I'm still casting," is pretty boring. But let's ignore that for a moment; we can examine how to fix that later if we find there's worth in pursuing this line of reasoning.

I'm curious how much that would impact the "caster supremacy" consideration, and how one would have to change spell design to account for and accommodate it.

Specifically, the idea is that casting times are often more than one round long, and longer casting times are (as now) balance factors, but are not always designed to be either "1 action - combat usable," or "1 minute or longer - not combat usable." Instead, a number of them might be 2-3 rounds' actions, or at least "a full round action" like in 3.5 for a few. The idea here being that 1-action spells are weaker or are meant to interfere with other castings, and to let "hit the mage" be a way to try to disrupt spells.

If you say that sounds like no fun, I agree it probably would be without some very careful thinking about action economy, but for sake of discussion, I'd like to focus more on what it would alter in the balance of spellcasting in general, and how it might require rebalancing or even rethinking the spells that wind up being longer cast-time.

It would make longer cast-time spells be either "finishers" or "climax-inducers," I think, but it may not do that perfectly. If it took until round three of combat to get off a fireball, though, the dozen goblins would need to be herded into position for it and would still get two or three turns before it went off. Is this a worthwhile thing to seek? I'm not saying it is or is not; this is purely exploratory on my part.

So, what do people think? How would such a game look compared to what we know of in 5e? How would magic spellcasting need to be altered to work with that paradigm?
Usually I read the whole thread, but this time I'm going to jump to pointing straight at a different system entirely to give you an idea of what it would look like:

The initiative system from Second Edition Exalted.

In that system, initiative was basically a wheel, and the wheel was always turning like a clock. Each action had a certain number of ticks associated with it. I don't recall them exactly off the top of my head, but it was something like this; attacking with a light weapon was two ticks, a heavy weapon was four ticks, and casting a spell (a big effing deal in that setting, btw) was something like 6 ticks (to several days or months; sorcery was big time, world changing magic.) Once a tick was resolved, you moved the clock forward until you came to the next occupied tick.

This presented *some* problems, as everyone was wildly incentivized to get their tick rating as low as possible to ensure that they were constantly acting. It made jade the greatest of all the magical materials bar none, when the setting specifics called for it to be merely ubiquitous compared to the others - in the previous edition, it helped you win initiative, not act more often. But because Jade specialized in reducing ticks to the exclusion of anything else; if you were decked out in jade, you just got to play more.

So... it's been done if you want a model, and I'm sure there's a forum somewhere dedicated to Exalted that will lay out the pitfalls of that system if you wanted to avoid them.

[Snails]

Does having powerful effects taking time equal to their power punish though?

I would say is not power, but effectiveness that should feel balanced out. Yet, the player should feel his PC is effective in most rounds, or it becomes a drag. Fighters do miss and enemies do make their saves sometimes, but not getting hit during the entire round can feel a lot like Mother May I.

My concern is there are going to be a lot of subtleties of scaling from party size. In, say, a 3 PC party, it can be difficult to protect a party caster. In a group of players that know the tribal knowledge well it may be okay if small parties should have Warlocks and not Wizards, or that certain spell are stupid to prepare. Be aware that this is a significant barrier for casual players having fun trying out a spellcaster.

[PhoenixPhyre]

My gut says that if the issue is that spells (and spellcasting) is too strong, the first-cut solution should be to reduce the power of spells and the number of spells people get, rather than trying to balance things by the back door. If it's less about power and more about theme, then knock yourself out. I certainly don't want to have dynamic initiative--that's substantial extra overhead. But yeah.

[clash]

I've implemented a system where spells build up to full effectiveness and find out worked quite well. So an encounter changing spell like hypnotic pattern for example would say make them distracted on the first turn giving disadvantage on attack rolls. On the second turn you increase it giving them the incapacitation. Or with a more powerful spell it could have another turn or 2 of charging

[loki_ragnarock]

I certainly don't want to have dynamic initiative--that's substantial extra overhead. But yeah.
Understatement of the day.

[Chaos Jackal]

I can see it happening. Would require a number of changes in how spells work though.

As it is right now, spells, for the most part, are most effective at starting combats. They might end them too, possibly in the same cast, but the idea in general is to go first, throw down something big, make the entire fight much easier from the get-go. It's why dedicated casters like initiative so much.

If it took me two turns to cast hypnotic pattern, I'd probably never cast it. Enemies might've had time to get into a spread formation if they weren't already. Maybe two enemies died. Or perhaps a number are low and it would be better to just throw a blast at them to finish them off instead; killing is the best form of crowd control, if you can guarantee it.

For a longer casting time system, you'd need to introduce spells that would matter as finishers. Big blasts, or powerful execute-style mechanics, that sort of thing. I could see some spells doing that from the current system, but not many. A fireball could cut it. Some single target save-or-lose too, perhaps, like polymorph. Area battlefield control/debuffing, less debilitating effects, single target blasting or most cases of buffing? Not so much.

But it's not inherently bad or unfun, especially if the casting time never or rarely exceeds 1 round; regularly spending a turn where your answer is "I'm still casting from the previous round" could get frustrating. Charge up to throw something big next turn? Hell, could even be cool. Power overwhelming and all that.

So yeah, it would require some, or rather plenty of, rewriting, but it's something I can see working.

[EggKookoo]

My gut says that if the issue is that spells (and spellcasting) is too strong, the first-cut solution should be to reduce the power of spells and the number of spells people get, rather than trying to balance things by the back door. If it's less about power and more about theme, then knock yourself out. I certainly don't want to have dynamic initiative--that's substantial extra overhead. But yeah.

Were I reinventing the game, I'd eliminate a lot of the simpler attack-based leveled spells and develop a mechanism to carry some of their secondary effects over to cantrips. For example, acid arrow might go away as a spell, and instead its secondary acid effect would become something akin to an Eldritch Invocation that you can attach to any ranged attack cantrip, with maybe a per-rest use limitation. I'd go through all of the spells to see how many could be converted this way, eliminating as many off the spell lists as I could. The leftover spells would be the "reality altering" kind that involve complex mechanics -- summoning spells, illusory stuff, buff/debuff, environment modification, and so on. Many of these could be given a ritual tag and/or concentration*, and there's where a casting time mechanic could be applied. And the upcasting mechanism could be revamped so that rather than just be a damage boost (since most damaging spells are now cantrips that scale with level), using higher level slots could provide additional effects.

Spells per day and spell slots would be adjusted to compensate, but depending on how spells are used during a fight it might not matter that much.

* Although I've made no secret of my unhappiness with how the latter was implemented so I'd probably be jockeying for a redesign of that as well.

[Psyren]

Pathfinder 2e does something like this. You get three actions on your turn, and casting a spell usually burns at least two of them.

So a way to do this in 5e that wouldn't result in "I do nothing every other round, yay" would be for most spells to burn both your action and bonus action. The problem is that for many casters, their bonus action is where their fun non-casting stuff tends to come in, like Bardic Inspiration, or a Stars Druid firing their arrow, or a Battlesmith/Artillerist commanding their constructs, a Fathomless Warlock controlling their tentacle etc.

If you instead decide to make casting take multiple rounds you cause a different and imo much worse problem - every spell would effectively become a concentration spell unless you overhauled those rules.


I certainly don't want to have dynamic initiative--that's substantial extra overhead.

+1000

[sithlordnergal]

Hmmm, I'd say this is a poor idea...forcing a caster to wait a round or two before they can do anything just creates an annoying experience that is clunky to use. As a spell caster you'd need to know where your targets are going to be in 1 or 2 rounds, and that's just not possible in 5e.

I could see it working if Martials and other characters had proper control that forced enemies into certain positions, but as it is your only option is to grapple.

Not to mention a lot of encounters only last 3 or 4 rounds with or without spells. Meaning the spellcaster will only be casting 1, maybe 2 spells if they're lucky. That's gonna be very, very boring for the caster. You may as well play a warlock and just start casting Eldritch Blast...its boring and uninteresting.

I get that people feel spell casters need to be nerfed, I disagree. Increase the power of martials, don't nerf a spellcaster to being effectively worthless cause they can't properly cast anything.

[Jathaan]

Segev's plan is clearly on the right track, but doesn't go far enough to give magic the momentous weight it ought to have.

Counter proposal: Casting time is a number of rounds equal to the spells level... with an exponent of 9.

Cantrips happen instantly. Free action. Feel free to do as many prestidigitations as you care to on your turn. (Also, filed in the unintended but hilarious consequences bin: the Warlock Minigun)
1st level spells take a whole round. Start 'em on your turn, and they go off at the end of the round.
2nd level spells take 512 rounds; almost an hour. THERE'S the nerf that Suggestion's been needing.
3rd level spells take 19683 rounds to cast; that Blink will be ready to go for a full minute in a little over 32 hours.
4th level spells take 18 days to cast. Make 'em work for that Greater Steed.
Finally, 9th level spells will take an awe-inspiring 387420489 rounds to cast; around 73 years. That should put paid to all this Simulacrum chain nonsense.

[Segev]

"You cannot, should not, balance something by making it annoying to use."

My take: Do not punish a player for doing something you said he could do. Spellcasters are entitled to cast spells and should not be punished for it by having a miserable time.

I actually agree with that. It just isn't helpful to what I am looking to explore. I would not get behind a system that was what we have now, but spellcasters only get to act every few rounds. Exploring ways to achieve the longer casting times while also keeping caster players feeling relevant is a later stage of this, though, to me.

What I am looking for is insight into how, if at all, existing spells would have to be modified or replaced to remain effective enough to use should they take longer to cast than one action.

*Hypnotic pattern* was mentioned as not worth using if it took two rounds. What would it have to do to make up for such a change, were it applied?

[Greywander]

Multi-round casting would actually work pretty well for spells you don't want used in combat. But in such cases, it should suffice to just give the spell a 1 minute casting time. It sounds like that's not what you're looking for. However, this does highlight an important corollary: a multi-round combat spell should obviously be pretty strong if it takes multiple rounds to cast it, but you also don't want it being strong for out of combat use.

So if a spell would be too strong to use in combat, you can just give it a 1 minute casting time (or longer). If you do want a spell to be used in combat, but want it to be multi-round, then you'll need to make it stronger to balance out while also not making it OP for out of combat use.

Off the top of my head, big damage spells would fit this pretty well. There's not actually much use for damage outside of combat, and anyway you have plenty of other ways to deal damage if you need to. That said, you could also just spam a spell every round and deal damage that way, so the big, multi-round spell has to either deal more damage or be more spell slot efficient to make it worth waiting for it to finish casting. Maybe every spell would need to be multi-round, so that those spells don't have to compete with single-action spells.

Perhaps a spell to grant immunity to a specific damage type would work. Once you understand which damage types your enemy uses, e.g. if you're facing a dragon and you're not immediately sure what type of breath weapon it has, then you can cast the spell to give immunity to the corresponding damage type to the party. One problem is that it would be pretty easy to pre-cast buff spells, which eliminates the primary downside of a multi-round spell.

Hmm, maybe something else you could do is have a spell that gives a big buff to the party, but only for one round. You might still be able to pre-cast it, but if your timing is off it might be wasted. But something like this could be a good emergency button. For example, something that gives a bunch of healing or temp HP and advantage on attacks. Something like that could really swing the battle in your favor, and might be worth waiting for.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that existing spells would be able to be modified for this. They're simply not designed with this in mind, so tweaking them is tricky at best. Maybe a better question is figuring out how multi-round casting would benefit the game. Once you figure that out, you'll probably have a better idea of what type of spells multi-round casting would fit. And in the end, you may just have to design new spells from scratch.

[sithlordnergal]

I actually agree with that. It just isn't helpful to what I am looking to explore. I would not get behind a system that was what we have now, but spellcasters only get to act every few rounds. Exploring ways to achieve the longer casting times while also keeping caster players feeling relevant is a later stage of this, though, to me.

What I am looking for is insight into how, if at all, existing spells would have to be modified or replaced to remain effective enough to use should they take longer to cast than one action.

*Hypnotic pattern* was mentioned as not worth using if it took two rounds. What would it have to do to make up for such a change, were it applied?

So, in order to determine what a spell should be able to do if it had a casting time longer than one action, I'd suggest looking at similar spells. For example:

Conjure Elemental takes 1 minute, lasts an hour, and summons a CR 5 Elemental as an ally. Personally I feel this spell is a bit on the weak side, because you usually don't have the time to take 1 minute to cast a spell in a dungeon, and an hour goes by very quickly. You could end up not needing it at all.

You also have Tsunami, it takes 1 minute to cast, lasts 6 rounds, and creates a 300ft long, 300ft high, 50ft thick AoE that deals 6d10 on a Strength save, and shoves Huge and smaller creatures 50ft away from you. I've never seen this spell be used once because of the 1 minute casting time despite being a pretty powerful effect.



All in all, I don't think there's any reasonable way you could remake Hypnotic Pattern into a spell that'd be worth casting if you had it take longer than 1 action to cast. That said, if you really were dead set on this, I'd remove the 30ft cube limitation and make it any creature of your choice within a 60ft radius of you. It cuts the effective range in half, but you no longer have to try and predict if targets are still going to be within that 30ft cube. You'd also need to change how Hypnotic Pattern can be ended. I'd also change it so the only way to end the effect is to break the Caster's Concentration.

Again, you're giving up one to two rounds to cast this one spell. You're basically not contributing at all to an encounter for those rounds in order to cast this one spell, and the spell could be interrupted before you can even cast it by losing concentration. Not only that, but due to Concentration rules you wouldn't be able to, say, concentrate on this spell then cast Fireball on your next turn because it takes your concentration in order to prepare a spell to cast.

[Psyren]

What I am looking for is insight into how, if at all, existing spells would have to be modified or replaced to remain effective enough to use should they take longer to cast than one action.


Unless you keep it wiithin one turn (e.g. the action + bonus action suggestion I mentioned to be more like PF2), then the first thing you'll need to modify will be the concentration rules. Because otherwise, you wouldn't be able to cast anything at all without losing your concentration on anything else, which kills things like flight and summoning.

[Segev]

The main mechanical benefit I am looking at would be cleaning up counterspell by making it something you cast as an action while another caster is doing something that takes long enough for your action to come up. It also would allow for "martial counter spell" by making "geek the mage; don't let him finish that spell!" a more viable thing.

But it would also mean a lot of reworking to keep spells worth it. (If the main issue with hypnotic pattern is that it requires predicting target locations, I would just have the targeting happen when you finish as the last thing you determine.)

Thinking on this a bit more, Concentration spells almost have a similar purpose to them: the mage is doing something that can be disrupted to end his spell. If counterspell were an action or bonus action, but forced a concentration duration spell to end if cast on the target, area, or caster, with the same rules for rolling or auto-success as it has now, that is obviously a nerf, but would it still be worth casting?

Or is it now too similar once more to dispell magic?

[Pex]

Does having powerful effects taking time equal to their power punish though?

In terms of game play yes because it's not fun sitting there doing nothing round after round manifesting one thing while everyone else does stuff. By the time the effect goes off the reason for doing it may no longer be applicable either because the combat is over or the specific target isn't available for whatever reason or circumstances changed the effect is irrelevant or even harmful. Anything powerful is useless if you never get to use it, and something being powerful is no excuse not to be used. Everyone is allowed to do powerful things. Being powerful is not something to be avoided. It is a feature that PCs get to do powerful things.

[Reynaert]

There are a number of points that come to mind:

First, longer casting times have the effect of causing powerful spells to not be cast in the first round of combat (and not as often in a longer combat)
Second, longer casting times mean that the time between choosing an effect and the effect going off will be lengthened and more can happen in between.
Third, longer casting times make it so a caster effectively does nothing while the casting is taking place.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be mainly going for the first point, maybe a bit for the second, and the third is a downside that's currently out of scope of discussion (or: we all agree it's bad and should be fixed somewhere down the line)

It seems like the second point would be the biggest nerf to casters, and have the largest disruption on a lot of spells, and would probably ruin a lot of fun as well.
The first is also a bit of a nerf, but doesn't nearly seem as ruinous to a caster's fun. Also, you don't need nearly as much spell tweaking; basically you reduce the tweaking to spells that would only be useful in the first round(s) of combat.

I think a system where a caster has some kind of "charge bar" (to use a video game turn), akin to the NPC concept 'recharge', except you don't start charged, would work quite nicely.
It would hopefully be reasonably easy to implement, e.g. give the player an amount of tokens each round, and casting an Nth level spells takes N tokens.


An alternative (also nicked from some video games) would be to make spells less powerful on their own, but be very powerful if multiple are chained in some order. Like if fireball only did like 4d6 or something, but if you cast create water the round before, the combo effect is steam explosion which does double damage, double radius, and knock prone or something like that.
But that's a whole 'nother ballgame I guess.

[Psyren]

The main mechanical benefit I am looking at would be cleaning up counterspell by making it something you cast as an action while another caster is doing something that takes long enough for your action to come up. It also would allow for "martial counter spell" by making "geek the mage; don't let him finish that spell!" a more viable thing.
...
Thinking on this a bit more, Concentration spells almost have a similar purpose to them: the mage is doing something that can be disrupted to end his spell. If counterspell were an action or bonus action, but forced a concentration duration spell to end if cast on the target, area, or caster, with the same rules for rolling or auto-success as it has now, that is obviously a nerf, but would it still be worth casting?

Or is it now too similar once more to dispell magic?

This strikes me as using a nuke when a flyswatter would do. If the mechanics behind counterspell and martial disruption/Mage Slayer are dissatisfying in some way, I'd modify those two things, rather than uprooting the entire spellcasting system and rewriting gods know how many spells as a result.


But it would also mean a lot of reworking to keep spells worth it. (If the main issue with hypnotic pattern is that it requires predicting target locations, I would just have the targeting happen when you finish as the last thing you determine.)

While "aim at the end" helps, it doesn't solve everything: What happens if the battlefield as a whole changes? e.g. your allies have now closed to melee with the enemy, leaving you no space to place the HP safely. Or the enemies have spread out so that you can only catch a single one in the pattern no matter where you put it, making it a waste. Or a bunch of enemies have died so you'd rather cast something more surgical and save the bigger spell. Even if you rule that they can cancel the spell to start casting something else, and even if you rule that doing so means they didn't waste their spell slot, it still doesn't feel good to have spent now two rounds in a row now having done nothing.

[Rukelnikov]

The main mechanical benefit I am looking at would be cleaning up counterspell by making it something you cast as an action while another caster is doing something that takes long enough for your action to come up. It also would allow for "martial counter spell" by making "geek the mage; don't let him finish that spell!" a more viable thing.

I understand this, and I also would like for that to be a thing as it used to be in previous editions, having to "protect the wizard for a round" so he could get a full round spell led to cool moments. The problem I see with a 2 round casting of a spell*, is that a good spell now is probably better than a very good spell next round, because a good spell now allows the rest of the party to make informed decisions for the round.

If there are many foes, area damage or control on the first round lets the rest of the party focus on finishing off those who are more damaged or focusing on the enemies that saved against the cc effect.

Having the spell go off in the second round, means the fireball may now be overkilling the orc by 19 points, which means the party spent 3 attacks on that enemy uselessly becuase he was gonna be fried by the fireball anyway. In a way, casting a good spell now makes the rest of the party members actions worth more.

How much more damage does the 2 round nuke need to do above the 1 round nuke in order to be worth it? I think the balancing facot here are spell slots. If, like mine, your group only has 1 or 2 big combats per day, would I cast a Cho-Fireball of 12d6 instead of a regular Fireball of 8d6? Unlikely unless I had only 1 slot capable of casting FB and I really need all the area damage I can. I'd normally just cast fireball, and in my next turn if we still need more aoe I'll just cast FB again. My party had the benefit of knowing which enemies to focus, and by next turn, maybe things have changed and I really need to Dispel Magic, Dimension Door out of there or cast Fly to pursue a fleeing enemy. If the spell did 16d6, well maybe my party would start adjusting tactics, and it could become a viable strategy for when we want to conserve spell slots. But it also needs opposition against whom the difference in damage from 28 to 56 is relevant.

My advice would be doing somethinig akin to slot level with the casting times. Like, maybe fireball becomes 5d6 + 3d6 per extra channel round to a maximum of 10d6. Easier to balance for nukes than for CC's, but for instance, maybe HP duration could be "Concentration, until the end of your next turn", but if you cast it as a 2 round spell it lasts "Concentration, up to 1 minute". It'd be a lot of work, I know.

Or the other thing you could do, is just change a whole subclass of spell to 2 round casting, so they don't have to compete against 1 round version of comparable effects. Like all multi target concentration CC's are now 2 rounds. Then its not 2 round HP competing against 1 round Confusion, because all spells with relatively comparable effects would have the same casting time.

*which as I understand it would be, action, ba, and reaction of the initial casting turn, plus an action on the second turn, which would work as normal spell do currently.


But it would also mean a lot of reworking to keep spells worth it. (If the main issue with hypnotic pattern is that it requires predicting target locations, I would just have the targeting happen when you finish as the last thing you determine.)

Yeah, with first round targeting, I think lots of spells become extremely unreliable, with effect round targeting, there are still other issues (as I pointed above), but it may be doable, albeit with much rework involved.


Thinking on this a bit more, Concentration spells almost have a similar purpose to them: the mage is doing something that can be disrupted to end his spell. If counterspell were an action or bonus action, but forced a concentration duration spell to end if cast on the target, area, or caster, with the same rules for rolling or auto-success as it has now, that is obviously a nerf, but would it still be worth casting?

Yes, but...


Or is it now too similar once more to dispell magic?

This, the ocasions when you would rather "Counterspell" instead of DM under this rules would be for concentration spells that affect multiple targets but you can't target the effect per se. Like you can dispel Evard's Black Tentacles, thus ending the effect for all those in the spells area, but you can't dispel the effect of Hypnotic Pattern or a high level hold person on all targets with a single casting of DM.

IMO, instead of reworking Counterspell into this, just remove counterspell and add this capability to Dispel Magic.

[Eldariel]

In terms of game play yes because it's not fun sitting there doing nothing round after round manifesting one thing while everyone else does stuff. By the time the effect goes off the reason for doing it may no longer be applicable either because the combat is over or the specific target isn't available for whatever reason or circumstances changed the effect is irrelevant or even harmful. Anything powerful is useless if you never get to use it, and something being powerful is no excuse not to be used. Everyone is allowed to do powerful things. Being powerful is not something to be avoided. It is a feature that PCs get to do powerful things.

"Powerful" is meaningless. Everyone does powerful things. Some do more powerful things than others. It seems to me like getting to do your superpowerful things slightly less often (but your powerful things as often as everyone else) is fair all considered; you have more to look forward to and it feels awesome when it goes off but it has a more significant failure chance effectively upping the stakes. It's actually a somewhat well known mechanic in most games; cooldown in e.g. MoBAs is a surprisingly similar mechanic when you look underneath the surface.

[sithlordnergal]

But it would also mean a lot of reworking to keep spells worth it. (If the main issue with hypnotic pattern is that it requires predicting target locations, I would just have the targeting happen when you finish as the last thing you determine.)

I was assuming you'd aim it at the end. The issue still persists if you aim it at the end. A battlefield can dramatically change in even just 1 round. You may have started casting because 5 out of 6 enemies are in a 30ft cube, but after 1 round 2 of them could be dead and the rest could be scattered, making it impossible to catch all 5. Or your allies could now be in the way and you could catch all of your martial buddies in the spell.

Its just not worth casting at that point if you leave the AoE as a cube. Instead, if you wanted to delay the casting time, you'd need a targeting system that's dynamic. You'd need it to be like a 60ft radius centered on yourself, and allow you to choose which creatures are effected.

And because you wasted a minimum of 1 round on this, you'd need to make sure the effects of the spell are hard to end. So only way to end the spell is either damage or ending concentration.



The main mechanical benefit I am looking at would be cleaning up counterspell by making it something you cast as an action while another caster is doing something that takes long enough for your action to come up. It also would allow for "martial counter spell" by making "geek the mage; don't let him finish that spell!" a more viable thing.

Thinking on this a bit more, Concentration spells almost have a similar purpose to them: the mage is doing something that can be disrupted to end his spell. If counterspell were an action or bonus action, but forced a concentration duration spell to end if cast on the target, area, or caster, with the same rules for rolling or auto-success as it has now, that is obviously a nerf, but would it still be worth casting?

Or is it now too similar once more to dispell magic?

While I can understand a desire for this kind of effect, your method simply wouldn't work with 5e spells. Not without overhauling every single spell and making them much stronger than they are now in order to make them worth casting. Especially if you can stop a spell from being cast before it goes off.

Imagine Fireball: In my eyes, you'd need to up the damage, up the sizs of the AoE, and maybe allow it to deal either Bludgeoning or Fire damage in order to balance out taking an extra round to cast.

Sure, the spell is stronger, but that's balanced by the fact that it takes 1 round to cast, meaning you effectively give up your turn to do nothing but move, and it can be interrupted before it even goes off. Heck, it'd be a nightmare as a DM. You'd never see an NPC cast a spell, because the moment they start casting the entire party would stop what they're doing and attack the caster until they lost the spell.

Instead of changing the entire system, I'd suggest making it so everyone gains that reaction attack from Mage Slayer, and have the Reaction go off before the spell finishes. That way if a martial PC or NPC is within reach of a caster, they can try to stop the spell via an Attack of Opportunity.

This would actually give the caster some actual counterplay options. If they don't want their spell to be stopped, they need to move out of reach for their turn. That's far more reasonable and do-able than trying to remain out of reach for 1 to 2 rounds.

As for Counterspell, your changes would basically make it another Dispel Magic. Leave Counterspell as it currently is, or, if you really want to change Counterspell, do this:

Let a caster make an Arcana check using their Spell Casting modifier as a Reaction to seeing someone cast a spell. DC can either be an opposed Arcana check, or 10+Spell Level

If the Caster succeeds on their check they know what spell is being cast and, as a part of that Reaction, they can Counter the spell provided they have the same spell prepared. I.E. if a Wizard wants to counter Fireball, they need to have Fireball prepared.

This makes Counterspelling a bit harder to do than a single spell, since you need to have the spell prepared or be one of your chosen spells. It also allows Druids and Clerics to counter Divine spells.

[king_steve]

So, if we’re just thinking out loud about ways to rework actions in combat to sorta spread things out you could look to break up ALL actions.

To start, we’d need to look at the overall flow of combat.

Currently, you roll initiative and it’s set in stone. The goal sounds like we want to make that more dynamic based on actions taken.

In the DMG there is a rule for alternative initiatives with speed factors, which makes things a bit more dynamic, but we might want to take things one step further by adding a speed cost for different action types and removing rounds entirely, just use the initial imitative to start things and use the speed factor to track where a characters next ‘action’ takes place. So a combat would be something like:

1) rolling initiative - add init mod, I think instead of a list for the order we should have a deck of cards (which helps us with quickly rearranging later)
2) on a characters turn they take an ‘action’ and based off its type. Spitballing speed costs but let’s say an standard action costs -5 (maybe add Dec mod?), bonus actions cost -2, and reactions cost -1. Then you add modifiers from the speed factor modifiers table in the DMG. To keep the flow of combat stead, if you have a stack of cards to track everybody you can easily move a card a few spaces down.
3) You can now have certain actions spread out in the order of combat. E.g. a spell takes its levels (- Dec mod?) ‘turns’ to cast. You could also have the extra attack feature spread out attacks for martial, which would give creatures more time to react and move if their initiative was fast enough. Actions, bonus actions, reactions and movement would all need to be factored into speed modifiers.

So, theoretically this system causes a number of problems with the current spell design. This sorta breaks the concept ‘rounds’, since everything is now speed based on actions taken. You could take a ‘round’ to be some set total of speed scores (e.g. 20 speed points for one round). This also makes tracking a lot more difficult and a lot more finicky. I think tracking with a deck of cards would make this easier to rearrange but you’d still need to track the speed points for telling when a round has occurred. Otherwise you could rework spells to have some other round value.

I think this could work with some play testing to help smooth out the rough spots and tune speed factors, but it also is a lot of overhead and complicated combat a bit.

[Pex]

"Powerful" is meaningless. Everyone does powerful things. Some do more powerful things than others. It seems to me like getting to do your superpowerful things slightly less often (but your powerful things as often as everyone else) is fair all considered; you have more to look forward to and it feels awesome when it goes off but it has a more significant failure chance effectively upping the stakes. It's actually a somewhat well known mechanic in most games; cooldown in e.g. MoBAs is a surprisingly similar mechanic when you look underneath the surface.

If it's meaningless then there's no reason to worry about it to have mitigating balance factors; therefore having mitigating balance factors means it's not meaningless. By applying mitigating balance factors such that the powerful effect doesn't get to happen because the reason for it no longer applies since it took too long, in this case, then there was no point to having the powerful effect because a powerful effect that doesn't get used is useless. A PC doing something powerful is not such an atrocity of gaming DMs need to prevent happening at any cost or make the PC regret doing it. Let the PC do his powerful thing.

[Snails]

Fundamentally, the game balance and game pacing is not perfect, but most people are reasonably satisfied.

Increasing the casting time so that it is much easier to disrupt a spell with bring the expectation of "compensation" to the spellcasters. The net result is that when (or if) that big spell is actually unleashed, the combat will be effectively over by the result of this "appropriately improved" spell effect.

That is a legitimate change to make, but it is probably not something most players of the game desire.

I can imagine a game where this would work: If all players play both a spellcasting PC and a non-spellcasting PC. The potential of a game rich in strategic and tactics would be immense, but it would probably crush the soul of the casual player.

[NaughtyTiger]

Fundamentally, the game balance and game pacing is not perfect, but most people are reasonably satisfied.

Increasing the casting time so that it is much easier to disrupt a spell with bring the expectation of "compensation" to the spellcasters.

given that i haven't been on a table with a pure martial in 3 years, suggests to me that most folks are not reasonably satisfied with the balance between martial and melee.

caster "compensation" isn't required if the goal is it reign in caster power-creep.

players' "compensation" is that it requires the party to develop a strategy other than max DPR.

[Segev]

given that i haven't been on a table with a pure martial in 3 years, suggests to me that most folks are not reasonably satisfied with the balance between martial and melee.

caster "compensation" isn't required if the goal is it reign in caster power-creep.

players' "compensation" is that it requires the party to develop a strategy other than max DPR.

Query: what would qualify as "pure martial" to you? 5e's approach to the problem, depending on your definition, could just be making everyone "a bit of a spellcaster."

[olskool]

We went a different route because of the experiences we had with other games. In this case, we copied from The Design Mechanism's game MYTHRAS. We give EVERYONE 3 ACTIONS in a combat round. We retain the 1 REACTION that is conditionally set by the DM. Each ACTION represents from 1 to 2 seconds of activity so it fits well with both movement (IRL an average person can sprint from 6 to 8 yards or 18 to 24 FEET in a single second) and combat. An adventurer can allocate 1 ACTION to movement, 1 ACTION to combat, and still have 1 ACTION left to draw a weapon, jump a barrier, drink a potion, etc... IF a character who doesn't have multiple Attacks wishes to attack TWICE, they do so at DISADVANTAGE (this ceases once multiple attacks are gained and those multiple attacks basically fall under one Attack action). The Fighter's Action Surge allows the conversion of a REACTION into another ACTION (this was done for balance of play reasons).

For Spellcasters, Somatic Components take 1 ACTION, Verbal Components take another ACTION, and Material Components (which are consumed by the spell in our game creating a resource requirement for spells) requires the THIRD ACTION. So casting a spell in our game basically precludes everything else including movement. The spell cast takes effect at the BEGINNING of the next round.

For Combat Spell Caster FEAT takers, you can convert your REACTION to the Verbal component giving you one additional ACTION to be used for things like movement or attack. This also occurs for those spells that high-level casters can cast without spell slot usage. They simply have progressed to the point where they no longer have to concentrate on the proper annunciation of the spell's keywords.

This slows casters just enough to make them wary about what spells they cast (V, S versus V, S & M spells) at the start of combat but doesn't delay the use of magic so much that spell casters cannot contribute to the battle. The one thing I did see here in this thread which I might have to try is the idea of reducing the spell's onset time in the next round by the Spell's Level being subtracted from the Initiative rolled. That would make a caster have to think about "speed" versus "power" in a critical situation.

[EnnPeeCee]

Concept:
Instead of making some spells take additional turns/actions to cast, have them instead require some action to be performed on a prior turn in order to have them available to cast.


To explain, an example:

Gain focus
Spend 1 action to gain focus. This has no effect on your character, but is required to cast certain spells.
Focus only lasts for X turns before you lose it, there is no consequence to losing your focus.

Powerful Spell XYZ
Casting Time: 1 action + expend focus


This way, some spells require '2 turns' to cast, but the character does not need to commit to a spell at the beginning of the 2 turns. A character can gain focus expecting to use it on the following turn, but can change plans as the situation changes.
Immediate 'issue' I see is players wanting to maintain focus outside combat so they always start combat with it available.

[Sigreid]

Honestly, I don't think I ever played with anyone in 1e that did spells on anything other than your turn simply for convenience.

[DeadMech]

Given that the majority of DM's I've played with can't keep track of a static initiative order, a dynamic initiative is a non-starter.

You want martials to be on the same level as casters? Learn from Tome of Battle and make them fun and versatile instead of hamstringing the casters.

[Second Wind]

Each player needs at least one consequential choice to make on each of their turns, and it's hard to do that if the same casting eats multiple actions. You could build a class around it by giving them interesting non-action actions for the dead turns, but that starts to defeat the premise.

Concentration spells are a better implementation. They take effect over time instead of all at once, they can be disrupted, and they can be exceptionally powerful since you can't run more than one at a time... but they don't lock the player out of playing for multiple rounds.

Multi-round casting would be great for NPCs, though. Cultist starts chanting a dread spell, giving you a round to prevent your impending doom? Awesome. I'mma start doing that, yes please.

[Kane0]

This actually was the case waaaaay back when D&D started. I fully get why it has changed: waiting a whole round for your turn to come up only to say, "I'm still casting," is pretty boring. But let's ignore that for a moment; we can examine how to fix that later if we find there's worth in pursuing this line of reasoning.

I'm curious how much that would impact the "caster supremacy" consideration, and how one would have to change spell design to account for and accommodate it.

Specifically, the idea is that casting times are often more than one round long, and longer casting times are (as now) balance factors, but are not always designed to be either "1 action - combat usable," or "1 minute or longer - not combat usable." Instead, a number of them might be 2-3 rounds' actions, or at least "a full round action" like in 3.5 for a few. The idea here being that 1-action spells are weaker or are meant to interfere with other castings, and to let "hit the mage" be a way to try to disrupt spells.

If you say that sounds like no fun, I agree it probably would be without some very careful thinking about action economy, but for sake of discussion, I'd like to focus more on what it would alter in the balance of spellcasting in general, and how it might require rebalancing or even rethinking the spells that wind up being longer cast-time.

It would make longer cast-time spells be either "finishers" or "climax-inducers," I think, but it may not do that perfectly. If it took until round three of combat to get off a fireball, though, the dozen goblins would need to be herded into position for it and would still get two or three turns before it went off. Is this a worthwhile thing to seek? I'm not saying it is or is not; this is purely exploratory on my part.

So, what do people think? How would such a game look compared to what we know of in 5e? How would magic spellcasting need to be altered to work with that paradigm?

I think the only way you could make it work is if casting that sort of spell did something on that first turn, then more on following turns as you spend more actions on it. It would be a nice alternative to just slapping concentration on everything.

[sithlordnergal]

given that i haven't been on a table with a pure martial in 3 years, suggests to me that most folks are not reasonably satisfied with the balance between martial and melee.

caster "compensation" isn't required if the goal is it reign in caster power-creep.

players' "compensation" is that it requires the party to develop a strategy other than max DPR.

Caster and player compensation is required since you would be massively nerfing casters to a point where they wouldn't be fun to play anymore. Requiring a caster to spend an entire turn or more doing nothing, and make no mistake they would be doing nothing, but trying to avoid being hit isn't fun. Its boring and tedious. No amount of party strategy or teamwork makes up for that. If a person is playing a caster and they can only do something substantial every other turn outside of avoiding being attacked, then I'd fully expect that player to check out, pull out their phone, and stop being invested.

And I don't know what tables you'd been playing at, but I've seen a lot of pure martials. From Barbarians, to Monks, even Fighters and Rogues. Heck, I have a few pure martials myself, my favorite is a Battlemaster Fighter/Thief Rogue.

[sithlordnergal]

Concept:
Instead of making some spells take additional turns/actions to cast, have them instead require some action to be performed on a prior turn in order to have them available to cast.


To explain, an example:

Gain focus
Spend 1 action to gain focus. This has no effect on your character, but is required to cast certain spells.
Focus only lasts for X turns before you lose it, there is no consequence to losing your focus.

Powerful Spell XYZ
Casting Time: 1 action + expend focus


This way, some spells require '2 turns' to cast, but the character does not need to commit to a spell at the beginning of the 2 turns. A character can gain focus expecting to use it on the following turn, but can change plans as the situation changes.
Immediate 'issue' I see is players wanting to maintain focus outside combat so they always start combat with it available.

I'd say this is a poor idea. Again, there's nothing fun doing nothing for a round, and building up focus is another way of saying "You do nothing this round"

[PhoenixPhyre]

Honestly, if you want to make spell-casting more risky (easier to counter), just add the clause "casting a spell provokes opportunity attacks; damage caused by those opportunity attacks causes the caster to have to make a Constitution saving throw (basically a concentration check, except you're not concentrating), losing the spell on a failure."

You can then give some casting classes/subclasses (the ones you want to consider casting in melee) features that either remove the provocation, make it at disadvantage, or improve the save against losing the spell.

[Eldariel]

If it's meaningless then there's no reason to worry about it to have mitigating balance factors; therefore having mitigating balance factors means it's not meaningless. By applying mitigating balance factors such that the powerful effect doesn't get to happen because the reason for it no longer applies since it took too long, in this case, then there was no point to having the powerful effect because a powerful effect that doesn't get used is useless. A PC doing something powerful is not such an atrocity of gaming DMs need to prevent happening at any cost or make the PC regret doing it. Let the PC do his powerful thing.

You misunderstand. The point is that powerful doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. It's a relative term. If PCs are powerful, they're all equally powerless unless there's something to compare it to. If one PC gets more powerful things than others, it needs a proper recompense for there to be much point in picking one over the other.

[Pex]

You misunderstand. The point is that powerful doesn't mean anything in a vacuum. It's a relative term. If PCs are powerful, they're all equally powerless unless there's something to compare it to. If one PC gets more powerful things than others, it needs a proper recompense for there to be much point in picking one over the other.

Or give the lower powered choice more power. Or ignore the alleged imbalance bceause it's not really imbalanced. It's a matter of taste of whether someone likes the idea that character A can be Really Awesome Amazing once or twice per day and Cool Enough the rest while another character is Way Cool all game day long.

If something is so powerful you feel the need to make it almost irrelevant in effect or use or otherwise make the player regret using it because his character is then The Absolute Suck for a while, then don't have that something powerful thing at all and do something else. Never punish a player for doing what you said he could do.

[Composer99]

Maybe instead of having spellcasting take multiple turns, you could reconfigure initiative and turn order so most spells reliably cast later.

Examples of what I'm thinking of are B/X combat rounds and Shadow of the Demon Lord.

Both use side initiative, and B/X has unmodified d6 rerolls every round. So they may not be exactly what's looked for, but might serve as inspiration.

[Pooky the Imp]

I think a system where a caster has some kind of "charge bar" (to use a video game turn), akin to the NPC concept 'recharge', except you don't start charged, would work quite nicely.
It would hopefully be reasonably easy to implement, e.g. give the player an amount of tokens each round, and casting an Nth level spells takes N tokens.

Just a point, but might a system of this nature be a reasonable substitute for spell slots?

I certainly think it could be interesting if casters start with, say, 1-3 charges (depending on character level) and gain more during combat (either innately or by performing certain actions). So they can cast a low-level spell each round or they can bide their time and instead cast a higher level spell later.

Cantrips, presumably, wouldn't consume charges - so they could still cast those without expending any.

[Kane0]

Maybe instead of having spellcasting take multiple turns, you could reconfigure initiative and turn order so most spells reliably cast later.

Examples of what I'm thinking of are B/X combat rounds and Shadow of the Demon Lord.

Both use side initiative, and B/X has unmodified d6 rerolls every round. So they may not be exactly what's looked for, but might serve as inspiration.

Or like you start casting the spell and when your initiative minus the spells level the spell takes effect?

[KorvinStarmast]

Honestly, if you want to make spell-casting more risky (easier to counter), just add the clause "casting a spell provokes opportunity attacks; damage caused by those opportunity attacks causes the caster to have to make a Constitution saving throw (basically a concentration check, except you're not concentrating), losing the spell on a failure."
Which then calls for the ability to create 'zones of control' for the melee characters so that a 'front line back line' ordering makes sense.

[NaughtyTiger]

Query: what would qualify as "pure martial" to you? 5e's approach to the problem, depending on your definition, could just be making everyone "a bit of a spellcaster."

champion, bm, thief, berserker, totem, swashbuckler with no multi...

given the new archetypes all have magic, that IS 5e's approach...


Caster and player compensation is required since you would be massively nerfing casters to a point where they wouldn't be fun to play anymore. Requiring a caster to spend an entire turn or more doing nothing, and make no mistake they would be doing nothing, but trying to avoid being hit isn't fun. Its boring and tedious. No amount of party strategy or teamwork makes up for that. If a person is playing a caster and they can only do something substantial every other turn outside of avoiding being attacked, then I'd fully expect that player to check out, pull out their phone, and stop being invested.

And I don't know what tables you'd been playing at, but I've seen a lot of pure martials. From Barbarians, to Monks, even Fighters and Rogues. Heck, I have a few pure martials myself, my favorite is a Battlemaster Fighter/Thief Rogue.

maybe we disagree on "compensation".
further above i laid out the mod we were trying.
basically, you can concentrate/cast multiple spells at a time, but concentration penalties grow.
caster can try to rush it, but risks all the spells fizzling out.
so the cast does something every round but has delayed gratification or increased risk.
i don't consider it compensation, i see it as balancing the power creep.

[CapnWildefyr]

Or like you start casting the spell and when your initiative minus the spells level the spell takes effect?

Only thing - then you have to do math, and have to make exception lists for spells like power word kill. I mean the whole point of spells in the "power word" series, way back in the day, was that they went off in 1 segment and had only V components -- precisely to reduce interference with the spell going off.


Honestly, if you want to make spell-casting more risky (easier to counter), just add the clause "casting a spell provokes opportunity attacks; damage caused by those opportunity attacks causes the caster to have to make a Constitution saving throw (basically a concentration check, except you're not concentrating), losing the spell on a failure."

You can then give some casting classes/subclasses (the ones you want to consider casting in melee) features that either remove the provocation, make it at disadvantage, or improve the save against losing the spell.

I might borrow this one... just rule out OAs for power words and maybe a few other spells (like counterspell), plus I would allow ranged opportunity attacks provided that the person is specifically spending their action looking for spellcasting to interrupt with an arrow or whatever. [since normally OAs are melee attacks, the balance here is that if you do not notice the spellcasting, you lose your action, and the DM is within rights to have you roll a check. In a way, a ranged OA for this is like counterspell -- it's not free, and you have to be in a position to do it.]

edit - in general, any spell cast as a reaction should be exempt.

[EggKookoo]

edit - in general, any spell cast as a reaction should be exempt.

I would also take components into account. I'm not sure a spell with just a verbal comp should be subjected to this, but somatic makes more sense. Don't know where I'd come down on a material comp.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I would also take components into account. I'm not sure a spell with just a verbal comp should be subjected to this, but somatic makes more sense. Don't know where I'd come down on a material comp.

I'd say counterspell rules on this--if it has components, it provokes. Gives sorcerers a way out at a cost (subtle spell). I would exempt reaction spells, generally (mainly because reactions to reactions are kinda annoying).

And I'd not allow ranged OAs for this--let melee be better at something. Also gives encouragement to casters to keep the enemies away instead of taking the melee's job.

[CapnWildefyr]

I'd say counterspell rules on this--if it has components, it provokes. Gives sorcerers a way out at a cost (subtle spell). I would exempt reaction spells, generally (mainly because reactions to reactions are kinda annoying).

And I'd not allow ranged OAs for this--let melee be better at something. Also gives encouragement to casters to keep the enemies away instead of taking the melee's job.

Good points. But I'd still keep the "word" spells out of this too, kind of hard to counter "DIE!" because by the time you realize it's a spell, you're in trouble. Not sure about 5e, but in 2e for sure these spells used to be higher-level precisely because they were hard to counter. I mean, if PWK requires you to shout something long like "PIXELIXCRAMMINICKSARGOVIAN! it kinda breaks verisimilitude for me. Or, maybe let you get your OA but no chance to break the casting?

[PhoenixPhyre]

Good points. But I'd still keep the "word" spells out of this too, kind of hard to counter "DIE!" because by the time you realize it's a spell, you're in trouble. Not sure about 5e, but in 2e for sure these spells used to be higher-level precisely because they were hard to counter. I mean, if PWK requires you to shout something long like "PIXELIXCRAMMINICKSARGOVIAN! it kinda breaks verisimilitude for me. Or, maybe let you get your OA but no chance to break the casting?

Possibly. If I were to implement this[1], I'd set general rules and then do a pass through spells for ones needing specific handling.

I would say that the PW spells tend to be rated lower (as they're fairly weak); being non-provoking might help.

[1] I'm not, at least now. For all my gripes about spells and spellcasting, I don't see it as out of balance as some do. Mainly due to play style differences. It's worrying, but it's not critical. I despise the design of the wizard class from an aesthetic point of view, but that's neither here nor now.

[ZRN]

I like the way Flesh to Stone and the errata'd Contagion do this: an immediate effect on a failed save, and the caster concentrates to have additional, stronger effects on later turns.

[MrStabby]

First of all, what I've heard is that the average combat only lasts 3 to 5 rounds. Some last longer, yes, but we would ideally like a spellcasting system that is usable in most combats, not just a few.

If combat is dragging on long enough to make such a spell worth using, it's probably because you've reached some kind of stalemate, though possibly a tenuous one. In that case, it would make sense for such a spell to be designed to tip the balance of that stalemate in your favor. These spells are then mostly for breaking a stalemate. If we're tweaking spellcasting, we might consider tweaking the combat rules, too, so that martial characters have more tools that help stall for time. Then it becomes of game of the martials defending the casters while the casters charge up their big spells. So that could be interesting.

One thing I would probably do is that casting a spell with a casting time longer than a single action would achieve this by using your action on your turn to continue casting the spell. This means you would still have a bonus action and reaction available. This way, you can charge up a big spell while still being able to do something on your turn. This means that casters would need to be geared more towards bonus actions, likely things with cantrip level damage or minor support effects. These are, after all, bonus actions, and thus shouldn't be as strong as what you could normally do with your main action. This probably also means changing the rules for bonus action spellcasting, and just making bonus action spells weaker (under the assumption that you're casting a big spell with your main action).

So probably combat opens up with the martials engaging the enemy while the mages stand back and drop a mid spell that only requires an action. The key is to do as much as you can on round 1 in order to shift the odds in your favor for the remainder of the combat. Come round 2, if it looks like you're winning, then you just clean up and you're done. If things look like they're not going as well as you'd like, that's probably when the mages start charging up the big, multi-round spells, while the martials shift into defending the mages until those spells drop.

I think I would just prefer this the other way round. Casting a spell costs an action, coninuing to cast it takes a bonus action. You can adjust concentraton rules as needed so it isn't like readying a spell (or is, to taste). I think the right balance point is the timing rather than the action cost; even no aditional action components but the spell taking effect at the start of your next turn is good. Something like hypnotic pattern shutting down enemies but letting them all get one more turn before it does doesn't seem so bad. Making casters do less probably isn't fun, bu changing how it works could be balanced and fun.


Thanks for the replies so far. I see a couple focusing on the "no fun" aspect, which I agree with, but isn't the main focus I have here. Others noting how you could keep your other actions open are a good one. It's more, to me, about how changing this to having a duration might alter action interaction.

Maybe a multi-round casting takes your bonus action each round and you can cast cantrips while also caSting a longer spell. Or maybe (holding because I like this one more and want to draw attention) the casting time lowers your initiative score by some amount, and you're casting throw out the intervening initiatives. So if you go on 20, cast a five-count spell, anybody on initiative 19 through 16 goes while you're caSting. The spell goes off on 15, and 15 becomes your new initiative. (Or you don't reset your initiative, if you prefer.) Going to zero or below makes you cast that much after the first person in the next round. i.e.starting a 5-count spell at initiative 1 means the first person in the initiative order takes his next turn (in the next round), and four counts later (in said next round) your spell goes off.

This would make initiative order and timing more important than 5e cares for it to be, but we're exploring things, here.

What it does open up is more possibilities for interrupts without ready actions and reactions.

Lowering intitative scores is good and fine but it is real pain to track. I have done this once and needed a spreadsheet for it to manage everything (not that spellcasting was reducing initiative but other factors were). It would certainly raise barrierrs to entry for the game.



"You cannot, should not, balance something by making it annoying to use."

My take: Do not punish a player for doing something you said he could do. Spellcasters are entitled to cast spells and should not be punished for it by having a miserable time.

Yeah, well a fighter has been told they can fight. If there isn't much left by the time the party wizard and the party sorcerer have both let off their fireballs then they are being "punished" for wanting to do cool fighter stuff. This isn't about stopping the players doing stuff - it is the same amount of stuff that will be done for the encounter to be resolved, it is just distributing the "stuff" that resovles the encounter more equitably amongst the different players. It isn't about stopping anyone playing, but rather about letting everyone play.


Pathfinder 2e does something like this. You get three actions on your turn, and casting a spell usually burns at least two of them.

So a way to do this in 5e that wouldn't result in "I do nothing every other round, yay" would be for most spells to burn both your action and bonus action. The problem is that for many casters, their bonus action is where their fun non-casting stuff tends to come in, like Bardic Inspiration, or a Stars Druid firing their arrow, or a Battlesmith/Artillerist commanding their constructs, a Fathomless Warlock controlling their tentacle etc.

If you instead decide to make casting take multiple rounds you cause a different and imo much worse problem - every spell would effectively become a concentration spell unless you overhauled those rules.



Yeah, a lot of fun stuff is here and it would need to be adjusted. On the other hand, it could be a way to add a bit of specialism to otherwise generic casters. A fireball might be a "next turn" timed spell but to an evocation wizard it could be a "now" spell. Given that things like adding more damage or more targets or whatever to different spell schools isn't that universally aplicable this might be a more interesting balance lever to promote mechanically distinct characters rather than the usual "take all the best spells I can" type characters.





Multi-round casting would actually work pretty well for spells you don't want used in combat. But in such cases, it should suffice to just give the spell a 1 minute casting time. It sounds like that's not what you're looking for. However, this does highlight an important corollary: a multi-round combat spell should obviously be pretty strong if it takes multiple rounds to cast it, but you also don't want it being strong for out of combat use.

So if a spell would be too strong to use in combat, you can just give it a 1 minute casting time (or longer). If you do want a spell to be used in combat, but want it to be multi-round, then you'll need to make it stronger to balance out while also not making it OP for out of combat use.

Off the top of my head, big damage spells would fit this pretty well. There's not actually much use for damage outside of combat, and anyway you have plenty of other ways to deal damage if you need to. That said, you could also just spam a spell every round and deal damage that way, so the big, multi-round spell has to either deal more damage or be more spell slot efficient to make it worth waiting for it to finish casting. Maybe every spell would need to be multi-round, so that those spells don't have to compete with single-action spells.

Perhaps a spell to grant immunity to a specific damage type would work. Once you understand which damage types your enemy uses, e.g. if you're facing a dragon and you're not immediately sure what type of breath weapon it has, then you can cast the spell to give immunity to the corresponding damage type to the party. One problem is that it would be pretty easy to pre-cast buff spells, which eliminates the primary downside of a multi-round spell.

Hmm, maybe something else you could do is have a spell that gives a big buff to the party, but only for one round. You might still be able to pre-cast it, but if your timing is off it might be wasted. But something like this could be a good emergency button. For example, something that gives a bunch of healing or temp HP and advantage on attacks. Something like that could really swing the battle in your favor, and might be worth waiting for.

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that existing spells would be able to be modified for this. They're simply not designed with this in mind, so tweaking them is tricky at best. Maybe a better question is figuring out how multi-round casting would benefit the game. Once you figure that out, you'll probably have a better idea of what type of spells multi-round casting would fit. And in the end, you may just have to design new spells from scratch.

I am a bit skeptical about the 'big buff that needs to be got right' type spell. My concern is not so much spell casters being too powerful overall (though they are that a little as well) but rather that they are too powerful in a particular fight. A wizard sucking in a different fight doesn't put right them being so effective that another party member couldn't do much to contribute in a pervious one. A big buff that can be mistimed is great for a solo game but one that means 'well I guess I don't have to be good at my job then' for other characters might be a bit annoying when playing a team game.



The main mechanical benefit I am looking at would be cleaning up counterspell by making it something you cast as an action while another caster is doing something that takes long enough for your action to come up. It also would allow for "martial counter spell" by making "geek the mage; don't let him finish that spell!" a more viable thing.

But it would also mean a lot of reworking to keep spells worth it. (If the main issue with hypnotic pattern is that it requires predicting target locations, I would just have the targeting happen when you finish as the last thing you determine.)

Thinking on this a bit more, Concentration spells almost have a similar purpose to them: the mage is doing something that can be disrupted to end his spell. If counterspell were an action or bonus action, but forced a concentration duration spell to end if cast on the target, area, or caster, with the same rules for rolling or auto-success as it has now, that is obviously a nerf, but would it still be worth casting?

Or is it now too similar once more to dispell magic?

I think it is quite neat. I like it not so much because of its neatness, but because it creates a nice class of spells that are just that bit harder to dispell. And if countering what mages can do becomes a bit more common, I have no issue with raising spell slot numbers etc. to compensate.




There are a number of points that come to mind:

First, longer casting times have the effect of causing powerful spells to not be cast in the first round of combat (and not as often in a longer combat)
Second, longer casting times mean that the time between choosing an effect and the effect going off will be lengthened and more can happen in between.
Third, longer casting times make it so a caster effectively does nothing while the casting is taking place.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to be mainly going for the first point, maybe a bit for the second, and the third is a downside that's currently out of scope of discussion (or: we all agree it's bad and should be fixed somewhere down the line)

It seems like the second point would be the biggest nerf to casters, and have the largest disruption on a lot of spells, and would probably ruin a lot of fun as well.
The first is also a bit of a nerf, but doesn't nearly seem as ruinous to a caster's fun. Also, you don't need nearly as much spell tweaking; basically you reduce the tweaking to spells that would only be useful in the first round(s) of combat.

I think a system where a caster has some kind of "charge bar" (to use a video game turn), akin to the NPC concept 'recharge', except you don't start charged, would work quite nicely.
It would hopefully be reasonably easy to implement, e.g. give the player an amount of tokens each round, and casting an Nth level spells takes N tokens.


An alternative (also nicked from some video games) would be to make spells less powerful on their own, but be very powerful if multiple are chained in some order. Like if fireball only did like 4d6 or something, but if you cast create water the round before, the combo effect is steam explosion which does double damage, double radius, and knock prone or something like that.
But that's a whole 'nother ballgame I guess.

I think personally, the first point is also the least fun, rather than the second. Doing less stuff sucks. At least if I failed to read the way the battlefield would evolve then that is something I can learn from and try and improve. I think that it will change the balance of some spells - lighting bolt gets better but fireball gets worse as you can weave a lightning bolt in between your allies.

I do disagree a bit with you idea of spells acting in concert. If, to get good value from one spell you need to pick another it makes it harder/more punative to have thematic builds (say a sorcerer that is all about fire and not about water in your example).




I understand this, and I also would like for that to be a thing as it used to be in previous editions, having to "protect the wizard for a round" so he could get a full round spell led to cool moments. The problem I see with a 2 round casting of a spell*, is that a good spell now is probably better than a very good spell next round, because a good spell now allows the rest of the party to make informed decisions for the round.



Uff, I don't like the dynamics of this as all - the whole person doing cool stuff vs the person who just has to protect them. I mean protecting them might be cool if thats what you are into, but puting non spellcasters into that box rather than having them proactively do awesome stuff in their own right doesn't work for me.






If there are many foes, area damage or control on the first round lets the rest of the party focus on finishing off those who are more damaged or focusing on the enemies that saved against the cc effect.

Having the spell go off in the second round, means the fireball may now be overkilling the orc by 19 points, which means the party spent 3 attacks on that enemy uselessly becuase he was gonna be fried by the fireball anyway. In a way, casting a good spell now makes the rest of the party members actions worth more.

How much more damage does the 2 round nuke need to do above the 1 round nuke in order to be worth it? I think the balancing facot here are spell slots. If, like mine, your group only has 1 or 2 big combats per day, would I cast a Cho-Fireball of 12d6 instead of a regular Fireball of 8d6? Unlikely unless I had only 1 slot capable of casting FB and I really need all the area damage I can. I'd normally just cast fireball, and in my next turn if we still need more aoe I'll just cast FB again. My party had the benefit of knowing which enemies to focus, and by next turn, maybe things have changed and I really need to Dispel Magic, Dimension Door out of there or cast Fly to pursue a fleeing enemy. If the spell did 16d6, well maybe my party would start adjusting tactics, and it could become a viable strategy for when we want to conserve spell slots. But it also needs opposition against whom the difference in damage from 28 to 56 is relevant.

his seems more like a feature han a bug.

Yeah, fireball might be less of a good spell because other people got to kill enemies first or did more damage to them or whatever. I think that maybe a bi of forgiving flexability might be the answer here. Maybe instead of casting a spell/picking a target on your first turn you just commit power. You dedicate a spell slot level and a time window, and if the circumstances don't require fireball you can use hypnotic pattern instead, or fly or whatever. You could even be more forgiving and just let the caster convert it into any other spell at that cost; maybe you waited a turn for fireball but then deep it an inefficien use of magical energy so downgrade it to a magic missile.





My advice would be doing somethinig akin to slot level with the casting times. Like, maybe fireball becomes 5d6 + 3d6 per extra channel round to a maximum of 10d6. Easier to balance for nukes than for CC's, but for instance, maybe HP duration could be "Concentration, until the end of your next turn", but if you cast it as a 2 round spell it lasts "Concentration, up to 1 minute". It'd be a lot of work, I know.

Or the other thing you could do, is just change a whole subclass of spell to 2 round casting, so they don't have to compete against 1 round version of comparable effects. Like all multi target concentration CC's are now 2 rounds. Then its not 2 round HP competing against 1 round Confusion, because all spells with relatively comparable effects would have the same casting time.

With you on this one.





This, the ocasions when you would rather "Counterspell" instead of DM under this rules would be for concentration spells that affect multiple targets but you can't target the effect per se. Like you can dispel Evard's Black Tentacles, thus ending the effect for all those in the spells area, but you can't dispel the effect of Hypnotic Pattern or a high level hold person on all targets with a single casting of DM.

IMO, instead of reworking Counterspell into this, just remove counterspell and add this capability to Dispel Magic.

Yeah, or maybe not all - just give dispel magic an area of effect?





given that i haven't been on a table with a pure martial in 3 years, suggests to me that most folks are not reasonably satisfied with the balance between martial and melee.

caster "compensation" isn't required if the goal is it reign in caster power-creep.

players' "compensation" is that it requires the party to develop a strategy other than max DPR.

So I have only played one game in recent years with a non-spellcasting character. That character was A rogue. Bedecked with wands and use magic device. That said, it isn't just power bu also playstyle, coolness of character and that spellcasting stats tend to offer more to do out of combat.

[Eldariel]

Or give the lower powered choice more power. Or ignore the alleged imbalance bceause it's not really imbalanced. It's a matter of taste of whether someone likes the idea that character A can be Really Awesome Amazing once or twice per day and Cool Enough the rest while another character is Way Cool all game day long.

If something is so powerful you feel the need to make it almost irrelevant in effect or use or otherwise make the player regret using it because his character is then The Absolute Suck for a while, then don't have that something powerful thing at all and do something else. Never punish a player for doing what you said he could do.

What about the players who might enjoy that? Or is only one group entitled to catering to them?

[MrStabby]

What about the players who might enjoy that? Or is only one group entitled to catering to them?

Oh, well if players enjoy that then they are having the wrong type of fun and they Should Not Be Accomodated lest expectations of this type of behaviour spread to other groups.

[Willie the Duck]

My gut says that if the issue is that spells (and spellcasting) is too strong, the first-cut solution should be to reduce the power of spells and the number of spells people get, rather than trying to balance things by the back door. If it's less about power and more about theme, then knock yourself out. I certainly don't want to have dynamic initiative--that's substantial extra overhead. But yeah.
I am going to tend to agree. OP's solution is a solution, but I wouldn't say a great one. In particular because it doesn't address the specific issues that (IMO) make spellcasters dominate -- that they tend to have a huge number of choices of powers (some of which are just plain poorly balanced against other abilities, such as minion-mancy, shape-changing, force cage, simulacrum, etc.) to bring to situations and the so-many-per-day limitation upon them doesn't match the average encounters per day of most playstyles. Limiting the number of spells (or high-level spells) per encounter does constrain how much the casting classes can mass-unload on the situation, but that's a sledgehammer solution to a tweezers & screwdriver issue. In particular if level of spell is the primary metric against which you levy a hindrance. Sometimes it is a low-level spell (particularly an already powerful-but-constrained spell like one with concentration as a rider) like fairy fire or web -- used at the right time and in the right place -- that makes the caster the superior contributor, while a higher level spell like fireball can be nice-but-not-game-changing.


Honestly, I don't think I ever played with anyone in 1e that did spells on anything other than your turn simply for convenience.
1E initiative is an ur-example of 'balance things by making them convoluted, fragile, or otherwise annoying to actually play' failed hard*. This does not mean you should never make something with high power but high cost. It's the 'annoying' part that doesn't really work out.
*In no small part because a lot of people came from oD&D/B/BX/BECMI and had an alternate rule set from which to crib, but also just in general.

[Cikomyr2]

Make the player roll a spellcaster check to determine if the spell casts faster or not? You can maybe move a number of feet equal to your roll, or maybe 20 you get a bonus action?

[olskool]

Make the player roll a spellcaster check to determine if the spell casts faster or not? You can maybe move a number of feet equal to your roll, or maybe 20 you get a bonus action?

We play a "gritty 5e" where the Spellcaster has to roll an Arcana Proficiency Check equal to a DC of 10 + Spell [being cast] Level (with Cantrips being Level 0) to successfully cast a spell. They get to add their Proficiency Bonus to the roll and a Spell Slot is only expended when a successful casting occurs.

[Amnestic]

We play a "gritty 5e" where the Spellcaster has to roll an Arcana Proficiency Check equal to a DC of 10 + Spell [being cast] Level (with Cantrips being Level 0) to successfully cast a spell. They get to add their Proficiency Bonus to the roll and a Spell Slot is only expended when a successful casting occurs.

Huh, so wizards win again, basically?

[Rukelnikov]

Huh, so wizards win again, basically?

Bards will be fine too

[Cikomyr2]

We play a "gritty 5e" where the Spellcaster has to roll an Arcana Proficiency Check equal to a DC of 10 + Spell [being cast] Level (with Cantrips being Level 0) to successfully cast a spell. They get to add their Proficiency Bonus to the roll and a Spell Slot is only expended when a successful casting occurs.

How about 10+spell to cast it. +5 to make it more powerful, +10 to make it REALLY more powerful.

And don't make it Arcana for the love of :durkon:

[PhoenixPhyre]

And don't make it Arcana for the love of :durkon:

Yeah. A spellcasting ability check (ie spell mod + proficiency) might work. Extra rolling, but...

[Kane0]

Only thing - then you have to do math, and have to make exception lists for spells like power word kill. I mean the whole point of spells in the "power word" series, way back in the day, was that they went off in 1 segment and had only V components -- precisely to reduce interference with the spell going off.


It would make an interesting differentiation between spells, for both casting time and duration. Not all would be like that just like not all spells are rituals or require concentration. Maybe call it offset?

Eg. Magic Missile stays as it is now, but Chromatic Orb takes effect with an offset of like -3 instead of the costly material component. Likewise Blade Ward might become a Bonus Action casting time but only work until initiative -3 rather than until the start of your next turn, scaling by an additional -3 at levels 5, 11 and 17. Hmm, that may be weird if you enable wrap-around to avoid it being useless if you're towards the end of initiative though.

Edit: Or we could split rounds into say three phases for them to work in. Phase one is everyone with initiative 20+ (and lair actions). Phase two is everyone with initiative 10-20 and phase 3 9 and lower. A spell with an offset of 0 takes effect immediately, 1 in the next phase, and so on.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It would make an interesting differentiation between spells, for both casting time and duration. Not all would be like that just like not all spells are rituals or require concentration. Maybe call it offset?

Eg. Magic Missile stays as it is now, but Chromatic Orb takes effect with an offset of like -3 instead of the costly material component. Likewise Blade Ward might become a Bonus Action casting time but only work until initiative -3 rather than until the start of your next turn, scaling by an additional -3 at levels 5, 11 and 17. Hmm, that may be weird if you enable wrap-around to avoid it being useless if you're towards the end of initiative though.

The issue with working on actual initiative counts (other than being fiddly as all get out) is that initiative counts are sparse, which makes fixed-offset effects have huge swings in effectiveness.

Casting an offset -4 spell when the initiative is like

You 20
Friendly 15
Bad guy 1 14
Bad guy 2 12
Friendly 12
slow guy 1

is very different than one where the initiative is more like

You 20
Friendly 19
BG 1 19
BG2 18
Friendly 17
SG 15

Among other things, it forces you to break immersion and focus on the exact numbers of the initiative counts, instead of just using it as an ordering process. That's super meta.

[Segev]

The issue with working on actual initiative counts (other than being fiddly as all get out) is that initiative counts are sparse, which makes fixed-offset effects have huge swings in effectiveness.

Casting an offset -4 spell when the initiative is like

You 20
Friendly 15
Bad guy 1 14
Bad guy 2 12
Friendly 12
slow guy 1

is very different than one where the initiative is more like

You 20
Friendly 19
BG 1 19
BG2 18
Friendly 17
SG 15

Among other things, it forces you to break immersion and focus on the exact numbers of the initiative counts, instead of just using it as an ordering process. That's super meta.

Yeah, that's a big concern with anything that manipulates initiative. 5e doesn't just want you to be able to ignore the exact numbers after you establish order, it wants you to never regret where you are in the order enough that you would like to go LATER than you do in it. (It's fine with you lamenting not going earlier, but once you've had your first turn, 5e philosophy is that you should never, ever want to permanently lower your position in the order because of how any 5e mechanic would make that be more advantageous.)

[Mr. Wonderful]

The "Living Death" and "Masque of the Red Death" version of D&D played some years ago multiplied all casting times by 10.

This lead to a very different game of course, both mechanically and in the setting (1890's with steam and firearms).

That said, the magic system was very satisfying, in that spells were the province of specialists who mainly focused on divination and alteration, since starting a combat casting an attack spell and waiting 10 rounds for it to go off is silly. Magic was if anything even weirder and more powerful as a scenario builder but was super reduced in combat.

It worked very well within its context, but again, a very great difference from the standard D&D setting.

[Segev]

The "Living Death" and "Masque of the Red Death" version of D&D played some years ago multiplied all casting times by 10.

This lead to a very different game of course, both mechanically and in the setting (1890's with steam and firearms).

That said, the magic system was very satisfying, in that spells were the province of specialists who mainly focused on divination and alteration, since starting a combat casting an attack spell and waiting 10 rounds for it to go off is silly. Magic was if anything even weirder and more powerful as a scenario builder but was super reduced in combat.

It worked very well within its context, but again, a very great difference from the standard D&D setting.

Huh. Just thinking about this with a "how would that look in the real world?" perspective, if fireball as written took 1 minute to cast, but could be cast IRL, how big a security threat would that be? Is it super-obvious it's being cast, to the point that you couldn't hide somewhere and snipe a crowd, like a cowardly terrorist? Or is it subtle enough that, if you're on a rooftop or in a room with a window cracked, you could easily cast it without being detected before the glowing bead comes streaking out?

[Cikomyr2]

Huh. Just thinking about this with a "how would that look in the real world?" perspective, if fireball as written took 1 minute to cast, but could be cast IRL, how big a security threat would that be? Is it super-obvious it's being cast, to the point that you couldn't hide somewhere and snipe a crowd, like a cowardly terrorist? Or is it subtle enough that, if you're on a rooftop or in a room with a window cracked, you could easily cast it without being detected before the glowing bead comes streaking out?

Or a mage on a battlefield with an escort, and he could fireball tactical locations

[Mr. Wonderful]

Huh. Just thinking about this with a "how would that look in the real world?" perspective, if fireball as written took 1 minute to cast, but could be cast IRL, how big a security threat would that be? Is it super-obvious it's being cast, to the point that you couldn't hide somewhere and snipe a crowd, like a cowardly terrorist? Or is it subtle enough that, if you're on a rooftop or in a room with a window cracked, you could easily cast it without being detected before the glowing bead comes streaking out?

The setting is the 1890s and so there are plenty of other ways to blow things up outside of magic, and even more so today.

But extrapolating to the standard D&D setting would be very interesting. I'm sure that sitting in a castle and seeing someone approach wearing a pointy hat would be a bit of a downer, but as with all things, defense develops to withstand offense.


Or a mage on a battlefield with an escort, and he could fireball tactical locations

Yes, that would definitely happen. And also groups looking to whack that mage and their escort - in fact I'd imagine that most mages wouldn't want to reveal themselves until absolutely necessary lest they get a LOT of attention.

[Cikomyr2]

Yes, that would definitely happen. And also groups looking to whack that mage and their escort - in fact I'd imagine that most mages wouldn't want to reveal themselves until absolutely necessary lest they get a LOT of attention.

then you start getting into "places of powers", "mage towers" and other such nonesense that boost caster's power and their range, so they can lob fireball from kilometers away

[Mr. Wonderful]

then you start getting into "places of powers", "mage towers" and other such nonesense that boost caster's power and their range, so they can lob fireball from kilometers away

Sure, like an 81mm mortar.

No joke, one group I know uses Advanced Squad Leader as their mass-combat rules. Heroes are leaders, casters are artillery - and really powerful wizards are off-map artillery. I don't know all the ins and outs of the rules as I only observed (not participated) in one session.

[CapnWildefyr]

Counterspell: FWIW I don't have a problem with blind counterspell, IRL it's really hard to get details right when you're in a stressful (life or death) situation. Is it a ball of bat guano? Molasses? A black pearl? Maybe if the fire breathing dragon moves out of the way I can get a better look? Besides, not even sure you have to pull the components out of your component bag in 5e? Sorry I don't feel like looking it up right now...

Another possible solution could be that if you have taken damage in the last round (between your actions, specifically), maybe you have to roll a Concentration check. Try that with PhoenixPhyre's OA, see how it goes in practice.

Another alternative to longer casting times: If you fail a Concentration check (not the OA) because you took damage in the last round, maybe your chosen spell goes off but the targets save at advantage, or get a save if they otherwise wouldn't get one, or the outcome gets reduced 25%? That way, there is a benefit for putting casters under duress, but casters are not completely clobbered (or worse for players: bored).

Melee characters don't have a threshold like this, but they also can't cast big AOE effects either.