Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5786988" data-attributes="member: 4937">Because high level spells in D&D tend to be significantly more advantageous than two lower level spells, which would encourage you to spend all or most of your points on high level spells.  (For example, this is the reason that empower and maximize metamagic feats are such niche abilities in 3e.  Generally speaking, for almost anything that you'd want to empower or maximize, there is something 2 or 3 levels higher that is better.)To me, for almost every gamist complaint about Vancian magic - it encourages the 15 minute adventuring day, it imbalances the classes, it makes encounters hard to design, it encourages redundancy in actual spell use, and so forth - this change would not lessen the strength of such arguments, but make them much more relevant.   If it is true that Vancian magic encourages you to 'go nova', which in turn can act like a 'win button' in an encounter, but which in turn forces you to retreat to rest, then it would be more true that having a fewer number of more powerful effects would encourage 'going nova' and the 15 minute adventuring day.   To the extent that spellcasters greatly outshine other classes on a per encounter basis by going nova, being able to focus their powers more sharply isn't going to help the matter.   To the extent that spell casting makes encounter design difficult on the grounds that you aren't quite sure what party resources will be available, it becomes even more difficult in a system where those resources are even more amorphous.  (I would go so far to say that the 15 minute adventuring day is an example of a table comprimise due to failed encounter design, and for that matter one of 4e's explicit goals was rendering encounter design easier by making available party resources more predictable.)In short 'point buy' is not a mechanical solution to a set of problems and complaints commonly raised against Vancian magic.  In theory 4e's 'at will' and 'per encounter' structure is a solution (in the same sense that some found ready access to wands an easy workaround and acceptable table comprimise), but this raises its own problems - encounters have to be harder to meaningfully challenge the party which tends to make combat run longer and slower, resource management subgames go away (which may be a feature or a bug depending on your point of view), and overall versimilitude may go down depending how you think you world should work, over balancing may lead to redundancies in game play, greater power access may have to be countered with reduced power flexibility and effect, etc.I've tried several systems.  The spell slot system may strike some as overly gamist, but I find it to be a good comprimise between narrative simulation and real game play concerns.   Besides which, the Vancian system has some arcane depth to it that I think adds significantly to flavor.   It suggests to me that spellcasting is more of an art (or a science) than mere innate power.  Granted, the more you are going for innate power, the further you'll probably move away from it, but I like my Wizards as scholars and loremasters.</blockquote>

Verification