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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9271540" data-attributes="member: 8461">I don't think that is "ideally," though. Yes, it narrows the range of available bonuses, which makes encounter design easier, but you've also cut off certain options in order to do that. Now, the range of magic items is narrower, since you can't have them be equal to or greater than spells of the same type. This has unanticipated consequences, such as the party potentially not bothering to buy those magic items at all if they're superfluous thanks to the daily persistent buffs (and the encounter math presuming the buffs anyway), which potentially changes the Wealth By Level calculations. It also constrains the magic item creation rules, and (as noted before) requires the spellcaster to put aside a certain number of spell slots for those buffs as a matter of course, even if it's just at the beginning of the day.Restricting options in favor of trying to make the math more predictable, or speed up the course of play, is understandable, but doesn't strike me as the best way to go about achieving either of those things.That doesn't mean that it's a good idea to presume that character X's effectiveness is necessarily going to be based (even partially) on specific actions from character Y. Otherwise, once you change the party composition, things are going to be thrown off. Now, some of that is inevitable, but you can at least ameliorate some of that by not calculating what the party can do by assuming something as specific as particular spells always having been cast ahead of time.I agree that the math isn't a problem, but the simplification that you're achieving comes largely from restricting ranges of possibility. I don't think that's a worthwhile tradeoff. Capping what magic items can do, necessarily presuming a specific set of buffs being in play all day, etc. push things more toward a standard which I don't think will achieve the stated goals (or at least, not enough to be worthwhile when compared to what's lost).</blockquote>

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