[RangerWickett]

Wulf, your and my suggestions are pretty similar. But where I tried to tone down spellcaster power by reducing spells available, you've greatly increased it for sorcerers and wizards. What's your logic for that? Also, if you want to cast a spell twice in a day, do you have to prepare it twice, or can you prepare it once and just spend a spell slot each time you want to cast it?

I think 3/4 spellcasting progression is aesthetically better than 2/3, but for balance sake, and to minimize fiddling, I think your idea works.

My version is easier in gameplay, I feel. I've never liked having to write down prepared spells, and I prefer spontaneous casting. Less book-keeping. Likewise, despite my work on Elements of Magic, I sorta hate spell points. A little too fiddly.



Sadrik, I don't see how either my or Wulf's version are 'incompatible' with existing 3.5 products. Sure, there would be niche case problems: for instance, what do assassins get (I recommend that if a prestige class gets its own mini spell list, it is independent of this system, but if a prestige class provides a caster level boost, well that's easy to work into this system). And how would you qualify for prestige classes that require divine caster level 5 (easy revision, you need to be able to cast 3rd level divine spells).

What problem do you see with the systems being compatible? When it comes to NPCs, I'm pretty sure even the Paizo folks have admitted the best thing to do is to run them as they're written, and not try to convert them to the new ruleset. I mean, few people complain that now all the NPC fighters in their games will need to have extra feats and stuff; you just run them as they were previously written and don't sweat the small stuff.



As an aside, one idea I always liked was to directly equate BAB with attack power. So a Fighter 20's attacks would be 20x as damaging as a Fighter 1's, or at least 20x as versatile. The idea came from Elements of Magic, where it was easy for you to design spells at high level that did lots of things at once, because you had lots of Magic Points to play around with. I wanted to someday create a Elements of Battle system where fighters got Battle Points for pulling off cool maneuvers in combat.

But I suppose that's a development for a different game.


Anyway, back to this one. We both like the unified spells per day based on caster level, and stacking caster level based on class. We disagree on how people should get access to spells. Which solution do you think is better? Which would be better accepted by the Pathfinder community, and which is better for game balance and gameplay?

We should come up with a unified proposal and show it to the guys at Paizo.