Quote Originally Posted by Habber_Dasher View Post
So I agree that it could be made more clear, but careful spell does say it protects against a saving throw, not throws. If nothing else, the thing that makes me think careful was never attended to work on more than one saving throw, is just how cheap it is.

Just think about the effect a 'persistent' careful would have. It completely changes the nature of spells like web, stinking cloud, sickening radiance, and more. Your allies can now hang out in the area of effect, completely protected, and enemies have to make repeated saves just to attack them. This all for one sorcerer point? Careful is now probably the most powerful metamagic for it's cost.

Now I do wish there were more spells that worked with careful, but I think it's undervalued currently. Hypnotic pattern is one of the best spells not only for it's level but for a good chunk of the game, and taking away one of its few weaknesses (friendly fire) is a huge plus. Careful can also be used with spells like acid stream, grease, watery sphere, and reverse gravity.
it doesn't necessarily specify only one saving throw. it could just as easily mean that if you have to make a saving throw, you automatically pass that saving throw.

it also isn't just the number of saves... as I said, for 1 SP I think all saving throws caused by a spell is extremely strong. perhaps even too strong (that said, transforming the entire nature of a spell is exactly the sort of thing metamagic should have done from the beginning if that was going to be *the* big feature of the class). I would have felt it was tolerable if it was *only* a matter of it being one saving throw instead of all. I think it's way less interesting that way, and would prefer an increased cost in exchange for increased effect, but it would at least be a reasonable choice of metamagic that lets you do some interesting stuff.

no, the real killer is the timing. spells that create a thing might not even count; you don't make a save when grease is cast, you make a save when the grease appears (not that sorcerers got grease at the time in the first place... or were likely to struggle much to place the 2x2 square AoE safely in the first place). you don't make a save because watery sphere is cast, you make a save when the creature is in the area (and again, the AoE is not really that hard to position safely in the first place). it is questionable whether careful even does anything for those spells. and while a web that the party can fight in might be a bit much, what we got *instead* is a metamagic that does *absolutely nothing whatsoever* with web. it doesn't reduce the friendly fire effect *even the tiniest bit*.

they basically told us that they deliberately intended for careful to do absolutely nothing for most spells that you can cast it on. it was one of the first rulings that made me lose a lot of respect for the current dev team, and begin to suspect that when they fired a bunch of folks that had written the core books it wasn't just a loss of quantity, but also a very real loss of quality in their development team.