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[The Shadow]

I like some of your ideas. I think Spells & Powers, from the 2e "skills & powers" ruleset (2.5?) had this as an alternate magic system.

I seem to recall something like that, from the misty days of yore. I think it was a bit more complicated, though. And certainly nobody ever accused 'Skills and Powers' of being well thought-out or balanced!

Some concerns: It might not satisfy some people, because "it's not D&D".

Yes... I know. So does WotC. That's why I said it was a crazy idea that had no real chance.

That aside... you need to careful balance things. You can't simply translate the things from current table and call it a day. This way, you make Wizards quite more powerful than they were with the other system. I know any 18th level wizard will happily trade 5 level 1 and 2 level 2 spells to get another Time Stop. This does not mean the system can´t work, just that you need to balance it with the idea that, at higher levels, low level spells are going to be recycled into higher level spells.

Yeah, I know that too. Right now, I'm favoring costing each spell as the caster-level at which it becomes castable. So Time Stop would be the equivalent of 17 1st level spells. (Honestly, Time Stop is SO overwhelmingly broken, I'm really not sure it can be saved.)

Some people have suggested each spell having its own cost. This seems to me rather burdensome to remember, but it could certainly be made to work. Maybe Time Stop needs to cost 100 spell points or something.

 

[slobster]

I like keeping spell levels and deriving spell point costs from them, largely to keep the spells compatible with other casting classes (and the alternate/standard wizard which gets discrete spell slots of each level).

So a fireball might be cast for 5 willpower by a sorcerer spontaneously, prepared for 5 spell points by a wizard, prepared as a 3rd level spell by a cleric with the fire domain, or used as a spell-like ability by fire elementals. The point is that they all refer to the same spell entry, but cast it a different way. That preserves modularity (allowing someone to switch back to the classic wizard easily) while still allowing the spellpoint wizard extensive flexibility.

I also like the 1/3/5/7 progression for spellpoint costs.

 

[triqui]

(Honestly, Time Stop is SO overwhelmingly broken, I'm really not sure it can be saved.)

Even the very much toned down 4e Time Stop is prone to abuse.

Some people have suggested each spell having its own cost. This seems to me rather burdensome to remember, but it could certainly be made to work. Maybe Time Stop needs to cost 100 spell points or something.

It sounds very good from a balance point of view, but quite complex to remember. It'll make people to need to check the books constantly.

 

[Nellisir]

So in essence, you had wizards act the same way Next clerics do?

Possibly. I've got the playtest packages, but I haven't played them or looked at them in some time. I can check later. I can tell you I took the idea from Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Arcana Evolved. I think all the casters therein worked essentially the same way. I found it very simple to institute and worked well - it made the wizard very much the "flex" caster, able to prepare a wide variety of weird spells without worrying that she might not have an opportunity to cast Tenser's ticklish fingers.

I rebuilt sorcerers as more of a "gish" class, but you could still keep them viable and magic-heavy spontaneous casters by emphasizing bloodlines, blood abilities, and thematic spell lists. They'd fill a more specific role (heavy artillery, sneaky magic, whatever), and leave the esoteric arcana to the wizard.

 

[The Shadow]

It sounds very good from a balance point of view, but quite complex to remember. It'll make people to need to check the books constantly.

Oh, it's not quite so bad as that, though it is a burden. I figure when you write your spells on your sheet, you just include the cost next to them.

Nellisir: It sounds like you're going to be very pleasantly surprised by the second playtest. The Next cleric works the way you describe, and the draconic sorcerer - currently the only bloodline we have seen - is a gish.

 

[pemerton]

But given that necessary design work, where's the downside?

<snip>

The only thing that suffers is tradition. Or am I missing something?

I noticed a definite trend towards preparing lots of big, obvious spells. That's a lot of fun for the player, who likes chucking lots of dice and causing lots of property damage, so I don't begrudge them that. But sometimes I lamented the loss of creativity and spontaneity that you get when you've fired all your big guns and are down to your last few low level slots, the ones you hoped you never had to rely on.

I think slobster states the biggest potential downside - but whether it is actually a downside is taste-dependent, I think.

It's a bit like discussions around 4e martial powers, and suggestions that encounters and dailies be replaced with a "stamina" pool. One consequence of traditional spell slots, and of 4e's AEDU power structure, is forced diversity of player resources. A mechanically mandated limit on spamtasticality.

This is good for creativity. It also helps balance, at least a bit, because an overpowerd game element can be brought into play only so many times (though 3E relaxed this for wizards, by allowing lower level spells in higher level slots).

As I said before, this is not necessarily an objection. It's just something to think about. (Interestingly, a spell point system that is flexible at casting rather than at memorising can be less spamtastic in this way, because the GM can set up situations that seed more creative choices when the allocation of points to spells is made during play.)

 

[Nellisir]

Nellisir: It sounds like you're going to be very pleasantly surprised by the second playtest. The Next cleric works the way you describe, and the draconic sorcerer - currently the only bloodline we have seen - is a gish.

I've skimmed the documents, and overall things seem quite decent. My schedule just hasn't allowed for any playing. I do usually tweak races and classes; my campaigns are high fantasy, but more "fairy tale" than "D&D novel", so I play down some of the more outrageous classes and races, or rewrite them to better suit the setting. It doesn't seem like that will be difficult in 5e, however.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I also like the 1/3/5/7 progression for spellpoint costs.

I believe that this has been the best progression historically when applying spell points to D&D spell levels. However, like all spell point systems it can break down across wide power levels, which is certainly present in D&D magic, from cantrips to wish.


A potential compromise solution would be to break the spell levels up into three or four tiers, allowing flexibility within each tier, but not across them. So for simplicity, let's say it's:

• Tier 1 (lesser) - spell levels 1st (or zero) to 2nd.
• Tier 2 (standard) - spell levels 3rd to 5th.
• Tier 3 (greater) - spell levels 6th to 7th.
• Tier 4 (supreme) - spell levels 8th to 9th.

You could break them up other ways, but I deliberately chose those because of the traditional extra oomph at spell levels 3rd and 6th. Obviously, if spells are adjusted, you can do it any number of ways.

So now instead of slots, you get spell points by tier, probably derived from that 1,3,5,7,etc. progression. The old 5th level wizard with 4/2/1 slots would get Tier 1 points of 4+6=10, and Tier 2 points of 5. You might represent this in the whole format as 10/5, but that stays pretty simple even up into the high level casters, never having more than 4 numbers to track.

I'm guessing that this is a happy medium on flexibility and power and cutting down on analysis paralysis. It's four categories to consider, but you don't have to get too bogged down into the details of 1st versus 2nd level spells when your 11th level wizard is mainly focused on Tier 2 and 3. When a caster first breaks into a new tier, they still have the traditional D&D limits of not being able to do very much with it yet, because they just got the points. That 5th level caster is still stuck with one 3rd level spell. By the time he hits 11th level, he's got all kinds of 3rd - 5th level spell options. He still can't break those down into unlimited invisibility or whatever. So it's possible to run out of the higher level stuff and still be scrounging with the utility effects.

Finally, note that this division is independent of the method of preparation discussion, but I do think it solves most of the problems in a full spell points system, which would apply to the OP's suggestion. (The remaining issues are at the margins, such as 1 point for 1st level spells being terribly cheap. This can be handled by adding a small, common factor to the progression evenly -- i.e. even costs of 2,4,6,etc. or 3/5/7, etc. will work, though the numbers can get pretty big, fast, if you do that. It's a trade off.)