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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9271377" data-attributes="member: 8461">Having magic items serve as a less-effective substitute for buffs strikes me as likely being seen by the players as just that: less effective. While there's a lot who won't care (since optimization isn't nearly the pivotal point that the Internet makes it sound like), I don't think building spellcaster supremacy into the system even more is the way to go in terms of reducing the overall degree to which buffs can tilt things.That's leaving aside the issues of practicality involved, since this would necessarily require some rewriting of the magic item creation system. Even if we put aside issues of (comparatively) cheap wands and scrolls (along with UMD to activate them), we'd need to establish a reason why you can't create wondrous items that manifest the spell effect on a use-activated/continuous basis, which isn't that expensive for lower-level spells even if you use that ridiculous footnote that 3.5 introduced (the one that staggers the cost based on the spell's duration). At that point, you're basically edging towards a different game altogether, and I'm not sure that the results would be worth the effort.If you're saying that you'd keep all buffs short-term with regard to their duration, so that the spellcaster had to re-cast them at the beginning of every fight, that just sounds like you're locking down their actions even more due to the "soft pressure" of them being expected to buff again and again and again throughout the adventuring day. So now their buffing is not only expected, but also not very fun for the player, who's being pushed toward a perpetual support role because the party doesn't want to only be 75% effective by just relying on their magic items.This sounds an awful lot like you want to lock the wizard into a support niche, rather than finding ways to boost the fighter so that they can exceed the limits of their current design. I won't say that's not a credible way of doing things, but I'd venture that there are better methods of doing this than making other types of magic sub-optimal to buffing. (Personally, I'd recommend bringing back some of the limitations from AD&D, not just on spellcasting but also on magic item creation, but at that point we're getting back toward "making a variant game" again.)The nature of that competition shouldn't be between "make the rest of the party more effective" and "getting to have fun." At least not where the system itself expects the first choice to be the consistent one.I don't agree with your last sentence. If the goal is to reduce the degree to which spellcasters seem to dominate the game, institutionalizing that dominance by making it expected that they'll do certain things (and making alternative choices notably worse, both to funnel them toward their expected route and to protect other classes' niches) strikes me as narrowing options rather than expanding them.</blockquote>

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