New Ideas for Specialist Wizards

[Aust Diamondew]

No offence, but I don't like your ideas. And your justifications sound like utter BS.

First off if you are trying to 'balance' specialist shouldn't you try to 'balance' them through out their class levels (you know the first 1-20 where most of us play) instead of waiting till level +21 in order for them to get these +10th level slots to 'balance' them out.

The bottom line is specialist are balanced with other spell casting classes. If you want to give them a nice little boost with out having them wait till epic levels give them the spell focus feat for free or make them give up only one school instead of two. You could also give specialist a couple other class skills with out throwing game balance out of whack.

 

[Planesdragon]

Next, this this how I came up with my conclusion, in 2ed a mage had to gain 2,500 experience to reach level 2. Well instead of having to 2,500 experience points they must study for 2,500 days to become a wizard. From this and the special abilities of other classes I have decided that a character would take 5,080 days to become a necromancer, or 15 years, 29 months, and 2 days, to become a necromancer, while it would only take 6 years, 44 weeks, 2 days to become a wizard. At last I add 2,000 points to there first experience point goal in addition to other requisites.

Are you still playing 2nd?

XP simply works differently in 3e. Even if a character gained 1 XP per day of study (one CR 1 encounter per year?), after 8 levels the study would be worthless to them.

 

[dogboy]

Tweak it!

I think the way to go about this is to tailor a magician's spell list to reflect a
different bent on studies. I have never liked the idea of a generic mage class that is able to learn anything he wants to, although I realize you have to keep the class balanced and not get restrictive. I would just take a spell off the list here and there and get a mage able to cast from every school, but unable to cast one or two specialist spells. An alternative to this would be to add a few new spells to each specialist school that are not accessable by a regular magician.

 

[The Great Bear King]

Now I reailize that my kind specialist wouldn't fit as a core class so I'm taking Vrecknidj's advice and making them seperate prestige classes. Take this as an example.

It seems the way you'd want to do this is to create 8 prestige classes. For each, the prerequisite should be "Ability to cast 9th level spells" of the appropriate school. Then these special abilities would be prestige class abilities gained at certain levels. And, you could create a spell advancement table that detailed at what level a 10th, 11th, and so on spell is gained, and how many spells of each level.

For example:

Epic Evoker
Prerequisite: Ability to cast 9th level evocation spells, Knowledge (arcana) 23 ranks, Spellcraft 23 ranks, an inability to cast spells of two schools.

You don't need a BAB or saves table because of the way epic progression works
...........Max Spell
Level....Level..........Special
1.........10..............Spot and Listen are now class skills
2.........11..............Dazzle (the caster has a dazzling aura)
3.........12..............Aura of Fear
4.........13..............Etc.
5.........14..............Etc.
6.........15..............Etc.
7.........16..............Etc.
8.........17..............Etc.
9.........18..............Etc.
10.......19..............Etc.

Spells: You gain a number of spell levels at each level equal to half your Int modifier times the highest level spell you can cast. So, if you're a 21st level evoker with a 22 Intelligence, you gain 30 (10*3) spell levels. With 30 spell levels you could take six 5th level spells, five 6th level spells, two 9th and three 4th, etc. You could also take three 10th level spells because you can now cast 10th level spells.

Note: Each spell of 10th level and above must be researched by the caster.

You'd have to make up quite a bit of stuff, but once you were done you'd have a nice system available.

Dave

I would also add Knowledge (physics: energy) 23 and perhaps minimum ability scores to the list of prerequisites.

 

[Elephant]

Even if a character gained 1 XP per day of study (one CR 1 encounter per year?), after 8 levels the study would be worthless to them.

Not necessarily. If we assume that full-time study and practice of basic magical subjects for one year represents a CR 1 encounter, then we can assume that a studious mage could progress to more challenging topics, represented by higher CR encounters for later years of study.

To draw upon a real-world example, one learns much more in a year of high school than in a year of kindergarten because the study is more in-depth.