[3.5] The Various Types of Casting and Recovery, and a New System

[balistafreak]

I was going to post this in Homebrew, but without anything concrete I decided it was better here.

There's Vancian casting, where casters prepare "fire-and-forget missiles". Each spell is its own slot, and spells are typically recharged at the beginning of the day.

There's psionic casting, where casters have a "mana-bar" and spells have varying levels of power depending on the PP spent. All spells are castable at any given moment, should enough "mana" be available to cast the particular spell. Like Vancian casting, the mana-bar is typically recharged at the beginning of the day.

There's invocation casting, where casters have the ability to cast whatever they want whenever they want, as many times as they want. There's no need to recharge, ever. Invocations are typically far weaker than the above two casting types, but make up for it by being, well, infinite.

I'm interested in balancing a fourth form of casting against these three, inspired on the Recharge Magic variant in Unearthed Arcana.

The idea is a hybrid of Vancian and Invocation casting; yes, you can cast any of your known spells whenever, but after doing so it becomes unavailable for a short period of time.

How would you balance it against the existing kinds of casting?

[PId6]

If recharge time is anywhere in the range of a few minutes, it's pretty much just encounter based, just like ToB. If recharge time is a few rounds, that acts more like binder abilities which recharge in 5 rounds. Both of these types of "recharge" abilities already exist, and are quite balanced too.

[balistafreak]

Well, no ToB system currently exists for magic; no "use/recover per encounter" system, at any rate.

And the Binder is a bit too rigid with its pacts to have the fully customizable scope of a Sorcerer/Wizard.

What I was thinking along the lines of was a "cooldown" system. You have "slots" with spells in them. Upon casting a spell, it becomes unavailable for a short period of time. After waiting for the cooldown to take its sweet time, the spell becomes readied once more.

I was unsatisfied with the way Recharge Magic treated buffs, giving them preposterously long cooldown times; however, I can think of no satisfactory system to handle it. Make the cooldown too short and everyone gets buffed.

[Shadowleaf]

And the Binder is a bit too rigid with its pacts to have the fully customizable scope of a Sorcerer/Wizard.

What I was thinking along the lines of was a "cooldown" system. You have "slots" with spells in them. Upon casting a spell, it becomes unavailable for a short period of time. After waiting for the cooldown to take its sweet time, the spell becomes readied once more.

How is this in any way different from what PId6 said? He just said your idea already exists with Binder casting.

[PId6]

Yeah, that's my biggest issue with recharge systems too. I like how ToB handles buff abilities, as swift action 1-round duration, or as stances that last as long as you want but you may only have one active. My desert swordsage homebrew (sig) translates spells to this system, and it seems to work well.

To expand on this, it may be possible to allow each caster to have a certain number of buff "slots" that function like stances. Each slot holds a buff spell which lasts as long as it's in there, but you only have a limited amount of buffs you can maintain at one time. You'd also have some buffs, like boosts, which are more limited duration (1 to 5 rounds at best), and require actions to initiate, but do not take up those slots.

[balistafreak]

How is this in any way different from what PId6 said? He just said your idea already exists with Binder casting.

The idea exists, but the implementation (the pact system) is, as I said, rigid. You have to bind a vestige, which comes with its own set of abilities. No major mixing-and-matching can be done, at least to the extent of my knowledge of the Binder system.

Maybe some sort of duration limit would be advisable. You can only use your recharge slots for instantaneous/round per level spells. If you want to cast a buff in one of those slots, it only lasts round/level.

[Chambers]

Well, no ToB system currently exists for magic; no "use/recover per encounter" system, at any rate.

Magic Variant - Known / Readied Spells.

It's kinda a dead project for now - working on other ideas that take spells entirely out of the game. But it might be something to inspire you. Or something you want to avoid.

[ZiggZagg]

I created a spellcasting system that works on recharge magic to an extent. I pooled together mechanics from spellpoints, recharge magic, revitalizing magic, and from warhammer rpg and table top. Essentially, you have a pool of dice used to cast your spells. You spend dice to cast spells, and regain dice every round based on your con. I am running it in a campaign right now, and the players really seem to enjoy it. Of course it doesn't address everything, I'm sure, but so far we have a rule pertaining to every situation we have encountered.

The rules for it can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/Dice-Pool

[Tyndmyr]

The thought of using essentially the crusader stance system has occured to me. Just tweak the numbers appropriately.

[Morph Bark]

You could otherwise make something similar to what psionics does with the "mana bar" as you call it, but have it slowly fill back up over time, like you regain 1 power point every minute, for instance. Of course, this would not work for psionics as is, you would need to make more changes, but it could be a basic idea to start from.