Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pyrex" data-source="post: 3171684" data-attributes="member: 11600">Hmm.  Let's do a couple quick checks here with our good friend Joe-Bob the Wizard.At 1st level, Joe-Bob isn't a particularly quick study (Int 14) and wants to cast Magic Missile, which, at 1st level he only has 1 rank in.So, 1 (Caster Level) + 1 (Skill Rank) + 2 (Int) = d20+4 vs DC 11.  So Joe-Bob needs to roll a 7 or higher Magic Missile meaning his cast will fail roughly one round in three.  Not too bad.Later on in his career around L8 (having increased his Int to 16) Joe-Bob decides to add Ice Storm to his spellbook at rank 1.  In the meantime, he also really likes Magic Missile and so has continued to train it up to it's max rank of 5*.To cast Ice Storm Joe-Bob is at 8 (level) + 1 (Rank) + 3 = d20+12 vs DC 14.  Wow, things have gotten *much* better for Joe-Bob, as with his best spell he now only fails to cast 10% of the time.  If he was either a little smarter (either naturally or by casting Fox's Cunning his failure rate drops to Natural 1.Next round he wants to cast Maximized Magic Missile at 8(level) + 5(rank) + 3(Int) = d20+16 vs DC 14.  Huh, assuming he still fails on a natural 1, it turns out he doesn't really need 5 ranks of Magic Missile after all, he only needs 2.Net result:  Your scaling is way out of whack.  What you need to do first is decide how often you want spells to fail (I'm going to go out on a limb here and say your highest level spell should never fail more than 50% of the time) and then re-jigger your difficulty curve.In order to make adding ranks to a spell meaningfull, you might also consider a scaling difficulty where each time you've cast a particular spell in a day the DC increases by 1 or 2.*Even though he should have a theoretical max of Rank 11, given your scaling cost factor for increasing spell-skill ranks, and that he only gains 5 spell-ranks per level by L8, he can only ever increase it to 5...</blockquote>

Verification