were dual attribute casters a better design choice?

[Psyren]

I'd be fine with DAD casters if you could economically pump two attributes from leveling instead of one. But being forced to choose between, say, bonus spells and save DCs just isn't fun - it forces you into much more narrow spell choices to have an effective character. You end up with either a small amount of spells per day that allow saving throws, or a wider array that bypass the mechanic entirely like buffs and summons, instead of a healthy mix of both.

[blackwindbears]

I'd be fine with DAD casters if you could economically pump two attributes from leveling instead of one. But being forced to choose between, say, bonus spells and save DCs just isn't fun - it forces you into much more narrow spell choices to have an effective character. You end up with either a small amount of spells per day that allow saving throws, or a wider array that bypass the mechanic entirely like buffs and summons, instead of a healthy mix of both.

I found my players would be down one or two bonus spell slots. They all focused on DCs. Of course if I had used point buy it might have worked out differently.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

I'd be fine with DAD casters if you could economically pump two attributes from leveling instead of one. But being forced to choose between, say, bonus spells and save DCs just isn't fun - it forces you into much more narrow spell choices to have an effective character. You end up with either a small amount of spells per day that allow saving throws, or a wider array that bypass the mechanic entirely like buffs and summons, instead of a healthy mix of both.

I don't think the effect is quite as pronounced as you're putting it here, since in my experience casters already tend to focus pretty strongly on buffs or summons or control and so on as a playstyle issue, regardless of casting stat. Heck, even necromancers, who have both "animate skeletons" and "shoot death rays" firmly within their comparatively broad theme, tend to choose between throwing save-or-lose spells or creating a massive undead army or animating a small number of more powerful undead minions even when they're a Dread Necromancer who gets all three kinds of spells for free.

Sure, casters almost always dabble in secondary and tertiary foci, but I think those foci tend not to correlate with whether the spells allow saves or not. For instance, in one campaign I had a mostly buffing-focused Bard/Heartfire Fanner in the same party as a more blasty/BFC wizard, and when the wizard retired because his player had to leave the group the bard decided to detour into Sublime Chord to pick up a bunch of blasty/BFC spells to cover the resulting capability gap. The bard certainly appreciated the fact that his offensive spells had good save DCs because he was Cha-SAD, but he was most likely going to pick up those offensive save-requiring spells even if he'd had to base them on Int or Wis because it was about picking up the spells the party needed and not squeezing every last point of save DC out of his spells.

For another instance, every single player who takes the theurge route with Wizard/Druid/Arcane Hierophant, Psion/Cleric/Psychic Theurge, or any other DAD combo is making a choice that not only loses out on SADness but drops multiple spellcasting levels as well because they value breadth of spell selection over the efficacy of a single class's spells, and so is leaning even harder into the extra-spells-vs.-high-DCs dichotomy.


Now, having said all that, you're definitely right that increasing attribute dependency for any set of classes, whether just certain casters or across the board, works out better when it's easier to boost multiple stats. Multiclassed and dual-classed PCs were noticeably sub-par in AD&D when raising stats at all was rare and difficult, then multiclassed MAD characters were a lot better off in 3e when you could spread level-based stat boosts around and actually did quite well when you could buy multiple stat-boosting items at higher levels, then multiclassed characters got really screwed in 4e when you want to hyper-focus on one or two stats and multiclassing outside of those stats knocked you off the bonus treadmill, then multiclassed characters got better again in 5e where things weren't so restrictive anymore but weren't as well off as things had been in 3e.

In general, I'd say a situation where casters are DAD but characters can easily boost 2 or 3 stats (so the martials who want high Str+Con or Dex+Con plus possibly a mental stat are also doing better) would probably end up being as good or better than the current situation where casters are largely SAD and characters can easily boost 1 stat, but that would of course depend on the specific implementation and ability score ranges and so forth.

[Lucas Yew]

Multi stat casting is one thing, but I do think it's even better if you just chop down the high level multi-purpose spells into smaller functioning spells (like how PF2 thoroughly dissected Summon Monster X down into Summon [Creature Type] spells).

You could totally separate skill stuff from class stuff such that your swording and your swimming are completely unrelated, but "This warrior is an all-around athlete with unrefined sword skills and that other warrior is an accomplished tactician and back-line commander but they both have exactly equal combat capabilities" can be a big hit to verisimilitude. Heck, 4e did that for its monsters, not even the PCs, and a lot of players quickly noticed and disliked the fact that the beefy bruisers and the tricky skirmishers had basically the same combat numbers plus or minus a few points despite being flavored very differently; doing that on the PC side would just make the effect worse and much more obvious.

The moment I realized this was when I became a staunch "Simulationist", sometime about 10 years ago when I was not even a year experienced in roleplaying games...

[PairO'Dice Lost]

Multi stat casting is one thing, but I do think it's even better if you just chop down the high level multi-purpose spells into smaller functioning spells (like how PF2 thoroughly dissected Summon Monster X down into Summon [Creature Type] spells).

The problem with that, of course, is that the more finely you slice up the more versatile spells, the more that spontaneous casters with limited spells known are screwed over--and the more you're likely to end up with niche spells that never get learned or cast, like how the 3.0 version of Otiluke's freezing sphere included a fire seed-like time delay option (so you could stockpile a few and pass them off to a fighter buddy to throw) as well as what is now polar ray, to make it a nicely versatile blasting-plus-buffing-plus-utility spell, but in 3.5 you almost never see casters use either freezing sphere or polar ray because neither is at all worth it on its own.

The only way I could see splitting up spells work out well is if you leave in class features or spells that let you access multiple of those spells without using up lots of spells known, kind of like undermaster does for earth spells. If you made separate summon animal, summon outsider, summon elemental, summon undead, etc. lines and stuck those on the druid, cleric, wizard, and cleric+dread necromancer+wizard lists respectively but retained a summon monster line for sorcerers and conjurer wizards that was basically "When you cast this spell, you get the effects of any summon X spell up to 1 level lower than this spell," that would give most casters the more thematically-focused spells you're looking for without making it a huge pain to build a devoted summoner type.

[NigelWalmsley]

Multi stat casting is one thing, but I do think it's even better if you just chop down the high level multi-purpose spells into smaller functioning spells (like how PF2 thoroughly dissected Summon Monster X down into Summon [Creature Type] spells).

That's not really a necessary change. Summon Monster was never a particularly problematic spell. The change you really want to make there is to set things up so that instead of summoning a Vrock at 15th level (a monster with half a dozen active abilities and a laundry list of defenses, but whose numbers are insufficient to be meaningful at that level) you summoned a thing that was tactically simple and numerically level appropriate. More like what you get from Animate Dead, basically.

The problem with that, of course, is that the more finely you slice up the more versatile spells, the more that spontaneous casters with limited spells known are screwed over

In fairness, I'm not sure how much that's a niche people really want. What people want out of spontaneous casting seems to be closer to the Warmage-type casters (where you have a specific list of spells that is simply however long it needs to be to cover a concept), rather than the Sorcerer. In that context, it doesn't really matter how broad or narrow spells are. Though it does make splitting them rather pointless.

in 3.5 you almost never see casters use either freezing sphere or polar ray because neither is at all worth it on its own.

That's because Polar Ray is stupidly over-leveled. The Orbs and Scorching Ray deal roughly proportionate damage, and people cast those periodically. It's just that "d6 damage per level to single target" is under no circumstances worth an 8th level spell slot (even if it keeps scaling until you're a 25th level character). If Polar Ray had come out of the split-up as a 1st or 2nd level spell (as it probably should have), it would still be something people used on occasion.

[PairO'Dice Lost]

In fairness, I'm not sure how much that's a niche people really want. What people want out of spontaneous casting seems to be closer to the Warmage-type casters (where you have a specific list of spells that is simply however long it needs to be to cover a concept), rather than the Sorcerer. In that context, it doesn't really matter how broad or narrow spells are. Though it does make splitting them rather pointless.

Pretty much, yeah. One still can rewrite casters to be DAD without going the fixed-list caster route, though, so I was pointing out the pitfalls there.

That's because Polar Ray is stupidly over-leveled. The Orbs and Scorching Ray deal roughly proportionate damage, and people cast those periodically. It's just that "d6 damage per level to single target" is under no circumstances worth an 8th level spell slot (even if it keeps scaling until you're a 25th level character). If Polar Ray had come out of the split-up as a 1st or 2nd level spell (as it probably should have), it would still be something people used on occasion.

It's not just a matter of over-leveling (though that is the main issue on the polar ray side), it's that the three individual functions of 3.0 Otiluke's freezing sphere don't individually stack up to similar spells (the "cold ray" version is almost exactly lesser orb of cold plus a higher damage cap but minus the antimagic penetration, the "globe of cold" version is inferior to fire seeds when used as a grenadelike weapon, and the "frigid sphere" version is far too niche to ever be prepared unless you know for certain you'll use it). The fact that they're all packaged together means you have some flexibility with the two blasty uses of the spell and you get the utility usage "for free" on top of that, but when split up they're not really worth taking on their own over similar spells even if they're appropriately re-leveled.

Summon monster is much the same. The monsters you can summon with it can be used for direct combat (though only at lower levels, as you note, before the CR drops off too much), for trap-springing, for scouting, for their utility SLAs, and so on, so you can always get a bit of use out of it, but if they were split up into summon combat bruiser and summon tiny scout and summon useful outsider and so forth those narrower spells probably wouldn't be worth spending a known spell on even if the monsters were more CR-appropriate simply because at that point taking a more broadly-useful spells for buffing the party fighter, rogue, or wizard respectively is a better investment.

[Xervous]

If you have a system that assumes numbers need to go up to stay on par and has multiple important numbers you need a reasonable way to increase multiple numbers.

Casters aren’t explicitly a numbers issue. Pulling back on spell slots doesn’t change the disparity of power between different spells. Fly is still going to make GMs throw a hissy fit when it bypasses an encounter that was relevant 5 levels ago. If the MAD change doesn’t make the MAD monk relevant without boosting other things into the sky it probably isn’t much more than a contrived bandaid to some narrow case that could be better implemented with some attention to detail.

Find a way to make ability score progression extend logically from the point buy valuations and you’ve got a solid foundation. It’s not going to change problem spells, but it will give you a more consistent baseline to weigh SAD against MAD