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<blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6050296" data-attributes="member: 1465">It's not that simple <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />I mean, of course it looks simple to put it in your way, i.e. wizards of level N casts spells of level N.But then you have to put it into the perspective of game design. And here you have plenty of interconnected issues to keep in mind, for example (a) how &quot;granular&quot; you want the character advancement to be, (b) how well you can separate spell effects in a vertical hierarchy, (c) how much difference you want to allow in characters of the same class e.g. in term of spells known, (d) how much space in the book can you allocate for a number of spells, and certainly more.I could guess that Gygax in the early drafts of D&amp;D might have considered your idea as the most natural one, but changed it later to &quot;one new level of spells every more than one class level&quot; as a result of assessing problems such as (a)-(c) above (maybe not (d) ).With one-spell-level-per-class-level, you either have a too big step in power and/or complexity of wizards when they level up, or you have instead too much granularity in spells plus too few spells at each spell level, leading to wizards player having too few choices, which can be compensated by designing many more spells but then it's a design cost and leads to problem (d).Overall it becomes a serious design restriction. I'd rather change the name &quot;spell level&quot; to something else than restrict design this way.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Li Shenron, post: 6050296, member: 1465"] It's not [I]that[/I] simple :D I mean, of course it looks simple to put it in your way, i.e. wizards of level N casts spells of level N. But then you have to put it into the perspective of [I]game design[/I]. And here you have plenty of interconnected issues to keep in mind, for example (a) how "granular" you want the character advancement to be, (b) how well you can separate spell effects in a vertical hierarchy, (c) how much difference you want to allow in characters of the same class e.g. in term of spells known, (d) how much space in the book can you allocate for a number of spells, and certainly more. I could guess that Gygax in the early drafts of D&D might have considered your idea as the most natural one, but changed it later to "one new level of spells every more than one class level" as a result of assessing problems such as (a)-(c) above (maybe not (d) ). With one-spell-level-per-class-level, you either have a too big step in power and/or complexity of wizards when they level up, or you have instead too much granularity in spells plus too few spells at each spell level, leading to wizards player having too few choices, which can be compensated by designing many more spells but then it's a design cost and leads to problem (d). Overall it becomes a serious design restriction. I'd rather change the name "spell level" to something else than restrict design this way. [/QUOTE]

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