D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[Micah Sweet]

Bluntly, so what? That's exactly the reason I'm saying houserules aren't a useful answer to everyone. I've explained this more than once, so either engage with it or stop responding to me. Acting like I haven't explained my position is ridiculous.

So your position is, " I don't like the traditional GM/player power dynamic and want it to be different"? You should have just said that in the first place. It would have saved a lot of confusion.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In which case there's no intrinsic reason you can't do that with houserules players suggest, either.

Sure, if they work for you.

 

[Hussar]

Take a look at our system sometime - it's probably closer-related to TSR-era D&D than you realize.

www.friendsofgravity.com/games then "commons room"; then "blue books" for (very setting-specific) player-side stuff and "DM stuff" for DM-side.

I perused the difference between the two books and your casting system is totally different. You use spell point casting in one system and free floating casting a la 3e sorcerers for the other. IOW, that's a pretty huge departure right there from AD&D.

 

[Lanefan]

I perused the difference between the two books and your casting system is totally different. You use spell point casting in one system and free floating casting a la 3e sorcerers for the other. IOW, that's a pretty huge departure right there from AD&D.

Indeed. My game is the one that uses free-floating slots a la 3e Sorcerers (which is where I stole the idea from), largely because I very long ago came to detest pre-memorization of spells as too much fuss for too little reward. Next time out I'll be tweaking down the number of slots all casters get as they advance; at low levels (up to about 5th) it worked great but it's proven to be overcooked at higher level.

The game that uses spell points is the one I play in, and mage types there still have to pre-mem their highest two levels of spells castable. Problem is, at high levels the mages can spam too many lower-level spells as by then they have loads of spell points and those lower level spells are free-floating (our term for this is 'wild card'). Seeing this in past campaigns is why I went back to slots for this one.

If memory serves, there may at one time have been a spell point option presented for 1e in a Dragon article, so we weren't the only ones to think that way.