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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5971337" data-attributes="member: 54877">I don't want to get rid of Vancian magic, because I like it a lot. However, the main reason that 3E made the 15 minute work day that much more prominent was that it used a naive solution for the problem of "low-level wizard are often under-powered." Pile on more Vancian spells, they aren't under-powered anymore, but you do magnify whatever negative effects are in Vancian spells. This should be obvious, in the same way that a few neighbors in your apartment building running their radio a tad too lad is annoying but tolerable, while half the complex hooking up their systems to guitar amps and turning them up to 11 is not. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> Adding low-powered at-will spells instead of scalable Vancian slots are one way to solve that. Giving the wizards a wider range of useful mundane skills and maybe d6 hit points is another. Heck, just being able to use a crossbow instead of throwing daggers can be part of a solution. Or you can go with the Arcana Unearthed/Evolved intent (if not always execution) of making the spells generally less powerful but more plentiful/flexible. Even the 3E kick of adding a lot more slots can work, if you are willing to impose sharp limits elsewhere. Let rest recharge one spell level per hour of rest, plus caster ability mod,(thus a 3rd level spell taking 3 hours by itself), double or triple when in a secure, calm location, half when interrupted in a dangerous location. That's 8-12+Mod spell levels in the dungeon, 4-6 (+ Half mod) if a wandering monsters drop by--enough to get back a few key spells or several smaller ones, but by 4th or 5th level, a typical 5E caster is unable to restock completely depleted spells in a single rest.  All or nothing resources really push the players towards "all". The more disproportionate a character's resources skew towards all or nothing, the more the push will be felt. (That's also a criticism of overnight healing of all hit points, though in 4E it would have been significantly muted had hit points been largely restored, but surges not--as then the hit points become almost pure combat pacing while surges become the real resource.) How you change the proportion doesn't matter so much as changing it somehow. Add resources that aren't all or nothing. Drop resources that are. Change resources that are all or nothing so that they are no longer all or nothing. And so forth. There's a point at which the music becomes tolerable again.</blockquote>

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