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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ppaladin123" data-source="post: 5519217" data-attributes="member: 60923"><a href="http://wizards.com/dnd/article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20110405" target="_blank">Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (Balance of Power)</a>No strong conclusions but a good summary of the various ways in which "class balance" can be interpreted.Random aside: I've always wondered whether wizards/sorcerers/other casters could be given their phenomenal cosmic powers in exchange for longer, multi-round casting times. Maybe a wizard can incinerate a vrock in one hit, permanently blind his opponents, or open a portal to allow escape, but only after chanting for 3-5 rounds without getting smacked. The defender then becomes extremely important; he has to lock down enemy melee monsters long enough for the caster to finish his spell. Strikers like rogues, rangers and barbarians then specialize in slipping behind enemy lines and 1. disrupting/killing casters, and 2. keeping archers, blasters and other ranged combatants from targeting the wizard/invoker/psion/bard/shaman and blowing their spell.This would necessitate rebalancing encounters and abilities so that they do not end  in 2-3 rounds like they often do now. Care would have to be taken to prevent casters from speeding through incantations via metamagic or whatever. Also, spells that essentially replace party members (impenetrable shields or hordes of permanent undead or dominated minions that can be summoned ahead of time) would have to either disappear or involve rare components and/or serious sacrifice (so that they could not be cast often).Variations on this idea could include increasing casting times for more and more powerful spells, chance to backfire as spell complexity increases, and physical damage/drain with each spell cast.I've been thinking about this recently because of rituals. When 4e first came out I imagined battles where a ritual caster frantically tried to complete a powerful spell in the midst of battle while his companions fought back monsters to buy him time. I like that image because it grants caster players the mighty reality bending power they crave but leaves them seriously dependent on on their non-magical friends; the caster can't pull off anything if And the reverse is true too: the fighter isn't going to be able to destroy the dragon without some magical backup.4e didn't really deliver on this idea since rituals are generally extremely expensive (they use the same resource, gold, that the system demands you spend to keep up with assumed mathematical progression of magic items), take 10 minutes or more to cast (combat rarely lasts that long), and often produce lackluster effects.But, previous editions didn't do any better in this regard. The only limit on spells in 3e was spell slots available. At low levels the caster couldn't do much before falling back and resorting to a crossbow. At high levels they had so many slots that this wasn't a limitation at all. Spells never took more than a full round to cast regardless of level, and once meta-magic came into the picture, casters could lob 2-3 spells per round. Prior to 3e you had serious limits on the number of spells casters could find and learn, but again these aren't the types of limits I am looking for.</blockquote>

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