How about this idea: At-Will/Encounter/Daily for EACH spell

[BASHMAN]

In another thread, I proposed this idea: each spell has an At-Will, Encounter, and Daily version (or at least some spells do).

The Daily version can be used once (well you can choose to prep 2 Daily Sleeps, but you get what I mean). Encounter can be used each encounter, and at will is at will.

Maybe some spells only have 2 version, but oh well.

So Magic Missile: At Will: 1 missile does damage = to INT mod.
Encounter: 1 Missile per 4 Levels.
Daily: 1 Missile per 4 Levels, each does 1d6+INT Mod.

Sleep:
At Will: Targets are drowsy, gets Disadvantage and half-movement until attacked or shaken awake.
Daily: Keep it the way it is now.

If you want to add some more "flavor" to this, you could also make the different options "unlockable" at certain levels. So a Wizard would not get the Daily Magic Missile at level 1, but might gain that at level 5. So some spells get better as time goes on. Note that the at-will version never would change.

As an option, you could make it so that once the Daily of a spell has been cast, you lose the Encounter and At-Will versions of that spell for the day as well. However I could see this being a problem.

The benefit of having each spell have a Daily/Encounter/At-Will variant is that it makes it so you don't really have to have different kinds of spell "slots". If you can cast 2 level 1 and 1 level 2 spell per day, and you pick Sleep, Magic Missile, and Phantasmal Force (I hope that comes back as a level 2 spell), you've got 3 At-Will, 3 Encounter, and 3 Daily spells figured out.

 

[SKyOdin]

It sounds unnecessarily convoluted. Spell lists would more than triple in size and become harder to read and sort through. Tracking of spell use would also become significantly more complicated.

The only way it could work was if a Wizard could only ever prepare 3 or 4 spells at once. So you would probably need to ditch the concept of spell levels and significantly pare down the over-all spell list.

Otherwise, the idea of wizard having a fair bit of flexibility when wielding a particular kind of spell has its appeal. Even 4E did this somewhat by making similarly themed spells available as at-will, encounter, and daily powers.

My only question would be what non-spellcasters would get to match that kind of versatility.

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

I'd rather see the Spell Seeds (3E EPH?) idea fleshed out fully into a system that works from 1st level.

 

[Li Shenron]

I would certainly like such idea if the game clearly spelled out that the DM may choose to allow only one version of everything. So the same game would support both the gaming group that only like vancian dailies and the group that only want at-wills, but also the game that wants all three versions.

There are only two problems:

#1 - it will be 3 times more expensive to design and balance all the spells, and for this reason alone I don't think WotC would ever make such thing

#2 - if you allow spellcasters that know 1 spell to automatically be able to use it in 3 versions, or worse, if you allow a wizard to prepare 1 spell in a slot and then be able to use that prepared spell in any of the 3 versions on the fly (which means that the slot is used up for the day if you cast the daily version, unavailable for the rest of the encounter if you cast the encounter version, or available again the next round if you cast the at-will version) then IMHO this is really too versatile... But at least it would be easy to house rule that each version of the spell needs to be decided at preparation time and cannot be changed during the day, or even that you need to learn the 3 versions separately as they were 3 different spells

 

[BASHMAN]

I'd rather see the Spell Seeds (3E EPH?) idea fleshed out fully into a system that works from 1st level.

Can you elaborate, I'm not familiar with "Spell Seeds".

 

[Vyvyan Basterd]

Can you elaborate, I'm not familiar with "Spell Seeds".

Epic Spells - d20srd

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Personally, I like the idea.

Would work nicely with less spells per day as well. But will it succeed at the all-edition-compatible litmus test?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Personally, I like the idea.

Would work nicely with less spells per day as well. But will it succeed at the all-edition-compatible litmus test?

Hmm, maybe.

1-3rd edition: only castable as dailies.

 

[am181d]

I kind of like the idea of an at will that you can "burn out" with a daily version. Sort of the opposite of the reserve feats in 3e.

 

[BobTheNob]

Im not totally adverse to the idea. It has its virtues.

Not too fond of the fact that there is an "encounter" power variant though. Im not a fan of "encounter centric" design, and 5e is moving toward "adventure centric", so Im not sure about the inclusion of an encounter variant.

One other thing. 5e have flat out established that spell "power" is NOT going to be linked to caster level, so no "X missiles per Y caster level" type of implementation will be there.

Question : Is it you intention with this that by having the "sleep" spell I have access to all variants?