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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 5473329" data-attributes="member: 85870">See this is EXACTLY what I was trying to get at over in the "Vancian Forest Burning / Must Go Away" thread. There are so, so, so many ways that basic Vancian casting could be tweaked into something that provides more interesting character and tactical choices besides "I put spell X into slot Y." I think the reasons for doing so are balance, as mentioned, but also for character development. If you really have to prepare your character to effectively play a caster, it highly discourages the "dipping" effect mechanics-wise, but can potentially help the player really think about why the character is so devoted to magic. If there's real consequences--both meta-game, and in game--for potential spell failure, and the player has to be more strategic and tactical with their spell and character choices, that's a good thing to me. The downside is obviously that such an approach means people that play casters need a higher level of system mastery--even higher than they do now. For example, My wife can play a basic cleric right now because there's really not many choices to make. Pick the best spells that seem useful, and swap out healing as applicable. Throw in another layer of complexity, and there's no way she'd go for it. Plus, there's another layer of adjudication that goes on top of the actual spell effects themselves--which is already a common slow-down for many groups. But the overall effect of something like Herremann suggested is highly positive. And besides, is it a bad thing to expect a more experienced player to play the caster classes? Something about the whole, "With great power comes great responsibility," or some such notion. <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=":)" />  If your character can kill stuff by speaking a few words and waving some bat dung around, I think it's a good thing to have a player that takes their RPGs a little more seriously pulling the character strings.</blockquote>

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