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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5473975" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've been using essentially the stock rules with the one change of not adding spell level at all and so far it has worked quite well.&nbsp; It's amazing the difference that this one change makes in the relative power of casters to non-casters.&nbsp; Remove spell level from the calculation and suddenly the math favors the non-spell caster.&nbsp; I threw a 6th level caster at my 3rd level party, and just having the DC of the saves (vs. his best spells) change from 17's to 14's was enough of a difference to change an encounter that could have been under RAW a TPK into a fun extended romp of a fight.&nbsp; And when I say 'could have been', I literally mean that there were some saves made by throwing 14's and 15's without which the whole party probably would have gone down.&nbsp; With 17's, even the 'good saves' in the party would have only had about a 50% chance of saving, so it wouldn't have been long at all before the whole party would have been disabled and out of action.&nbsp; The ultimate result was that the 6th level non-twinked spellcaster was only slightly more of a challenge to the PC's than a 6th level non-twinked fighter probably would have been in the same circumstances.Another cool thing about this is that the metamagic feat 'Heighten Spell' which I've tweaked to directly increase DC actually has a point to it.&nbsp; Normally, you'd not heighten a lower level spell because some higher level version of the spell is almost always strictly superior.&nbsp; But with this change there is actually a real point to taking a low level spell and heightening its power.&nbsp; You won't get as powerful of effect, but you have a better chance of getting that effect.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 5473975, member: 4937"] I've been using essentially the stock rules with the one change of not adding spell level at all and so far it has worked quite well. It's amazing the difference that this one change makes in the relative power of casters to non-casters. Remove spell level from the calculation and suddenly the math favors the non-spell caster. I threw a 6th level caster at my 3rd level party, and just having the DC of the saves (vs. his best spells) change from 17's to 14's was enough of a difference to change an encounter that could have been under RAW a TPK into a fun extended romp of a fight. And when I say 'could have been', I literally mean that there were some saves made by throwing 14's and 15's without which the whole party probably would have gone down. With 17's, even the 'good saves' in the party would have only had about a 50% chance of saving, so it wouldn't have been long at all before the whole party would have been disabled and out of action. The ultimate result was that the 6th level non-twinked spellcaster was only slightly more of a challenge to the PC's than a 6th level non-twinked fighter probably would have been in the same circumstances. Another cool thing about this is that the metamagic feat 'Heighten Spell' which I've tweaked to directly increase DC actually has a point to it. Normally, you'd not heighten a lower level spell because some higher level version of the spell is almost always strictly superior. But with this change there is actually a real point to taking a low level spell and heightening its power. You won't get as powerful of effect, but you have a better chance of getting that effect. [/QUOTE]

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