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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 522161" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, the answer to the question entirely depends on one thing: "Do you think you can survive to reach a reasonably high level without it?"Toughness sucks, but it is darn hard for a mage to survive low levels without it.  I've even seen wizards/sorcerers resort to starting out as 1st level fighters, before switching over to spell casting classes for the remainder of there career.  It actually works pretty well, albeit it slows down thier acquisition of higher level spells.   If you only have 10-12 h.p. by third level (or less!), you can find yourself in a world of hurt though.  One orc still has a reasonable chance of taking you down, and that is probably not the worst of your worries.  The same sort of thing applies to combat casting.  Ok, theoretically you should have better than a 50% chance of succeeeding in defensive casting at 2nd or 3rd level, but that is like playing russian roullette.   You don't have the h.p. to risk an AoO, and the loss of a precious spell like sleep or web is probably going to be fatal to someone in the long run.   You don't leave things like that up to 50% chances if you can help it.  So either Skill Focus (Concentration) if you get a +3 bonus in your campaign or Combat Casting isn't at all a bad idea for a low level spell caster.  Heck, it has saved the life of my cleric on at least 2 occassions: versus a flock of cockatrices when I needed to stun them quick and certainly couldn't afford drawing AoO, and versus an ogre when I needed a cure spell and couldn't risk the AoO.  Both cases the roll was just low enough to have failed without Combat Casting.</blockquote>

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