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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Persiflage" data-source="post: 5337341" data-attributes="member: 73597">As others have said: by the rules, neither.  Sorcerors can't (at least not explicitly) cast a lower-level spell from a higher-level slot so imposing penalties for them doing so isn't relevant.On the other hand, if your party sorceror wants to suck 17 times times a day instead of only 6 or so, I would have zero problem with them going right ahead.  Their fellow party members might wish they had a sorceror who was a bit more useful, but as a DM I'd allow it.Um...  I'd argue that it's exactly the opposite, most of the time.  The sorceror gets tonnes of spells per day but only a handful of spells known.  Spells don't scale properly: higher-level spells are just flat-out better than lower-level ones, so anybody employing higher-level slots to cast unmodified lower-level spells is really wasting the sorceror's only advantage: that of being able to sling more-powerful spells around at a greater rate.  This is why Versatile Spellcaster is so rock-your-face awesome: in general, "1x 4th-level spell" > "2x 3rd-level spells" and so forth.That said, I do sort-of see your point, inasmuch as the sorceror knows so few different spells that the situation may well arise where the couple of higher-level spells he knows aren't appropriate whilst the lower-level spells are.  In that sense, his versatility would be improved.However, if he takes Rapid Metamagic there's no reason at all why he'd ever bother blowing a high-level slot on an unmodified spell and the argument comes full circle.Incidentally, how would people treat the Arcane Preparation feat?  In the fluff text it says:"You can prepare an arcane spell ahead of time just as a wizard does.  When you do so, you need not take any extra time to apply metamagic  feats upon casting that spell."To me, that would imply that you could (if you really wanted to) prepare a lower-level spell in a higher-level slot, just as a wizard can.However, the actual Benefits section of the feat (which I acknowledge is the bit that actually matters) says:"Preparing a spell uses a slot of the appropriate level."...which tells me that - intended or not - the Sorceror still can't prepare a low-level spell in a high-level slot without using metamagic feats to modify the level. It does have a disadvantage: he's using up slots that could have gone to better spells.  I have to admit though, my feelings on the general argument are being strongly coloured by the specific case...   Fireball.  Geez.  If I could get past that, maybe I'd be more convinced that allowing someone to spam lower-level spells is in some way unbalancing.  It does mean fewer spells per day, but as I said earlier, spells just don't scale in a linear way.  If your spell selection is good then just one of the most awesome spells at a given level is more awesome than two of the most awesome spells at the level below.  Looking at it a bit more simply, having fewer spells per day is only relevant if you ever run out of spells in a day.  Not only are your higher-level spells more powerful and therefore more attractive to use, but for most of your career you have fewer of them (if you accept that "your higher-level spells" is a moveable feast) and are therefore more likely to run out of them.Ergo, trading lower-level spells for higher-level spells is a significant power-up, and the chances are that you're really giving up nothing whatsoever in exchange because you're simply sacrificing slots for spells you'd never have got around to using anyway.Unless, of course, you've got some sort of weird fireball fixation.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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