Rejigging caster level

[Spenser]

hong,

Very interesting idea! The explanation that caster potency reflects your inner "strength of spirit" or some such is certainly plausible enough for me. However...

First, a smaller objection. I don't think melee/spellcasters are too weak. I've played with fighter/wizards, barbarian/clerics, and the like who were evenly split... and they were quite effective in melee combat. Not quite as effective as a straight fighter... but with properly chosen spells and feats, they were reasonably close, plus they had all sorts of nifty non-combat magical abilities. The melee/spellcaster combo seems balanced enough to me. A spellcaster/spellcaster combo, on the other hand, does strike me as pretty poor. I've never seen a cleric/wizard in my campaign, and probably for good reason. (Then again, who knows... the people I play with have a habit of surprising me with creative ways of making their character effective.)

Second: there are too many low-level spells that scale up very well at high levels. You mention one example: Magic Missile. Invest one level in sorcerer, get 5 missiles. That's 17 points of damage that's very hard to avoid... which I think is pretty decent even at the higher levels (particularly when haste is ubiquitous, and you would just fire off five missiles as your partial action).

So that makes me a bit wary. But, okay, five Magic Missiles isn't terribly unbalancing. So let's pick a better example. Divine Favor. I think any fighter would have to be crazy not to take one level of cleric and get +6 luck bonus to hit and damage with a first level spell. Stack that with Shield of Faith: +5 deflection AC for 20 minutes. Or consider the 17Rog/3Drd, melee touching with flameblade (1D8+10+sneak) and protected with fully powered-up barkskin (+5 natural armor for 3 hours, 20 minutes).

Now, of course 20th-level characters can and should be very powerful. I just think that because of how many D&D spells scale, the tradeoff is just too good. With this system in place, a 19Ftr/1Clr would be (I think) a lot better at melee than a 20Ftr -- and have nifty noncombat spells to boot. There's too much return for too small an investment.

 

[Tony Vargas]

None of this changes, except for the last bit. Basically, caster level == character level under this rule change. Any spell effect that depends on caster level at the moment just uses character level instead.



D00d, what on earth are you talking about?

Game balance. By declaring character level to be caster level, you're effectively stacking stuff that isn't there (the caster levels of non-casters). It's something-for-nothing. Not conducive to game balance.

I agree that the way caster/caster MCs end up being like two casters standing next to eachother is less than satisfying, but it is a balanced way to do it. An alternative would be to stack the caster levels, but not the spells/day (so, if you were say, a Cleric 4/Wiz 5, your caster level would be 9th, but your spells/day would not be the sum of the two, but the greater of the two).

A less extreme alternative might be the Blended Technique feat I posted.

 

[hong]

So that makes me a bit wary. But, okay, five Magic Missiles isn't terribly unbalancing. So let's pick a better example. Divine Favor. I think any fighter would have to be crazy not to take one level of cleric and get +6 luck bonus to hit and damage with a first level spell. Stack that with Shield of Faith: +5 deflection AC for 20 minutes. Or consider the 17Rog/3Drd, melee touching with flameblade (1D8+10+sneak) and protected with fully powered-up barkskin (+5 natural armor for 3 hours, 20 minutes).

Good point.

IMO this is more a problem with how certain spells work, in particular the clerical/druid ones. It's a well-known wart that a cleric can become a better fighter than a fighter, by choosing the right buff-up spells (a result of the designers wanting to bribe players into being the party medic, I guess). The druid also gets some pretty nasty spells, including the ones you mention.

If I was writing D&D 4E, I'd change the way these spells work so they were more in line with the others. However, since I'm not writing 4E, that's indeed a problem.

 

[whydirt]

Here's a possible solution:

Improved Spellcasting [General]
You have increased your spellcasting ability in one of your classes.
Prerequisites: Spellcasting ability at a level lower than your total character level.
Benefit: Choose a spellcasting class you possess. Your spellcasting level is increased by up to +2 as long as the new spellcaster level total does not exceed your total character level.
Special: You may select this feat multiple times, each time you must choose a different spellcasting class to increase in level.



I like the idea of weighing options in 3E, and with this feat, you can have better multiclassed spellcasters, but they have to give up something else (a feat in this case) to do so.

 

[hong]

Here's a possible solution:

Improved Spellcasting [General]
You have increased your spellcasting ability in one of your classes.
Prerequisites: Spellcasting ability at a level lower than your total character level.
Benefit: Choose a spellcasting class you possess. Your spellcasting level is increased by up to +2 as long as the new spellcaster level total does not exceed your total character level.
Special: You may select this feat multiple times, each time you must choose a different spellcasting class to increase in level.

Hey, that's not bad!