Thinking E6. Are a LOT of SRD spells over-leveled? Am I being an idiot?

[johnbragg]

So... you're saying that these spells aren't well-designed for playing the game in a way it was never meant to be played, and that they have too high levels in what's deliberately a lower-powered version of the game?

Exactly!!

Seriously, this is part of it. A lot of these spells were written and placed as a 2 on a 0-9 power scale, or even as a 2 on a 1-7 for divine spells in 1st and 2nd edition.

They don't always make sense as a "2" on a 0-3 scale. If we put mage hand and detect magic at 0, entangle and burning hands and expeditious retreat at 1, invisibility and detect thoughts at 2, and fireball, fly and dispel magic at 3.

I'm not really criticizing the 3rd edition designers here. I may be doing what they did with the Cleric and Druid--making some options more attractive (healbots suck to play), that produces an unexpected result (CoDzilla). But if players end up wrecking my game by turning into trees and ventriloquism-ing all over the place and dragging a Tenser's Floating Disc around everywhere--that actually sounds like fun.