Must Try Harder: Spell Levels

[Chris_Nightwing]

Right from the start of this playtesting, there was talk of changing the way that spells worked, so that Fireball would no longer gain another 1d6 damage every time you gained a level, but that if you wanted a super Fireball, you would be able to prepare one. Many discussions here took this idea and ran with it. In addition to damage, there were ideas on adjusting hitpoint thresholds according to what level a spell was cast at, what effects could be added as riders, durations for buffs, all sorts of things.

There is nothing wrong with having discrete spell levels, they work in a variety of magic systems, whether magic invovles Vancian preparation or spontaneous casting, daily or encounter refreshment. In any resource management system there needs to be discrete quantities and spell levels do a good job of assigning power to cost.

But since those first mentions, we've only seen absolutely discrete spells. Fireball is 3rd level, Bless is 1st level and heaven help you if you want to Charm someone with too many HP. This is very disappointing, especially when I read a spell like Counterspell and see a great implementation (albeit I don't think you should lose an action) stymied by the fact that it is 2nd level. Where's the 3rd level version for auto-cancelling of 2nd level spells? Why can't it be described based on the level at which it is cast?

So I'm seriously hoping that that original seed of a great idea can be nurtured again.

And while they're at it, let's have a new term for spell level. Circle, Class, Rank, Tier, I'm sure there are a good number of synonyms, whether we end up with 20, 10, 9 or fewer of them.

 

[Prickly]

A spell can have a minimum "slot level" it can be stored in and then placed in higher spell slots for greater effect. its a great idea.

A flavourfull way to describe it would be that the greater effect is due to the wizard spending more mental energy in memorising the spell.
And so higher level spell slot gain represents a wizards greater understanding of magic and increased mental conditioning.

slightly off topic, but what if a wizard had a maximum amount of spell slots (Representing mortal limits) and a wizards lower level spell slots are replaced with higher ones (or are upgraded to higher ones) as the wizards mind and understanding improves?

 

[Raith5]

Chris_Nightwing: Are you arguing for a system of spell lists?

I agree that the current system of organising spells is underwhelming. I think there might be some value in trying a new way of presenting spells. But to be fair it is not a part of the game that they have seemed to put a lot of work into.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

A spell can have a minimum "slot level" it can be stored in and then placed in higher spell slots for greater effect. its a great idea.

A flavourfull way to describe it would be that the greater effect is due to the wizard spending more mental energy in memorising the spell.
And so higher level spell slot gain represents a wizards greater understanding of magic and increased mental conditioning.

slightly off topic, but what if a wizard had a maximum amount of spell slots (Representing mortal limits) and a wizards lower level spell slots are replaced with higher ones (or are upgraded to higher ones) as the wizards mind and understanding improves?

I absolutely think that they should have a maximum number of spell slots - I am concerned that in the first 5 levels we see Wizards retaining their lower level spells, only gaining more and more slots.

Chris_Nightwing: Are you arguing for a system of spell lists?

I agree that the current system of organising spells is underwhelming. I think there might be some value in trying a new way of presenting spells. But to be fair it is not a part of the game that they have seemed to put a lot of work into.

Yes, in a sense. I want individual spells to have effects that depend on how high a slot you put them in, or how many points you spend on them. Fireball might start as a 1d6 Burst 1 type affair, buildling up to a 5d6 explosion and beyond. I don't want things made too generic though - I think things lose their flavour if you pick a type of damage, whether it's single, multi or area targetted, whether it does X damage now or over time, whether it has an additional effect and so on.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I also really warmed to the original idea that how powerful a spell was, was based upon the spell slot used to cast at, rather than the character's level. I suspect though that the spell slot has not been looked at this closely in the playtest yet, as they've been more concerned at this early stage about getting the classes and how they interact with their spells right. Perhaps in another six months or so they'll really begin to delve into the spell level system itself and get things clicking along.

For now though... I'll just remain patient and keep hoping.

That being said... one advantage I think that scaling magic damage dice to spell slots rather than character level is that I think we will see more utility spell preparation and usage in lower level slots by higher level magic users. In 3E... a high level wizard would often still prep 50 to 75% of his 1st level spell slots with Magic Missile because of the way the spell's damage scaled up based on the wizard's level, and the auto-hit bonus. As a result, many of the utility spells of 1st and 2nd levels would still never get prepped because the damage spells ended up being worth more.

But with the new possible 5E paradigm, preparing a damaging spell in a 1st level slot would not produce much damage at all (since a Fireball for example in this instance would only do 1d6 in damage)... and you'd be probably be better off just using a cantrip at that point. This then opens up quite a number of 1st level spell slots to prepare spells that are more utility based, because those are ones that do not necessarily have any scaling involved (unless you consider something like duration). A Wizard might be more inclined to prep a spell like Comprehend Languages fairly consistently now with a 1st level slot, because damage spells aren't worth it. And what's good about that is that it makes more story-based sense. A lower level wizard could cast Comprehend Languages but would probably do it in its Ritual form (because he didn't want to use up a daily spell slot on it)... but as the wizard grows in power, he's more inclined to start preparing and casting it with a daily 1st level spell slot since it's faster, less expensive, and there's no damage spells worth saving the slots for.

At least, that's my take on it.

 

[howandwhy99]

Spell levels didn't used to be discrete, or at least not as much as they have been. They were like a lot of early D&D, discrete based on averages.

HD were exactly 3.5 hit points for d6s or 4.5 hit points for d8s. That didn't mean any monsters actually had that number of hit points but a 3 or 4 could be considered a rounding down of those values. Their hit point ability hadn't progressed far enough to reach 1 hit point more, but it could be at 0.5. It just wasn't necessary to be so precise. However, based on averages they were right within the bandwidth to be expected.

Spells worked similarly, along an advancing stairway of discrete averages. All 1st level spells were not 100 points in power, more like 50-150 with the designers doing their best to catch it near 100. 2nd level might be 151-250, but probably 300, with 3rd being 600 as I believe level growth scaled logarithmically.

This leaves a lot of extra room for designers to "get wrong, but right enough" when it came to assigning a spell level. All that stuff received a bit more custom design by each caster anyways and every DM had their own opinion about which spells were weak or strong for a spell level anyways. At the table it's their system, let them finalize the details.


Also, in AD&D Gary already mentioned alternate names for the ubiquitous level term.
RANK = class power with higher levels representing greater prowess.
LEVEL/LAYER = the depth of the dungeon complex with higher numbers increasing in hazard.
POWER = "Level as a measure of magic spell difficulty” (and effectiveness, increasing in both)
ORDER = “Level as a gauge of a ‘monster’s’ potential threat” (HP, magic, damage, venom, 1-10 increasing in power)

Power is pretty common as a reference to a character ability now after 4th, but it could be defined differently for DDN. Or we could get whole new terminology, who knows?

I miss not having spells altered from class level too, but it could always be rewritten. It's still just a playtest after all. I'd like to have separate class XP, but I doubt we'll see that again.

 

[Dausuul]

A bit off topic, but has anyone actually encountered confusion at the table between the different uses of "level" in D&D?

I ask because I've played with a lot of newbies and casual players, and lots of them had trouble with confusing stuff in the rules, but none of them ever seemed to have trouble with the concept that a 3rd-level wizard could only cast 2nd-level spells. Aesthetically, it's terrible, but practically it doesn't seem to be that big an issue in my experience.

Of course, my experience is not necessarily representative.

 

[howandwhy99]

I was just thinking while reading over my post, why isn't there a treasure level name? I know that stuff is very highly defined down to the copper piece, but it would be nice to have *average* treasure for a dungeon layer, order of monster, etc. So here's my suggestion:

TIER: property and capital amounts within a given section of the world.

As the world already comes in layers this could help in determining randomization rolls for treasure with different monsters and/or in different locations. How a location is assigned a higher or lower layer would be important though. Sometimes a looted castle still has a Level 10 secret and locked cache with the skill needed to find and surpass far beyond what most anyone wandering though can do.

NOTE: I do not advocate discreteness in adventure building. That would be uniformly boring. Variety is the spice of life as Gary said. Just advise adventure builders that a 1st level dungeon should probably stick to 1st-3rd Layer difficulties, with 1st-3rd Tier treasures, 1st-3rd Order monsters, and so on depending upon the steepness of the die mechanics. But... learning how to break even this advice can be fun too. Maybe the monster is weakened. Perhaps the treasured magic item is not recognizable as such, shows as non-magical, and needs a command word to function once reverse dispel magic is cast upon it. It is also possible the dungeon Layer has a few easier (albeit harder to find) paths around the arcane locked and insanity warded door.

Of course all of this is campaign setting specific and can be altered, what should be 1st level monsters, difficulty of dungeon levels, and all the rest too.

 

[ZombieRoboNinja]

This shouldn't really be an issue for clerics or wizards who can just choose not to prepare obsolete lower-level spells. I can see this as a potential problem for sorcerers, though, who might be tempted to take Charm Person at first level only to have it become useless by 10th level (whereas something like Shield might have still had applications at higher levels).

My guess is that there still are plans to do this, but they're waiting until they have the basic spell mechanics nailed down first. (For example, no point in figuring out how to scale max HP thresholds if they end up dumping those.)

The trick is that spell scaling would have to be very finicky. A few spells have HP thresholds that need to scale with level, and that seems easy enough. But should Fireball, Burning Hands, and Arc Lightning all gain +1d6 damage per spell level? Trying to work it out, you'd probably end up with something a lot like 3e metamagic. It might be simpler just to include higher-level versions of these spells and give sorcerers some retraining ability.

 

[RangerWickett]

On one hand, I like flexible magic.

On the other, I like quirky spells like "Leomund's Tiny Chest" and "Bigby's Flicking Finger."

Which is why in Elements of Magic - Revised, we had 'build your own spells' rules, but a limit that you could only have a handful of 'signature spells' at a given time. And if you picked a few static spells that you were a master of, you'd get a small perk.

That doesn't work well for new players, though.