3.5 and Pathfinder 1e. Extended casting time for increased effect

[Elder_Basilisk]

There are several aspects of 3rd edition derived D&D that are supported by the rules but are severely under-utilized compared to genre reprentations.

One such aspect is casting spells taking time to cast. Other than summon monster/nature's ally (1 round) and restoration spells (3 rounds for some bizarre reason), almost every spell takes a standard action to cast and most of the exceptions are swift or immediate actions.

Another common complaint about third edition derived spells is that direct damage magic is not effective enough (it turns out giving monsters con scores and con bonus to hp means d6/level doesn't go as far as in prior editions) and combat healing short of heal is ineffective (same root cause--it turns out giving monsters strength scores and power attack and letting those add to damage multiple times per round makes more of a difference than adding caster level to cure wounds spells--go figure). One doesn't need to accept the strong version of these complaints (which I don not accept--fireball is not appropriately 1st level because damage sux) to see room for improvement.

One interesting idea from later splatbooks that didn't make much difference because the spells sucked was "channeling" from the channeled pyroburst etc spells which allowed the caster to spend longer casting for increased effect. But what if that were a general feature of cure wounds (or (healing) in general) and evocation spells? Expand casting time by 1 step for a damage or healing die increase across the board. So fireball can be cast as a full round action for d8/level or a 1 round spell for d10/level or even multiple rounds to get up to d12/level. Likewise, cure wounds could increase in the same way.

Other than making damage slightly more effective in combat, it might have some less obvious effects. Out of combat healing by wands of cure light wounds or spells would get marginally more efficient though it would still not be as good efficient as lesser vigor. If applied to all healing spells, increasing the lesser restoration casting time would make ability damage significantly easier (or cheaper) to cure--though lesser restoration is probably not good enough at curing ability damage anyway. There might be edge cases like a pre-cast flame arrow which if not correctly worded might get too good.

For the most part though, I tend to think that only the full round and maybe occasionally the one round options would be used. Maybe the "disrupt his casting before he finishes!" Effect would be better encouraged by increasing casting time on key spells as well or instead. Or perhaps the increase to 1 round or 2 round casting time should be more beneficial.

[Biggus]

Other than summon monster/nature's ally (1 round) and restoration spells (3 rounds for some bizarre reason), almost every spell takes a standard action to cast and most of the exceptions are swift or immediate actions.

There are actually a fair few spells out there with longer casting times, a quick search turned up about 200-300. But as there are 2000+ published spells, that still means about 90% are a standard action or less.


One interesting idea from later splatbooks that didn't make much difference because the spells sucked was "channeling" from the channeled pyroburst etc spells which allowed the caster to spend longer casting for increased effect. But what if that were a general feature of cure wounds (or (healing) in general) and evocation spells? Expand casting time by 1 step for a damage or healing die increase across the board. So fireball can be cast as a full round action for d8/level or a 1 round spell for d10/level or even multiple rounds to get up to d12/level. Likewise, cure wounds could increase in the same way.

Other than making damage slightly more effective in combat, it might have some less obvious effects. Out of combat healing by wands of cure light wounds or spells would get marginally more efficient though it would still not be as good efficient as lesser vigor. If applied to all healing spells, increasing the lesser restoration casting time would make ability damage significantly easier (or cheaper) to cure--though lesser restoration is probably not good enough at curing ability damage anyway. There might be edge cases like a pre-cast flame arrow which if not correctly worded might get too good.

For the most part though, I tend to think that only the full round and maybe occasionally the one round options would be used. Maybe the "disrupt his casting before he finishes!" Effect would be better encouraged by increasing casting time on key spells as well or instead. Or perhaps the increase to 1 round or 2 round casting time should be more beneficial.

I think this idea makes sense on the whole, I might try it out myself. As you say, there need to be certain provisions built in; probably that it can only be done on spells which take effect immediately on casting. Perhaps it should also only be available as standard on spells with standard action casting times; an increase of one dice step before you reach the "disrupt his casting before he finishes!" point shouldn't make a huge difference, but two steps might.

Actually, that could be a way of giving it a built-in cost: instead of allowing the full range of casting time options, only allow the 1 round version, so there's an inherent risk in using them in combat.

[Saintheart]

I suspect the benchmark to compete against with something like this is: why would I take a full round to increase the damage dice of one spell when I can still get a superior damage in effect by doing a quickened version of the same spell and then another iteration of the same spell as a standard action?

[Ramza00]

How do you count spells with the concentration aspect?

[RandomPeasant]

which I don not accept--fireball is not appropriately 1st level because damage sux

It's hard to see how there's room for improving damage spells if dealing 1d6 damage in an AoE is overpowered at 1st level. That would suggest 1d4 damage in an AoE as appropriate which ... look at that, it's burning hands, a spell which notably exists.


But what if that were a general feature of cure wounds (or (healing) in general) and evocation spells? Expand casting time by 1 step for a damage or healing die increase across the board.

That would matter very little for blasting spells, and barely at all for healing spells which get their primarily scaling from a static bonus to dealing rather than more damage dice. If you want to fix healing or blasting, fix them directly, rather than trying to thread the needle of fixing that and also your desire to have spells take longer to cast. I'm inclined to be skeptical the change as proposed would do anything at all, as I doubt even "1-round d8 fireball" is competitive with stinking cloud as a spell to be casting.

[Saintheart]

Elder_Basilisk, more thoughts:

On healing spells I'd say channelling out of combat doesn't present any actual option, because casting time is not a meaningful constraint. At all. It's hard enough to convince DMs to run random encounters based on a percentage chance for every hour of time passing, there is no meaningful decision point in the question "Hmm, do I spend 3 seconds or 6 seconds out of combat with the payoff being that I heal more with 6 seconds of time?" The decision will always be in favour of channelling.

Standing back a little, I guess the question is: what is the aesthetic, what is the experience we are looking to create for the player given the option of channelling?

My guesses are, based on your OP:

- We're looking to create the 'feeling' that the player can overclock his caster in combat, spending a big moment building up a magical charge to unleash a more powerful spell, Wave Motion Gun style.
- We're also looking to create a 'feeling' of dread, suspense, etc., when the DM describes the enemy caster as seeming to take a big pause, slowly doing a kata stance, bolts of lightning crackling between his hands one foot apart, growing larger and larger by the second ... i.e. to create the feeling "Oh, man, he's building up for one big punch by overcharging one of his spells".
- We want this option to be available on the fly, so not an option that you have to prepare ahead of time, which is inherent in the fact you're looking at the casting time as the control
- We want people to debate over whether they should use this option as opposed to other more conventional choices, i.e. make decisions, because our working assumption is that extra decision points are good for D&D generally and D&D tactical combat in particular
- We want all casters to be able to do this (I'm presuming. You may want only to do this to give certain casting classes more flavour or more options to distinguish them from others.)


On that series of assumptions, we need to look back at game dynamics that affect how we create that aesthetic in 3.5 or Pathfinder:
- Option Costs (time, consumable resources, character statistic damage or drain, imposition of condition, give opponent chance to obviate or mitigate our option, I can't think of any others)
- Option Benefits (higher damage, less chance of saving throw by opponent, rider effect such as condition imposition on opponent, extended duration to spell or spell's effect)
- Dice versus fixed modifiers (changing damage dice alters final rolls by 1 or 2, changing modifiers can vastly alter the upper possible total)
- Affecting action economy or imposing debilitating debuffs is notionally more valuable than direct damage in most contexts given the normal level-based constraints of direct damage
- 3.5 Combat typically lasts about 4 rounds on average and usually amounts to only one or two players getting a significant hit from an enemy. Time out of combat is substantively unlimited in the context of spellcasting
- What others are doing (are we duplicating what someone else is doing without the costs or with lesser costs than our option, can anyone else do what we do, does our option interfere or hamstring what someone else is doing, does our option help another team member do what they do)
- If we're looking to create an "on the fly" option, the point at which we make the decision to use it or not is either on our turn or decide prior to our turn as some event happens on the battlefield which makes us think we have to use it. Therefore the decision point is somewhere after the end of our previous turn and before our turn (surprise rounds are down to a standard action, therefore a time-constricted channelling is not possible in the surprise round.)
- Widespread use of time-constricted channelling by NPCs leads players to adjust their strategies to watch for, target, and interrupt enemy casting if channelling results in damage/debuff/riders/extended duration over and beyond what they "expect" from a caster.
- Other options (e.g. metamagic, Quicken Spell particularly) that can be built on top of this option.


This set of aesthetics and dynamics leads me to think that the simplest and therefore laziest change to be made, if you wanted to make channelling a thing for someone in the game, is to basically give it only to Sorcerers or maybe similar fixed-list spontaneous casters, and make it effectively a free, on-the-fly Maximise Spell, no feat required, no higher spell slot required, it's part of their class features that if they channel for a full round, they can Maximise their spell for free. As the levels go by, they can add more metamagic feats for free: level 1 it's free Maximise, level 6 it's free Maximise and Empower, level 14+ it's free Maximise and Empower and Heighten spell. By this point if you're spending full rounds (i.e. 25% of the average fight) on direct damage it should be of a fairly significant fashion. Can decide as the levels go by whether other metamagic should be allowed to stack with a channelled spell. Could also consider whether you can flex this a bit so you can either Maximise or Extend the spell's effect, but not both at the same time.

This imposes the time constraint, makes it an option that arguably keeps up, makes it unique to Sorcerers who don't have a lot of other versatility built in like Wizards do, and allows NPCs to use it as well.

Channelling for all casters in the game is a lot harder to balance up simply because there's too many options that are too easily broken by giving benefits of this kind across the board. Haven't touched that yet.

[Melayl]

I would think a good balance to this would be to make it easier to disrupt the channeled casting. Maybe a penalty to concentration checks to keep from losing the spell.

[Kurald Galain]

So fireball can be cast as a full round action for d8/level or a 1 round spell for d10/level or even multiple rounds to get up to d12/level. Likewise, cure wounds could increase in the same way.
During combat, that's largely not enough benefit to the cost.

Taking a fullround action is a negligible cost. However, taking one round gives a big risk of spell disruption, and that's really not worth getting +22% damage on a fireball. Multiple rounds is certainly not worth it because of action economy; in two rounds you should cast two fireballs (+100% damage) instead of a single bigger one (+18% damage). And note that Pathfinder has damage boosts to evocations already, making these longer casting times even less worthwhile.

I mean it's an interesting mechanic, but if you want to work with action economy you need to start broader than this.

[Elder_Basilisk]

In general action economy terms I think full round action would often be a freebie. There are lots of times that the character doesn't have anything to do with the move action anyway. So that's a freebie. Sometimes it would force interesting choices though. However given the increased risk, I'm inclined to think that a single step increase is not enough to be worth it for going to a 1 round casting time.

On the other hand, 2 increases on top of the increase for going to FRA, might well be enough. By the time fireball's d6/level becomes 1d12/level (or 2d6 by standard progression I guess), the damage has doubled which certainly ought to be worth the risk, especially if resource conservation is an issue. When you only have two fireballs/day, getting double damage from them is certainly something you'd think about. And if you pull it off, it lets you pull off some massive damage spikes by doubling up when resources are not an issue. If not disrupted, you could do a 1 round fireball and follow it up with a FRA fireball for 2d6+1d8 per level delivered in a single round. Which might really be a bit much. On the other hand, NPCs are typically less dependent on healing and PCs can scatter or disrupt the spell and due to the way CR works, will also typically either be facing lower level enemies or enemies without lots of support to let them try risky things so the damage spike aspect might not be too bad a thing.

A more conservative approach might be to just go for two die increases for increasing to 1 round casting time and leave it at that. Going to d10s from d6s is almost double and would be a big deal at low to mid levels. It probably wouldn't hurt anything to offer another two die increases for adding another round to the casting time but I doubt anyone would try it.

[Kurald Galain]

On the other hand, 2 increases on top of the increase for going to FRA, might well be enough. By the time fireball's d6/level becomes 1d12/level (or 2d6 by standard progression I guess), the damage has doubled
It's less good than you think, because you should count from the freebie (full-round action) and not from the baseline.

Since this thread includes Pathfinder, an easier way is going crossblooded sorcerer for 1d6+3 per level before any casting time increases.

[Elder_Basilisk]

It's less good than you think, because you should count from the freebie (full-round action) and not from the baseline.

Since this thread includes Pathfinder, an easier way is going crossblooded sorcerer for 1d6+3 per level before any casting time increases.

Still potentially worthwhile though--especially at levels where spell slots are a valuable commodity.

For the normal wizard/sorcerer, going from d8 to 2d6 is a 55% increase in damage. If I dropped the freebie option, going from d6 to d10 is a 57% increase in damage.

For the cross-blooded sorcerer, going from d6+3 to d10+3 is still a 31% increase in damage.

Now, will that always be worthwhile? No. Sometimes it will be too risky and sometimes, you need to drop the hammer before the enemy gets to a safer formation and you can't get them all anymore. But I think it would be worthwhile often enough that it would see play and wouldn't just be a trap option.

Someone mentioned concentration spells in a previous post. I don't think there's enough of them (and some of the ones that do exist aren't really concentration spells in practice--wall of fire might as well be 1 round/level rather than concentration + 1 round/level) and I want to look at good ways to expand them too, they just weren't the subject of this post. I think there's a lot of design space for fun and interesting mechanics that even now hasn't been explored in the 3.x derived games.

Back to the initial suggestion, I think the damage increase analysis above merits addressing Saintheart's suggestion of doing a free metamagic feat rather than a damage die increase. Two die increases are often similar to empower spell--why not just use empower? I'm not entirely sure it wouldn't be good, but I lean towards the die increase for a few reasons. First, I don't think the mechanic would play nicely with non-instantaneous spells. If you do metamagic, the logic would go, why can't I spend 1 full round on mage armor to get a free extend? Game mechanically, the answer is "because 1 round casting time is a genuine trade-off with real costs in combat but not for a spell you cast once in the morning and are done with." Second, you could extend the casting time on an empowered fireball if you use the die increase mechanic. If you get a free empower out of it, the interaction with metamagic feats becomes wonky.

[Cortillaen]

It's been touched on a bit already, but I think an important consideration for any attempt at making this is "Are you willing to make it primarily a low-level thing that stops being relevant in serious encounters once Quicken Spell becomes viable?". It's going to be extremely difficult task to create a valuable option (defined as one that is often the best choice but not so often it becomes the default) for both low and high level play, and that's less a criticism of the idea than of the nature of spell slot progression. Conserving spells and getting the most out of them is of paramount importance early on but falls off against the importance of maximizing impact with regards to action economy later. Since you are talking about directly trading action efficiency for slot efficiency, you'll run into trouble crossing that change (or just design with the intention of it falling out of use at higher levels, which is entirely viable for many tables). Even without Quicken, the decreasing need to conserve slots will quickly change the value of anything longer than a 1 Round casting time so much that balancing early and later levels will be hard unless you stick only to full-round and 1 round options (maybe with a kicker from spending a Swift? not sure).

That's not to say I don't like the idea, because I very much do. It's foundational to several TRPG magic systems I love and is tied deeply into the fantasy of a magic-user for many of us. It just runs afoul of the nature of 3.P spell slot progression; though maybe its more accurate to say 3.P spell slot progression is just a broken mess to design around. I suspect you'd have to substantially increase the benefits of spending a given unit of time between early levels and 10+ in order to not be flatly overpowered early but stay competitive with existing options later.

[Elder_Basilisk]

Increased casting time at high levels? As you say, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing if high level spellcasters stop using the option. There are all sorts of gameplay options that have a short lifespan. Burning hands is good at level 3-5 and falls away shortly after that. Flaming sphere is good at 3 and done by 7. If increased casting time option was a staple part of play until, say level 11 or so and didn't figure into high level play as much, I think that would be ok. It would be relevant at the most commonly played levels.

But I'm not convinced that it would entirely fall out of use. Maybe my groups and I play differently than most, but I haven't found spell slot scarcity to disappear at high levels. It just changes. Instead of "I've only got two area effect damage spells, I need to make them both count", it's, "I've only got two top shelf area damage spells, can I get by with a middle effort spell and his round?"

This is particularly the case when you consider casters other than sor/wiz characters using attack spells. A 13th level cleric with the fire domain might easily be running destruction, fire seeds x2 (in 6th and 7th level domain slots because who cares about elemental body), flame strike X2, holy smite, and fireball as his attack spells. A more hardcore buff and bash cleric might just have a couple holy smites. Now, most of the time, that's probably enough. But if the party runs into large groups of enemies more than they anticipated, they're going to be asking "how can I make these two or four area spells do everything I need them to do?" Or more likely, they drop one or two the first time there's a group that it's useful against because that's what you prepare the for but now they're down to one or two area spells and q rounding it looks attractive if you can pull it off.

But even a 13th level wizard who is relatively focused on damage spells is going to ask, "ok, I've got an empowered cone of cold, a regular cone of cold, two fireballs, a lightning bolt and my evoker wall of energy ability. I'm on level 1 of the drow wizard tower and we're supposed to clean it out and raze it to the ground and be gone before the house's quick reaction force shows up, and I still want to have at least one top shelf spell and a a couple rounds of mid level things left in case the first daughter of the house we are kinda sorta allied with double-crosses us when we get out of dodge. Last round I dropped a quickened haste on the party and hit the enemy with slow and the things are going ok. I could drop the empowered cone of cold, but maybe I can get by by just upchanneling a 3rd level fireball. Maybe it's not an issue for sorcerers, but even by the time I hit 18th level, I was watching my wizard's pitch count.

[Ramza00]

You want some form of elemental feat where you can sacrifice two or more lower spell slots to cast a spell 1 or 2 levels higher than normal.

Said spell I’ll have something like the recharge magic Unearthed Arcana effect but in reverse where you charge 1d4 or something rounds before releasing the spell, and the longer you cast the spell the more of a caster level boost you get (both the spell level and caster level boost are components of this mythical home brew feat.)

Lastly this charging a spell up already sets up the encounter clock in regards to initiative, combat has begun allowing the enemy to target you. Note this feat is elemental to prevent buffing and debuffing spells from early entry.

*shrug* as you can see d20 combat is not made for this. Likewise it makes the game even more rocket tag for the feat is useless, it fails in the gamble punishing the party, or it steamrolls the encounter.

[Kitsuneymg]

Spheres of Power for Pathfinder has something similar. Destruction sphere puts baseline damage at d6/level plus rider for 1 sp. gather energy reduces the cost of a destruction sphere by 1 by extending it to be the next higher action. Metamagic also extends action time. Cosmic sage can consult their notes to get a CL boost. It makes spells at least a full round action.

A drawback that gives an extra boon or more spell points can make all your spells slower. I wouldn’t recommend it as a player.

Finally, there is spell crafting. It can be used to combine sphere effects. Part of its cost is to lengthen the casting time. It’s not a thing I’ve ever used in a real game, but it exists. It might be ok as long as you are out of combat casting, casting before combat begins, or the time increase leaves it as no more than one full round.

[noob]

I believe there is a 3.5 feat that allows to increase cl at the cost of a longer casting time.
It is named elder giant magic.

[Blackhawk748]

I think this is an interesting mechanic, and always did, it was just stuck on lousy spells. Personally I think it would have the most impact between levels 3 and 8, where spell slots tend to be low, but you have enough HP to risk something like this.

It's probably see sporadic usage up till like 12 or 15 just for slot efficiency.

I do like this mechanic and I might just crib it for myself.

Probably just keep it to certain spells, just let it be more than what WotC did