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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ptolemy18" data-source="post: 3767501" data-attributes="member: 24970">Millions and zillions of agrees. Balance is important, but give me immersion and style over balance any day.About the much-hated Vancian spellcasting... the whole thing about the spellcasters "making the party conform to their schedule", the 15-minute adventuring day, is a legitimate complaint, but it's also kind of a rules-lawyer complaint. It doesn't take into account the larger game world and the fact that there's plenty of ways for the DM to ensure that people don't do this too often. Such as:* players have to do things on a certain timeline ("crap, I'm out of spells, but we have to make it to the castle before sundown! We must continue!") This has happened TONS of times in games I've been in. This is what the whole "narrative storytelling" aspect is all about. * the players can't rest; monsters or enemies will attack the players if they camp for the night in a certain region, so they have to keep moving (sure, why not. It's realistic. I've played in several games where we were awakened in the middle of the night, with no spells, by monsters attacking us. Danger = drama = fun.) The old "wake up, go to the next room in the dungeon, kill the monsters, bar the doors, camp for the night, repeat" is just silly. That's just bad DMing. And if the characters are so high-level that the wizard Teleports the party out of the dungeon back to their comfortable pad for the night, then it's up to the DM to come up with some way this won't always work (Teleport-proof dungeon), or some other challenges to keep things fresh.So these are both ways to ensure that non-spellcasters get their time to lord it over spellcasters who are out of spells. If your response is "But that's not fun for the spellcasters", well, I must say that, speaking as someone who played spellcasters for 9 out of 10 of my last characters: actually, it *is* fun. It's the necessary flip side of having a lot of fun spells to cast during other times of gameplay, and I'm totally cool with that.I can also think of another couple ways to balance out spellcaster powers, other than the Vancian system:* spells cause HP damage/subdual damage/ability damage to the caster (this is how it is in Skull & Bones, and with the super-high-rank spells in the Book of Vile Darkness)* spells stun or stagger the wizard for a round or two after casting. This is a pretty big disadvantage which will pretty much require wizards to work in conjunction with other classes ("FIREBALL!... Ooh... I'm so tired... *collapse*)* spells take more than one round to prepare, like the existing full-round spells, perhaps more so (though unfortunately, I doubt WotC will go this route since some people will probably whine that then the caster "can't do something every round" @_@)* spells require more than one caster to work in conjunction to cast them (perhaps each caster donates a certain number of actions based on their level)* spells require XP (sure, why not? I used lots of XP-costing spells when I was playing my various spellcasters) or material components which cost lots of gold and/or are theoretically "hard to get" in the game world</blockquote>

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