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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cheiromancer" data-source="post: 3109007" data-attributes="member: 141">AD LIBITUM SPELLCASTING [Epic][Epic Magic]You regain your spells at a moment's notice.Prerequisite: Ability to cast spells at the normal maximum spell level in at least one spellcasting class.Benefit: You may regain your lowest level spell slots by spending one minute in concentration.  Furthermore, if you prepare spells you may use these spell slots to cast any spell of the same level that you know.Normal: It normally takes 8 hours rest and 1 hour of preparation to regain spell slots.  Furthermore, the selection of spells normally has to be made when spells are prepared.Special: This feat may be taken multiple times.  Each time you take the feat, the benefit extends to one higher level spell-slot.This reduces the book-keeping problem, but I think it might infringe too much on the Sorcerer. Maybe a feat that allows Sorcerers to know an unlimited number of spells? Such a feat should be balanced against Upper_Krust's Improved Spellcasting. Let's see, I'd word UK's feat like this:IMPROVED SPELLCASTING [Epic][Epic Magic]You expand the horizons of your spellcasting capabilites.Prerequisites: Ability to cast spells at the normal maximum spell level in at least one spellcasting class, Spellcraft 25 ranks.Benefit: You gain two extra spell slots. These can be assigned to any spell level you can cast.Special: You can gain this feat multiple times and its effects stack. Each time you take it you can cast two more spell slots per day.Note that this feat doesn't accumulate from the bottom like ALS does; maybe it should.  Or maybe ALS should affect any spell-slot, not the lowest.  Anyway, a complementary sorcerer feat would be something like this:INTUITIVE LEARNING [Epic][Epic Magic]You can keep a spellbook.Prerequisites: Ability to spontaneously cast spells at the normal maximum spell level in at least one spellcasting class, Spellcraft 25 ranks.Benefit: You may scribe your lowest level spells in a spellbook, just as a wizard does.  Furthermore you may scribe spells of that level from scrolls and other spellbooks, following the rules for a wizard.  Your spells known include every spell you scribe in this way.Special: You may take this feat multiple times.  Each time you take it you may scribe spells of the next higher level into your spellbook.Then a wizard who takes 10 ALS and 10 IS feats (cantrips through 9th level spells) would be mechanically identical to a sorcerer with 10 ALS and 10 IL feats.  Except that one would use Intelligence and the other would use Charisma.  Both would have a base 6 spells per spell level (plus ability bonuses) and would be able to choose their spells on the fly, and recharge their slots in a nominal amount of time.I figure that 4 levels of IM should about double a wizard's effectiveness; their spells could be double-empowered, or he could be quickening spells so as to cast 2 per round instead of one; things like that.  The big limit is that the wizard has to hold something back in case there is another encounter after the current one.With enough ALS feats the limitation is removed; the wizard can cast all (or almost all) his spells in one encounter instead of 3 or 4.  And so this is tripling (or quadrupling) his effectiveness.  That's equivalent to 8 to 12 levels of IM, so the 10 feats required for ALS is right on the money.  The main reason for the one minute recharge time is so that it can't be used in combat.  So in theory this should all be fine except for its failure to address Greybar's main objection:Certainly the mechanical benefit of taking that first ALS or IL is pretty insignificant.  Maybe even the second or third.  But after that it starts to become worthwhile.  Part of what makes the early feat chain weak is that they have to affect only low level spells.  I'd hesitate to remove this "accumulating" property, since then it might be too powerful.  Imagine if a 21st level wizard could cast his 9th level spells ad libitum!  Maybe the first feat should affect spells up to level 2 or something.  Someone might spend a feat slot to cast 1st and 2nd level spells ad libitum, and, once started, start taking the rest of the slots in the feat chain.I'd hesitate to make the feat chain less than 8 feats long, though, unless some kind of penalty were built in; e.g. that the number of spell-slots restored ad libitum was one less than if restored by a night's sleep.  Then I could see two levels of slots per ALS instead of only 1.All of this is a bit of a tangent to the thread, since it doesn't affect seed-based spells at all.  But it's not entirely off-topic; to balance seed based spells you need to know what the alternative is.  And the alternative should be more than just Improved Metamagic. [edit]I think Arcane Sluice might be overpowered.  But I ran the idea of Ad Libitum Spellcasting by Upper_Krust earlier today (in an IM conversation) and he thought it seemed flimsy.  So I don't know.****I wonder if "seminal" would be a better word for talking about seed-based spells.  Uniseminal would be relating to one-root epic spells, multiseminal would be epic spells with compound roots, etc.  Greek would be monospermal and polyspermal.  Or even a barbaric mixture of these two possibilities; monoseminal and polyseminal, perhaps.  Or maybe drop the "n" and lengthen the vowel to compensate: monosemeial and polysemeial.  It sorta straddles the ground between being based on seeds and being based on signs.  Dunno.  Sep, you have a good ear for such things; what do you think?****Re: the [life] seed.I think it is easier to use an epic spell to true resurrect a character with 400+ hp than it is to use an epic spell to heal him.  Though one could fiddle with the factors to make the equivalence occur far outside of the range we are considering.  But it occurred to me that it shouldn't be a trivial action to restore very powerful creatures to life; demon princes, gods, etc..  One way of reflecting this non-triviality is to put true resurrection on a fundamentally different basis; one based on CR.There would still be difficulties; could you use resurrection instead?  So what if Orcus loses a level.  Maybe you could patch the rules to say that unique creatures can't benefit from resurrection; they need a CR-based epic spell that true resurrects them.  However you do it, I think there is a desirability to making death an inconvenience even at epic levels; not something a quickened componentless spell could accomplish; a momento vitae spell of some sort.Those last two steps encompass x144; very close to the x100 that you would expect.  Mathematically it's 2.16 steps instead of 2 steps, but that's less than a 10% discrepancy.  Comparable to fudging 20 hours to 1 day, which is something I'd not hesitate to do.  Months to years is also very close to a x10 progression.  You can still use a days, months, years progression; you just have to make one of the steps +3 instead of +2.The two paradigms coincide there, so it is a good place to have the spell.  But it raises the question of which paradigm to follow into epic levels; I still think the CR-based one is better.And I've used the 6SP/spell level calculation before; it's a standard tool in my analysis of non-epic spell suites, not something completely ad hoc.  But yeah, that's not the only way I could have analysed it.Still, I like the looks of "the necromantic/healing/creation interface"; it provides an awful lot of theoretical neatness to the system.  Still, it is an enthusiasm, and maybe it will pass. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification