D&D 5E All Spells *At Will*??? (+)

[Horwath]

We can try to do this by looking at 3.5e reserve feats.
At will cantrips from 4&5E
and at-will classes from 3.5e onwards.

then all classes should have everything at-will

casting times can be used a lot to balance:

Action,
Bonus action,
Reaction,
1-Round action, similar to 3.5e, you can cast 1Round casting spell at the start of your turn, it uses your Action, Reaction, Bonus action and Movement, and casting lasts until the start of your next turn, that is, it can be interrupted with damage the whole turn.

1minute or 10 minute rituals should be for most healing/restoring spell.

"Combat healing" should only heal you to 50%, like Healing touch reserve feat from 3.5e.

 

[Redwizard007]

Does entering a fight at less than full health really affect balance? If anything, given that stat blocks are static and don't assume any resources on the part of the players, I'd think entering a fight with less than full hit points just makes it a harder fight for no particular reason.

You may have a point. If. Casters can sling their best spells at will, maybe martials shouldn't have to worry about HP.

 

[Voadam]

In 3e cheap cure light wound wands quickly often made healing fully between fights a thing for all but the most time pressed scenarios or low level parties.

4e had healing surges to bring you back up to full between encounters but a per day limitation.

5e has HD that work a bit like 4e surges in that regard with short rests.

Getting back to full hp between most every fight has been a thing for a while in D&D, the big variance is whether it takes daily resources or not and has a daily limit.

 

[Horwath]

In 3e cheap cure light wound wands quickly made healing fully between fights a thing for all but the most time pressed scenarios or low level parties.

wands of lesser vigor were even more efficient.

4e had healing surges to bring you back up to full between encounters but a per day limitation.

5e has HD that work a bit like 4e surges in that regard with short rests.

still dont know how they managed to bungle up nice and clear mechanic with healing surges and give us HDs for healing...

Getting back to full hp between most every fight has been a thing for a while in D&D, the big variance is whether it takes daily resources or not and has a daily limit.

yup.

 

[Redwizard007]

In 3e cheap cure light wound wands quickly made healing fully between fights a thing for all but the most time pressed scenarios or low level parties.

4e had healing surges to bring you back up to full between encounters but a per day limitation.

5e has HD that work a bit like 4e surges in that regard with short rests.

Getting back to full hp between most every fight has been a thing for a while in D&D, the big variance is whether it takes daily resources or not and has a daily limit.

What all of those have in common is a cost. With unlimited casting that cost disappears.

 

[TheSword]

Given some discussions lately, I just had a thought:

What if all spells were at will, but severely curtailed to keep their power level appropriate?

Some spells might have longer casting times, or other restrictions as well, to allow them to be at will. Many spells might just not work, of course, or take some creative "restructuring".

Probably simply a half-baked idea, LOL.

Make magic a test and make magic dangerous and you have WFRP!

 

[Voadam]

What all of those have in common is a cost. With unlimited casting that cost disappears.

Yes a cure light wounds wand cost 750 gp for 50 charges. 15 gp per spell for 1d8+1 hp of healing. Half that if you craft it.

That cost was quickly trivial with wealth per level.

As a PC I usually carried around one to three of them as a practice starting about as soon as I could afford them, usually by third level, but sometimes a DM would let starting first level characters start with a not fully charged one.

Wands for healing became ubiquitous. It was a bit Harry Potter with everybody having a wand.

At will healing means you do not need the cheap wand to be at that default fully healed between fights level of combat readiness.

 

[James Gasik]

Yes a cure light wounds wand cost 750 gp for 50 charges. 15 gp per spell for 1d8+1 hp of healing. Half that if you craft it.

That cost was quickly trivial with wealth per level.

As a PC I usually carried around one to three of them as a practice starting about as soon as I could afford them, usually by third level, but sometimes a DM would let starting first level characters start with a not fully charged one.

Wands for healing became ubiquitous. It was a bit Harry Potter with everybody having a wand.

At will healing means you do not need the cheap wand to be at that default fully healed between fights level of combat readiness.

As mentioned, the Wand of Lesser Vigor, granting Fast Healing 1 for a minute was an even better investment. In one party I was in, we had a guy multiclass into Dragon Shaman to give us the healing aura to ensure we could quickly heal to 50% before needing to expend resources. It sure didn't effect the difficulty of playing the game, we could still be beaten down by encounters, we could just bounce back to face more if needed.

Even back in 3.5, WotC was tinkering around with breaking the resource dependency of characters. You had Warlocks with their at will Eldritch Blast and at will spells (some with 24 hour durations!), their more refined cousin, the Dragonfire Adept, and of course, the Binder (also mentioned upthread), and of course, the Tome of Battle classes.

Magic of Incarnum also had a different resource paradigm, as I recall (but Incarnum was always kind of weird to me, only one guy in my group used the book, lol). It's just easier to plot an adventure when you don't have to troubleshoot around "what if the party can't continue".

 

[Voadam]

Lesser vigor wands were 10 hp per charge over a minute compared to a d8+1 hp in a round for cure light wound wands. They were fantastic, curing more hp at a cost of a little time and removed the annoying rolling of dice for downtime healing when you wanted to just get back 50 hp. But they were a later non-core 3.5 thing and cure light wound wands were there from the beginning in 3.0 in the PH and SRD. I played in a bunch of core/srd only games in the 3e era.

 

[Willie the Duck]

Does entering a fight at less than full health really affect balance? If anything, given that stat blocks are static and don't assume any resources on the part of the players, I'd think entering a fight with less than full hit points just makes it a harder fight for no particular reason.

You may have a point. If. Casters can sling their best spells at will, maybe martials shouldn't have to worry about HP.

In 3e cheap cure light wound wands [from others: also lessor vigor] quickly made healing fully between fights a thing for all but the most time pressed scenarios or low level parties.

I think portions of this have already been mentioned (so credit where it is due), but I'll summarize them here. The consequences I can see for all this (full hp each fight and all spells at-will) is that:

• Fights will have fewer win/lose/win-with-consequence states (potentially making most fights inconsequential, making all fights consequential but then need to be very rare, and/or simply making it harder to telegraph that a given fight should be climactic).
• With no incentive to hold back, players will have rather set fight strategies unless the game is set up such that the particulars of the fight scenario dictate optimal strategy to a great degree.