Refreshing sorcery with a short rest. How would you do it?

[Giltonio_Santos]

I'm thinking about allowing our sorcerer to renew his pool of sorcery points at every short rest. The idea here is to trade the potential of "going nova" for reliability through the adventuring day. How many do you think he should get? Is half his sorcerer level (rounded down) too many?

 

[Bitbrain]

No. If you want SPs to refresh on a short rest, then it isn't too many at all.

 

[Dausuul]

How many short rests do your PCs typically take in between long rests? If your party takes ~2 short rests per long rest, then half sorcery points is probably about right. He'll get more SPs total per day, but he won't be able to nova as hard.

One thing to watch out for: Converting sorcery points to spell slots could be abused hard under this system. There are some spells that work fine as a daily resource but get really broken if you can cast them once per hour. I would suggest giving the sorcerer a 1/day "spell surge" where he can convert any number of sorcery points to slots as a bonus action, and eliminating the ability to do it at will.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm thinking about allowing our sorcerer to renew his pool of sorcery points at every short rest. The idea here is to trade the potential of "going nova" for reliability through the adventuring day. How many do you think he should get? Is half his sorcerer level (rounded down) too many?

He can do this 100% by-the-books if he just takes a couple levels of Warlock. Warlock spell slots recover on a short rest, and you can trade them for sorcery points with flexible casting. If he takes 4 levels of warlock, he can grab the Pact of the Tome boon at 3rd and retrain an Invocation at 4th to get Aspect of the Moon so he never has to sleep, and just take 8 consecutive short rests while the rest of the party takes a long rest, converting warlock slots to sorcery points every time for effectively unlimited sorcery points and spell slots after a while.

 

[Satyrn]

I'm thinking about allowing our sorcerer to renew his pool of sorcery points at every short rest. The idea here is to trade the potential of "going nova" for reliability through the adventuring day. How many do you think he should get? Is half his sorcerer level (rounded down) too many?

That sounds like a good start. Test it out in play and see how it works, then if it ever looks necessary adjust up or down as you and the other players feel makes sense.

The thing is, if you're gonna do something like this, you gotta just pick a number and go with it. There's no theorizing that' gonna give a better value than guessing. You've picked a simple straightforward number, so give it a go.

 

[MechaTarrasque]

I think it would be more interesting to roll the die closest to sorcerer's level (round down) to determine the # of sorcerer points recovered. On average you should be pretty close to half the level, but it adds some spice to it. The sorcerer will always get at least 1 SP, but sometimes you could win big (and maybe have an inspiration point be worth advantage on the roll....).

 

[Satyrn]

I was wrong. Give that a go.

 

[5ekyu]

I'm thinking about allowing our sorcerer to renew his pool of sorcery points at every short rest. The idea here is to trade the potential of "going nova" for reliability through the adventuring day. How many do you think he should get? Is half his sorcerer level (rounded down) too many?

The problem is that some meta have high costs, so if you say cut sorcery pts in half and allow short rest recovery (to trade away nova for sustain) you might actually cut some out - practically.

I would suggest a feat to allow ssy CON MOD in SP recovery from SR once per day.

 

[Savage Wombat]

I considered letting the sorcerer burn HP for the privilege, since they're supposed to have high CONs anyway.

 

[Laurefindel]

Refreshing 1/2 sorcery point is the way I intend to do. When you convert sorcery point to spell slots, regaining half of them on a short rest is roughly equivalent to the wizard’s arcane recovery ability (actually, arcNe recovery is a tad more generous). So half sorcerer level rounded up sounds about right for me.

this makes the 20th level capstone ability less enticing, but if you’re willing to houserule sorcery points that way, houseruling the capstone, if need be, shouldn’t be too much of an issue.