Benjamin Olson
Hero
This seems cool, and I don't hate it at first blush as much as I do most 5.24 innovations. But magic is so deeply baked into the game, and there are so many spells it might effect in ways the designers almost certainly didn't anticipate that I worry about just slapping a new casting system on all spells. I certainly don't trust WotC to sufficiently playtest something like this. I don't really care about "breaking the game", my worry is more that this isn't really off-kilter and weird enough to let players break the game in joyful or exciting ways. Instead the places where circle casting is really advantageous enough to bother with are really going to be things for rule lawyers and power gamers to focus in on. This seems less like something people use to do some cool new magic feat and be evocative of fantasy ritual casting tropes, and more like something that one player uses over and over again to pull off an unbalanced combo they cooked up, and the other players get stuck participating to humor them.
Also, this edition is in year two and they've already introduced something that, to really do properly, would require rewriting a massive number of core materials (ie: to do this right they would have special circle cast options available for a lot of vanilla spells, not just a few exiciting new ones, and they would probably just make "circleable" a property of some spells, like ritual or concentration, and not of others). This just seems like a terrible lack of planning.
I do think group casting is a vital element of fantasy magic which has been missing from the game. I created a rough system of group casting for my own 5e clone system a couple years back. In mine the casting time was extended by hours or days, and the benefit was being able to cast spells of a level the lead character could not normally cast (my system only has 12 character levels so it normally only goes up to 6th level magic). I mainly intended it as a villain activily, but liked that it also opened up the opportunity for the players to do plot vital feats of magic (opening a portal, resurrecting a comrade) they otherwise couldn't yet do. I think my approach of spending days to cast a spell in its normal form, albeit a spell normally not accessible until a higher power level, had a lot less potential to mess things up and was more evocative of the group ritual casting tropes I assume WotC is also going for, but obviously I'm biased.
Also, this edition is in year two and they've already introduced something that, to really do properly, would require rewriting a massive number of core materials (ie: to do this right they would have special circle cast options available for a lot of vanilla spells, not just a few exiciting new ones, and they would probably just make "circleable" a property of some spells, like ritual or concentration, and not of others). This just seems like a terrible lack of planning.
I do think group casting is a vital element of fantasy magic which has been missing from the game. I created a rough system of group casting for my own 5e clone system a couple years back. In mine the casting time was extended by hours or days, and the benefit was being able to cast spells of a level the lead character could not normally cast (my system only has 12 character levels so it normally only goes up to 6th level magic). I mainly intended it as a villain activily, but liked that it also opened up the opportunity for the players to do plot vital feats of magic (opening a portal, resurrecting a comrade) they otherwise couldn't yet do. I think my approach of spending days to cast a spell in its normal form, albeit a spell normally not accessible until a higher power level, had a lot less potential to mess things up and was more evocative of the group ritual casting tropes I assume WotC is also going for, but obviously I'm biased.
