Spell Durations and the Practicality of In-Combat Buffing

[icefractal]

This is somewhat of a rant, but I'm curious to know other people's thoughts -

I've been thinking about spell durations lately, and I'm not a fan. Oh sure, they're nice and organized, but their actual utility is all over the place.

Rounds / level works once you're past the first few, it's a single combat. Likewise hours / level starts at "probably enough for a dungeon delve, but won't be up in advance" at the start, and progresses to "most of the day". Those two are fine.

But minutes / level? Ok, for the first few levels it's the "single combat" option where rounds / level isn't, but after that it's a really awkward duration. Long enough for multiple battles, but only if you're strict with time and keep hustling, in which case the whole adventuring day ends up being really short and there's no time to decompress between fights.

Ten minutes / level is weird too. Once you hit mid-levels, it's the "probably enough for a dungeon delve" option, but before that it's a ... few battles. Exactly how many requires time tracking to an extent that may be annoying.

Minutes / level is treated as a big increase (in terms of spell balance) over rounds / level, but that's only sometimes true. And the same with 10 minutes / level compared to minutes / level. Extend has the same problem - only at some levels does it even make a difference, and its best use is the probably-unintended rolling over buffs from the prior day's slots.


I was thinking about more impact-based durations, and this is a potential set:
Fleeting - three rounds, short enough that you could potentially stall it out during battle
Short - three minutes, long enough for almost any fight. Would work better in a system that has short rests, then make it the same duration and it's a nice trade-off - keep your buffs or recover your resources?
Medium - three hours, long enough for an extended action sequence but probably won't be up if an ambush happens.
Long - lasts until the next time you prepare/recover spells, max three days.
Beyond Long - varies by the spell, don't think this needs a standard duration.

Extend bumps a spell up one duration category. Might be worth +2 now.


This leads to a related topic - in-combat buffing. IME, it's just seldom worth it. The exceptions are high-impact party-wide buffs (Haste, in a party that strongly benefits from it), very high-impact single buffs (making the ubercharger able to hit a foe they otherwise couldn't), or buffs that don't cost a standard action.

The leaves out a lot of buff spells, most of them in fact, and it's a bit sad - there are a lot of spells out there that look like they'd be fun, but casting them in a high-risk battle is unwise and casting them in a low-risk battle is unnecessary.

Is our group just an outlier? I don't even feel like we're that offense-optimized - we have no uberchargers or mailmen, we seldom one-shot non-fragile foes - but it still seems like taking the extra action to cast a buff on a single person (or even the team, if it's not something impactful enough) is seldom worth it, because fights are not many rounds and every action matters. And TBH, I wouldn't want fights to be much longer, because they already take up enough real-time.

I feel like more buffs should be swift actions, because I'm fine with "spend the resources each battle that you want it" balance-wise, but "spend the actions" seldom works.

[pabelfly]

You could try out a Divine Metamagic user with Persistent Spell, that way you can persist spells to last all day and pay for the extra cost through Turn Undead uses. There are plenty of ways to get off-list spells onto a Cleric if you want to go down this route.

What spells did you have in mind as interesting, but you don't feel like you can cast right now?

[RandomPeasant]

Rounds / level works once you're past the first few, it's a single combat.

IMO rounds/level should really be "3 rounds + 1 round/level" to fix the awkwardness at 1st level. That said, it's not always a single combat, and that makes it annoying. You can, at high levels and in a threat-dense dungeon environment, get it to cover two fights if you move quickly, which adds annoying tracking. It's also long enough that you can cast a bunch of them before engaging, which creates dramatic power swings (this is a significant portion of why the Teleport Ambush is such a powerful tactic).



I was thinking about more impact-based durations, and this is a potential set:

I think the problem with a scheme like this is that there is stuff that really does need, or at least want, its duration to scale with caster level. DoT effects like acid arrow shouldn't have a fixed duration any more than fireball should deal a fixed number of dice of damage.

IMO, the real issue is "spells you can pre-cast" versus "spells you can't". Outside of fairly niche circumstances, you can't practically cast black tentacles in advance, and you can't carry it from one fight to the next. If the duration is long enough to last a fight, it's not going to much matter if it is 1 round/level or "until you regain spells" or even "forever". Conversely, it's quite important if divine power lasts one fight or all day.

My thinking on this issue has come around to the idea that it's less important to deal with duration per se and more important to figure out a better way of dealing with those spells. In-combat buffing is a desirable niche, but it's quite difficult to figure out an implementation of it that can't just be used pre-combat to even greater effect. Which hurts balance because it makes access to buffing potentially overpowering, and makes being in combat pretty boring for the buffer. The best I've come up with is to limit the number of active buffs, but all that really does is make pre-buffing a little worse and add a safety valve for all-day buff effects.


This leads to a related topic - in-combat buffing. IME, it's just seldom worth it. The exceptions are high-impact party-wide buffs (Haste, in a party that strongly benefits from it), very high-impact single buffs (making the ubercharger able to hit a foe they otherwise couldn't), or buffs that don't cost a standard action.

Combat buffing suffers from needing not just to optimize itself but to have an overall party that is optimized to benefit from your buffs. If you come with a bunch of multi-target buff effects, but the party just has on guy who hits things, you're in rough straights. On the other hand, if you pick a bunch of powerful single-target buffs and the party is relying on minions that are individually weak, you're loosing a lot of potential power.


The leaves out a lot of buff spells, most of them in fact, and it's a bit sad - there are a lot of spells out there that look like they'd be fun, but casting them in a high-risk battle is unwise and casting them in a low-risk battle is unnecessary.

I think a neat mechanic for a buff-bot class (perhaps a Transmutation equivalent to the Warmage) would be to get a lot of the crappy Transmutation buffs as at-will effects. There's a lot of spells out there you'd never actually cast, but would make for cool filler in low-risk fights.

[Saintheart]

Ten minutes / level is weird too. Once you hit mid-levels, it's the "probably enough for a dungeon delve" option, but before that it's a ... few battles. Exactly how many requires time tracking to an extent that may be annoying.

Part of the reason for the weird minute/level and 10 minutes/level durations is that they're legacy retentions. In earlier editions there were different types of turns depending on your activity which increased or decreased the time in which a turn happened.

Dungeon exploration tended to happen in turns of 10 minutes each. 1 round of combat was 6 seconds, and 10 rounds of combat accordingly 1 turn ... which also happened to be 1 minute. And then there was campaign or travel time measured in hours or days. Basic D&D also hearkens back to the fact a turn is 10 minutes anywhere but combat, and in combat a turn is 10 rounds of 6 seconds each, i.e. 1 minute. They were more significant when adventuring was tied very heavily to dungeoncrawls, but the "10 minute turn" was omitted, or at least dropped, from third edition. But the spell durations as categories remained, hence the Round/Level, Minute/Level, 10 min/level, hour/level and so on.

[Fizban]

Buff actions are more relevant when combat lasts enough rounds that spending one on a buff is not a major fraction of the entire fight, particularly when circumstances and playstyle allow there to be turns where bloody murder is not a feasible option due to distance, terrain, positioning, etc. It's possible cutting short duration buffs to 3 rounds could make buffing even less common, as casting them "outside the door" means you waste 1/3 or more of the spell so it's never worth it (and then buffing in combat is still not worth it compared to characters expected to end combat in 3 rounds or less).

As for minute/level and 10 minute/level spells being busted, yup. The fact that some spells are orders of magnitude longer than others, and caster level can flip some of those but not others, makes for a fundamentally busted progression. Depending on level some spells go from barely one fight to potentially the entire dungeon, and others go from a small dungeon to an entire day, and it is no surprise that these spells are some of the worst offenders for mismatched expectations. And worst of all, a number of spells seem to have been written with no regard for their actual duration, assigned duration "categories" of min/level as "short" or 10 min/level as "medium" on reflex without actually doing the math to get their minimum duration when cast. At 10th level, almost no spell that is not measured in rounds lasts less than 10 full minutes, and yet there are 5th+ level "minute/level" spells that seem to think they last only a single combat, or "10 min/level" spells that don't seem to realize they actually last for more than 2 hours.

I have a similar bit in my tweaks and brew:

Spell Duration Grid

This is not a nerf/change I'm currently planning on using, but is does address a serious problem I have with the system: All minute/level, 10 minute/level, and hour/level duration spells are broken. Rather than actual reliable duration factors, they create a mess of variable minimum durations based on spell level, high level "shorter" duration spells that still last for ages, and low level spells that literally increase by an order of magnitude to eclipse the expected duration of "longer" spells cast at minimum level. It's a disgusting mess, and one of the biggest problems with figuring out how many buffs should factor into encounters (and thus how powerful characters should even be) is how the durations are all over the damn place.

The fix for this is to replace nearly all scaling spell durations with flat durations that are actually usable. Thus, the Spell Duration Grid, a simple visual reference for converting any spell of Y level with X original duration.
Spells that already have fixed durations are of course unchanged by the grid, though they are also few enough that if any are brought up they can simply be checked. Same for the shorter 1 round/X levels. Spells with non-standard variable durations like gaseous form's 2 min/level are even rarer, and again can be evaluated individually (flat 10 min in this case).
The grid can also include spell duration nerfs, or buffs, by simply putting them on the grid.


-1 round/level
1 min/level
10 min/level
1 hour/level
1st
1+1/level (max 10)
1 minute
10 minutes
1 hour
2nd
1+1/level (max 10)
3 minutes
30 minutes
2 hours
3rd
1+1/level (max 10)
3 minutes
1 hour
6 hours
4th
1 minute
10 minutes
1 hour
6 hours
5th
1 minute
10 minutes
1 hour
6 hours
6th
1 minute
10 minutes
2 hours
12 hours
7th
3 minutes
10 minutes
2 hours
12 hours
8th
3 minutes
10 minutes
2 hours
12 hours
9th
3 minutes
30 minutes
2 hours
24 hours


Notes:

As can be seen, I've slightly buffed low level round/level spells to make them more usable, and then at 7th level, jumped them up to 3 minutes- this is primarly thinking of stuff like Summon Monster where eventually the "expectation" is that your caster level is so high you could maybe actually use it for more than just a minute, as well as just generally reducing pressure to track durations when combat could be involving a lot of weird stuff, 30 rounds ought to remove those from the need for tracking. And since 7th level spells are still major effects for 20th level characters, where "round/level" duration hits a base of 2 minutes, keeping 7th+ limited to 1 minute would be a significant downgrade.
It is entirely possible that there are high level round/level duration spells that are unsuitable for such a change, which would require walking it back, or changing the duration of those particular spells to a flat 1 minute. No general change can ever be perfect for all printed spells.
3rd level min/level spells are getting a short shrift down to 3 minutes, but I feel that most of such buffs aren't seriously written for multiple combats yet.
Any amount of serious searching or looting takes a minimum of 2-3 minutes (see Skills, below), and thus a 3 minute duration still only lasts for one fight unless the players stay in full round-by-round. A 10 minute duration spell should be good for two combats, possibly three. Thus, any 3rd level min/level spells can be further evaluated and have their final durations ticked up to 10 min if the DM finds that appropriate.
One could also adopt a 5 min per combat assumption, but this is long enough it opens the room for a lot more arguing, since "50 rounds to blitz a dungeon" is a lot harder to casually shoot down, compared to "any amount of searching takes basically 2-3 minutes" which is already part of the rules, easy to understand, and can be lined up nicely. If your "1 combat" duration can be easily argued as several combats, it's a lot harder to count the next increment as the "2 combat" duration. Thus, I have selected 3 minutes as the "guaranteed 1 combat" duration, with 10 min as the "potentially the whole dungeon but definitely not all day" duration.
2nd level hour/level spells are odd. I liked the progression of 1/3/6, but it does clash with the 10 min spells capping at 2 hours, so I made them 2 hours.


Search Reminders and Clarifications

Searching a 5' cube is a full round action with a range of 10'.
Thus, moving to a position and searching takes two rounds.
Taking 20 on a single square/cube is a full 2 minutes.
Searching the perimeter walls of a 20'x20' square room takes approximately 2-3 minutes: 16 rounds for the wall length itself, plus 4-12 rounds on movement depending on how far you stay away from the walls.
While "searching a 5' cube of goods" is a full round action, actually removing a pouch, bag, or item from a body is usually a move action (even longer for worn articles of clothing/armor), which may in turn mean that actually searching everything "on" a person requires multiple layers of removal and searching.
This does not mean I will require accounting for every action and dozens of search rolls per room and body regardless of what there is to find, that would be dumb.
The final takeaway is that if searching just the perimeter of what is a small room combat-wise takes 2 or more full minutes, and searching even one door/chest/whatever properly also takes 2 minutes, and stripping even one body can be measured at 2 or more minutes:
Unless the party is explicitly skipping all of these things and staying in a combat time rush from room to room, it will be assumed that a bare minimum of 2-3 minutes passes for any amount of searching or looting.
Thus, any spells or effects with durations of 3 minutes or less will expire.
And if the group spends say, 5 minutes talking in addition to that, or makes any exhaustive searches, or talks for flat out more than 10 minutes, then naturally any 10 minute or less durations will also expire.
This is not a punishment or an incentive for rushing: it is how the rules work and thus the normal expectation of how the game plays. Spell durations measured in minutes are not supposed to last for an entire dungeon, maybe a room or two at most.




I was thinking about more impact-based durations, and this is a potential set:
Fleeting - three rounds, short enough that you could potentially stall it out during battle
Short - three minutes, long enough for almost any fight. Would work better in a system that has short rests, then make it the same duration and it's a nice trade-off - keep your buffs or recover your resources?
Medium - three hours, long enough for an extended action sequence but probably won't be up if an ambush happens.
Long - lasts until the next time you prepare/recover spells, max three days.
Beyond Long - varies by the spell, don't think this needs a standard duration.

I find round/level perfectly usable up to a point, a nice granular measurement where a single caster level or turn out of sync can make all the difference. Your Short duration matches my next major tier exactly, but I don't agree with a jump straight from 3 minutes to 3 hours. It's too wide (600x) and yet that extra length doesn't matter: anything a 3 hour spell can do might as well just be 1 hour. From there, 2 hours is a nice round upgrade, and 6 is a quarter of a day, but I don't see any attraction to 3 (aside from maybe 3 as magic number).

I also don't agree with "until you recover spells, max 3 days," as it generally feels to me like an artificial/narrative constraint rather than the predictable magic that the game generally relies on. 24 hours or until you recover at least matches the clear intent of base game mechanics.

I'm not adverse to using a smaller number of durations- I only put so many on the grid because it's meant to be a direct conversion. But I'd go rounds and/or 1 minute, 1 minute and/or 3 minute, 30 minute, 2, either 6 and 12 or 8, and 24 hours. And if Extend is bumping things up a tier, every spell with a duration needs to be re-checked/individually evaluated before assigning the category, otherwise eventually something is going to get dumped into a place where Extend makes it way longer than it should be.

[Biggus]

This leads to a related topic - in-combat buffing. IME, it's just seldom worth it. The exceptions are high-impact party-wide buffs (Haste, in a party that strongly benefits from it), very high-impact single buffs (making the ubercharger able to hit a foe they otherwise couldn't), or buffs that don't cost a standard action.


This is generally true, which is why divination magic and/or a good scout can be very helpful to a party. Having even just a couple of rounds' advance notice of combat can make a huge difference.

Also, in larger parties buffing is a better strategy; in a party I DM for there are five potential combatants and one dedicated buffer who rarely enters combat, and they're considerably stronger with that set-up than they would be if they had another combatant instead of the buffer.

About 1 min/level and 10min/level spells: I've often thought the same thing, at high levels 10min/lvl can become all-day with Extend Spell and two or three castings, but apart from that they're in a weird intermediate zone. I've often wondered why there's nothing between Extend Spell and Persistent Spell, I've considered adding something like Durable Spell: 10x your original duration for +3 spell slots.

[Quertus]

Hmmm… in the interests of gameplay, my tables tend to ban combat buffs, at least of the “numbers” variety. Nobody wants people doing fiddly math, or asking, “did you remember my +2” slowing the game down every round of combat. If you can’t Persist the buff to last all day, don’t bring that annoying fiddly sloth around this table.

So I’m probably a little biased.

However, my experience with 3e buffs says that it’s rare than “numbers” buffs are worth casting in combat anyway.

So… Persist for the win/win? Quick gameplay with no fiddly numbers, buffers get buffed (and get to take a variety of meaningful actions during combat, not just “give me the numbers”).

[Kurald Galain]

in-combat buffing. IME, it's just seldom worth it. The exceptions are high-impact party-wide buffs (Haste, in a party that strongly benefits from it), very high-impact single buffs (making the ubercharger able to hit a foe they otherwise couldn't), or buffs that don't cost a standard action.
I agree with this sentiment, but that still leaves quite a lot of decent buffs (such as Good Hope, high-level bard song, Mirror Image, or Resist Energy).

[Darg]

It's all about opportunity cost. Rounds per level spells tend to be really strong because of their opportunity cost. Summon Monster lasting 3 rounds at level 1 anyone? Minute per level spells are strong, but generally not quite as impactful as a casting of Divine Power is for example. These spells allow you to prepare outside of hearing/sight range and still be active or at higher levels last long enough to travel significant distance behind a trap finding rogue. 50 ft per 1 min.

The point is, you don't have to have every rounds per level buff under the sun to do your thing. Spells are there to be impactful while costing you resources and opportunities.

[Jay R]

Several thoughts and ideas that need to be included.

1. Buffing the party is for the surprise round, or better yet, before the surprise round when the rogue did his job and found the enemy without being discovered. You are correct about the problems of in-combat buffing, but one solution is pre-combat buffing.

2. Minutes per level and ten minutes per level are also for buffs that are also used out of combat: bull's strength when boulders need to be cleared away, fox's cunning for a difficult Craft check, eagle's splendor for a negotiation.

3. You want buffs to be swift actions? OK -- then learn Quicken Spell and Sudden Quicken Spell. Persistent Spell is for ignoring the spell duration.

You have successfully identified one limitation of buff spells. The next step isn't merely to try to change the rules to eliminate the limitation, but to learn how to overcome the limitation within the actual rules.

[icefractal]

Thanks for the feedback; may take a couple passes to reply but I've read it all. :smallsmile: I should clarify, I was thinking of "Fleeting" as a pretty rare duration, used mainly for the spells that are currently more limited than rounds / level, but maybe some round/levels spells could use it too.

Roughly:
rounds / level --> 3r or 3m
minutes / level --> 3m or 3h
10 minutes / level --> 3h
hours / level --> 3h or 3d, mostly 3d


I think the problem with a scheme like this is that there is stuff that really does need, or at least want, its duration to scale with caster level. DoT effects like acid arrow shouldn't have a fixed duration any more than fireball should deal a fixed number of dice of damage.True; the spells where the duration is key like that should stay as they are. But that's a fairly small portion of them.


I think a neat mechanic for a buff-bot class (perhaps a Transmutation equivalent to the Warmage) would be to get a lot of the crappy Transmutation buffs as at-will effects. There's a lot of spells out there you'd never actually cast, but would make for cool filler in low-risk fights.That'd be nice, but personally I find the action economy a bigger factor than the spell slots. There are plenty of buffs I'd use in non-boss fights if they were a swift action.


Part of the reason for the weird minute/level and 10 minutes/level durations is that they're legacy retentions. In earlier editions there were different types of turns depending on your activity which increased or decreased the time in which a turn happened.That's true - in the more defined dungeon-time-structure that 1E had, the durations make a lot of sense. It's just too gamist a structure for my personal tastes.


Your Short duration matches my next major tier exactly, but I don't agree with a jump straight from 3 minutes to 3 hours. It's too wide (600x) and yet that extra length doesn't matter: anything a 3 hour spell can do might as well just be 1 hour. From there, 2 hours is a nice round upgrade, and 6 is a quarter of a day, but I don't see any attraction to 3 (aside from maybe 3 as magic number).The threes are just for aesthetics / easy-memorability, yes. But the large jump is intentional, because I find that intermediate range too inconsistent to be useful.

3 minutes - long enough for pretty much any fight, not a multi-fight spell unless they're right near each-other.
3 hours - long enough for the entire "action sequence", such as a dungeon, but it won't be available if you're ambushed at a different time.

30 minutes - long enough for ... what? It's overkill for a single fight, but it's not necessarily long enough for a dungeon, and to get the most out of it you have to be tracking exactly how long it's taking you to move between rooms - exactly what I don't want.


I also don't agree with "until you recover spells, max 3 days," as it generally feels to me like an artificial/narrative constraint rather than the predictable magic that the game generally relies on. 24 hours or until you recover at least matches the clear intent of base game mechanics.I was thinking that all currently cast spells end when you prepare spells (as part of this revamp, I know that's not the case currently), most just aren't long enough to require specifically mentioning. Spells that last multiple cycles can explicitly say so. Which could easily be an IC constraint rather than OOC - most spells don't 100% separate from the caster, only those specially crafted to last a long time. But as mentioned, the three is mainly for aesthetics, it could be 24h with similar results.


So… Persist for the win/win? Quick gameplay with no fiddly numbers, buffers get buffed (and get to take a variety of meaningful actions during combat, not just “give me the numbers”).Agreed mostly that I'd rather not be futzing with changing numbers mid-combat, but Persist is a kludge (and doesn't exist* in PF1). Still, sometimes I want to play the "assists others rather than directly attacking" concept, and in that case I do want to be casting buffs in combat. Or giving someone my actions, which I'm sad they removed from SoP (it was borken, but could have been fixed rather than removed).


You have successfully identified one limitation of buff spells. The next step isn't merely to try to change the rules to eliminate the limitation, but to learn how to overcome the limitation within the actual rules.This is a "how the rules should potentially be" thought exercise though. In practice, I deal with it by mainly using hours/level buffs, mixing in some 10 minutes / level stuff once I'm high enough CL and/or have extension methods, and only casting the most impactful stuff in combat. But that doesn't mean the system couldn't be better and make more of the minutes / level stuff worth using.

[Gnaeus]

If I were going to change it, I would change round/lvl to scene. Where for the most part in 3.5, scene = combat.

[SimonMoon6]

I've often wondered why there's nothing between Extend Spell and Persistent Spell, I've considered adding something like Durable Spell: 10x your original duration for +3 spell slots.

I've thought that there should be an option to bump up a spell level to the "next" kind of duration. We'd have a chart like this:

1. 1 rd/level
2. 1 minute/level
3. 10 minutes/level
4. 1 hour/level
5. 1 day/level
6. Permanent
7. Instantaneous

Then, each time the metamagic is applied, you bump the spell's duration to the next entry in the table.

[Quertus]

I've thought that there should be an option to bump up a spell level to the "next" kind of duration. We'd have a chart like this:

1. 1 rd/level
2. 1 minute/level
3. 10 minutes/level
4. 1 hour/level
5. 1 day/level
6. Permanent
7. Instantaneous

Then, each time the metamagic is applied, you bump the spell's duration to the next entry in the table.

That has the added advantage of letting a Necromancer cast a “first level” Animate Dead spell, that makes undead that only last a little while.

[Ramza00]

It is powers of 10

1 Round, not a power of 10 per level, just a flat 1 Round
0th power of 10, is 1 Round per Level
1st power of 10, is 10 Rounds per Level aka 1 minute
2nd power of 10, is 100 Rounds per Level aka 10 minutes
1 Hour per level is not a power of 10 but it is 6 times longer than 10 to the 2nd power, aka 600 Rounds per Level