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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 2454549" data-attributes="member: 141">I was thinking that 15 minutes would help reduce the "cast spells all day" exploit by a factor of three, which would certainly help.  But five minutes is a nice timeframe.  Five minutes is short enough that some 1 minute/level spells by non-token spellcasters will still have some duration left.  It is also enough time for non-spellcasters to take 20 on search checks for a few key areas.  At mid to high levels efficient adventurers will be keeping track of time on this scale, and people will generally have enough to do; nobody will feel that their time is being wasted.  But if 5 minutes is just right, 15 minutes will often be too long.  I wonder if we can have the best of both worlds by saying that a wizard can recover their tokens about 1 minute of concentration per token.  After a short encounter the party can move on after five minutes or so, while a major encounter will require a longer rest; people would understand and respect that, I think.  Besides, it takes longer to loot all the bodies and check for secret doors after a major battle; lots of time for the wizard to get his tokens back.You should mention that while it looks restful, it is a bit of a strain on a wizard to channel energy back into the tokens; maybe equivalent to hustling.  PCs who try the "cast all day" exploit can thus be warned that they will take subdual damage, become fatigued, etc.  (I don't know what set of rules to adapt for this; overland movement, or environmental conditions, or both?)Using table 4 would thus be even more strenuous; I'd say it would be, at best, about half as efficient as resting.  Maybe each use could be as tiring as 10 minutes of regular recharging, even though you get back a lot less than 10 tokens.  If people want to use the mechanics from table 4 outside of combat they can, but they have to keep score to see when fatigue damage will set in.  They would only use this mechanic once or twice in a typical encounter, so these calculations wouldn't have to interfere with the flow of battle.  The metagame distinction between time in combat and time out of combat is *not* a good basis for game effects.  The fact that party stays in initiative order shouldn't affect whether tokens spent during that time are gone for the day or not.  And the logic is backwards from what in-game expectations should be; casting spells during combat should be more wasteful of the wizard's energy than spells cast under controlled conditions.  If tokens are going to be lost during the day, logic would predict that they are the ones spent during combat, not ones spent out of combat.I guess I'm saying that it wouldn't feel right to do it that way.Tokens spent on permanent spells, really, any spell whose duration is longer than a day, should come back after one day.  It would make sense that spells that create permanent effects should take a day to recharge as well.  In other words, I am arguing that spells like wall of stone are really permanent, not instantaneous; they are just labelled instantaneous because they can't be dispelled afterwards.And so I guess I would recommend that spells that "count as permanent" have tokens that recharge only after 1 day.  I'd then go through the SRD and make a list of those instantaneous spells that fall into this category.  I doubt there are many of them.  DMs could then make rulings on non-SRD spells on a case by case basis.That by itself resolves the "mile long wall of stone" problem.  But I would revise the recharging rules as stated above so that a metagame distinction between in combat and out of combat doesn't have to be maintained.  If people want to use table 4 to recharge, they can; but it tires them out a lot faster than using the regular method.</blockquote>

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