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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Spenser" data-source="post: 232292" data-attributes="member: 5311">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.</blockquote>

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