Anyone thought about spell depowering metamagic?

[Angel Tarragon]

My gripe is this: why waste a feat to alter a spell to make it inferior? Feats exist to improve a character and their abilities. I think your idea would work but make it like inverting school specialization. Take evocation for example: all spells cast from the evocation school could be minimized and the spells from its opposing school could be be altered to allow the spellcaster to learn those spells with a metamagic feat that increases their level by two, without actually having to increase their level.

 

[robberbaron]

How about a feat that reduces the level increase for meta'd spells?

A Silent Spell could be the same level as its noisy cousin and a maximised spell would only be 2 slots higher.

Granted, it's unlikely that anyone would take this feat but then, according to many of the metamagic threads, there are plenty who wouldn't take the normal metamagic feats either.

 

[Brain]

How about a feat that reduces the level increase for meta'd spells?

A Silent Spell could be the same level as its noisy cousin and a maximised spell would only be 2 slots higher.

Granted, it's unlikely that anyone would take this feat but then, according to many of the metamagic threads, there are plenty who wouldn't take the normal metamagic feats either.

I'd have to disagree, people would jump all over that feat imo.

There is a similar feat in the epic rules, but not even as good as the one you propose. Here it is:

Improved Metamagic [Epic]
Prerequisites: Four metamagic feats, Spellcraft 30 ranks.

Benefit: The spell slot modifier of all the character's metamagic feats is reduced by one level, to a minimum of +1. This feat has no effect on metamagic feats whose spell slot modifier is +1 or less.

Special: A character can gain this feat multiple times. The effects stack, though a character can't reduce any metamagic feat's spell slot modifier to less than +1.

 

[Stalker0]

As others have mentioned...there are realistically only a few aspects of spells you can mess with and have it be a downgrade for any spell you would use it on.

1) Spell Failure.

2) Penalty to the caster (con drain, hp hit, something...and it should scale with the caster)

3) Minimize numerical effecfs (but you must specify the feat can't be added to a spell that has no variable effects....and including dispel magic specifically)

and that's about all I can think of, there really isn't a lot of room to work with.

However, looking over what's here so far, making the new feats only help limit the cost of the old feats is definately a step in the right direction.

 

[dragoncc]

These are feats, they are NOT supposed to penalize the caster; but give them a "balanced" measurable return for investing in learning it. ASF, or any other penalty shouldn't be suggested/implemented with this type of feat IMO.