Hello fellow EnWorlders,
During tonight's session a question on how a sorcerer casts his spells came up. The player of our group's sorcerer (level 10) argued that he could cast fireball 17 times a day, which is his spell capacity from 3rd-5th level + a ridiculous amount of bonus spells from charisma.
I argued that casting a lower level spell through a higher level spell slot would cause those spells to have a increased casting time of one round (like metamagic feats).
Which is it?
As others have said: by the rules, neither. Sorcerors can't (at least not explicitly) cast a lower-level spell from a higher-level slot so imposing penalties for them doing so isn't relevant.
On the other hand, if your party sorceror wants to suck 17 times times a day instead of only 6 or so, I would have zero problem with them going right ahead. Their fellow party members might wish they had a sorceror who was a bit more useful, but as a DM I'd allow it.
Not that it would matter much, but my reasoning was that choosing a lower level spell expands the sorcerer's versatility, which should he his weak spot.
Um... I'd argue that it's exactly the opposite, most of the time. The sorceror gets tonnes of spells per day but only a handful of spells known. Spells don't scale properly: higher-level spells are just flat-out
better than lower-level ones, so anybody employing higher-level slots to cast unmodified lower-level spells is really wasting the sorceror's only advantage: that of being able to sling more-powerful spells around at a greater rate. This is why Versatile Spellcaster is so rock-your-face awesome: in general, "1x 4th-level spell" > "2x 3rd-level spells" and so forth.
That said, I do sort-of see your point, inasmuch as the sorceror knows so few different spells that the situation may well arise where the couple of higher-level spells he knows aren't appropriate whilst the lower-level spells are. In that sense, his versatility would be improved.
However, if he takes Rapid Metamagic there's no reason at all why he'd ever bother blowing a high-level slot on an unmodified spell and the argument comes full circle.
Incidentally, how would people treat the Arcane Preparation feat? In the fluff text it says:
"You can prepare an arcane spell ahead of time
just as a wizard does. When you do so, you need not take any extra time to apply metamagic feats upon casting that spell."
To me, that would imply that you could (if you really wanted to) prepare a lower-level spell in a higher-level slot, just as a wizard can.
However, the actual Benefits section of the feat (which I acknowledge is the bit that actually matters) says:
"Preparing a spell uses a slot of the appropriate level."
...which tells me that - intended or not - the Sorceror still can't prepare a low-level spell in a high-level slot without using metamagic feats to modify the level.
To counter it, he already has a much greater amount of spells per day at his disposal (compared to the wizard). Hence I thought that it had to have some disadvantage to it if he wanted to cast even more spells of a certain level.
It
does have a disadvantage: he's using up slots that could have gone to better spells. I have to admit though, my feelings on the
general argument are being strongly coloured by the
specific case... Fireball. Geez. If I could get past that, maybe I'd be more convinced that allowing someone to spam lower-level spells is in some way unbalancing.
I don't know...is that the one that lets you use multiple spell slots of one level to cast a higher level spell?
Well, for metamagic I prefer the multiple slots approach, and this seems to be similar. If it means less spells per day, it can't be that bad!
It does mean fewer spells per day, but as I said earlier, spells just don't scale in a linear way. If your spell selection is good then just one of the most awesome spells at a given level is
more awesome than two of the most awesome spells at the level below.
Looking at it a bit more simply, having fewer spells per day is only relevant
if you ever run out of spells in a day. Not only are your higher-level spells more powerful and therefore more attractive to use, but for most of your career you have fewer of them (if you accept that "your higher-level spells" is a moveable feast) and are therefore more likely to run out of them.
Ergo, trading lower-level spells for higher-level spells is a significant power-up, and the chances are that you're really giving up nothing whatsoever in exchange because you're simply sacrificing slots for spells you'd never have got around to using anyway.
Unless, of course, you've got some sort of weird
fireball fixation.
