Spatzimaus
First Post
I'm trying to figure out something here, and could use some input. It's for more of a homebrew system of sorts, but we're trying to integrate into 3E.
The Mind's Eye introduced the concept of Power Chains, where you can upgrade along a chain. It always seemed backwards to me and my friends that spellcasters didn't learn chains; a Sorcerer who learned Teleport often wouldn't bother learning Teleport Without Error, even though it seems natural that it'd be his next goal. How many conjurers take all nine Summon Monster spells? It just seems wrong that a specialist would skip an intermediate spell out of some sort of metagame thinking.
So, we wanted to create an "alien" system of magic, where all spells in a chain were actually just variations of a single spell, and you could memorize the basic "spell" at any level to get different benefits. You'd learn a few basic spells (domains), and stick with their variations for your entire career. It's your specialty. Basically, you'd take each Domain and convert it into a single "spell" to get what I'm thinking of. Some domains obviously wouldn't work for this, and some new ones would need to be added, of course. But the point is, someone who knows how to Dimension Door should also know Blink, Teleport, Teleport w/o Error, and so on.
The question is, how would I balance it for classes that don't know all spells? How many of these chains should one caster learn, and how many spells per day would be appropriate? Is it possible to add this sort of thing to Sorcerers and such without ruining balance? (Obviously it's better than 1 known spell but not as good as 9 different ones). If I replaced the Sorcerer's entire "known" list with, say, 1 chain at level 1 and one at every even level, would that be enough?
Any thoughts?
The Mind's Eye introduced the concept of Power Chains, where you can upgrade along a chain. It always seemed backwards to me and my friends that spellcasters didn't learn chains; a Sorcerer who learned Teleport often wouldn't bother learning Teleport Without Error, even though it seems natural that it'd be his next goal. How many conjurers take all nine Summon Monster spells? It just seems wrong that a specialist would skip an intermediate spell out of some sort of metagame thinking.
So, we wanted to create an "alien" system of magic, where all spells in a chain were actually just variations of a single spell, and you could memorize the basic "spell" at any level to get different benefits. You'd learn a few basic spells (domains), and stick with their variations for your entire career. It's your specialty. Basically, you'd take each Domain and convert it into a single "spell" to get what I'm thinking of. Some domains obviously wouldn't work for this, and some new ones would need to be added, of course. But the point is, someone who knows how to Dimension Door should also know Blink, Teleport, Teleport w/o Error, and so on.
The question is, how would I balance it for classes that don't know all spells? How many of these chains should one caster learn, and how many spells per day would be appropriate? Is it possible to add this sort of thing to Sorcerers and such without ruining balance? (Obviously it's better than 1 known spell but not as good as 9 different ones). If I replaced the Sorcerer's entire "known" list with, say, 1 chain at level 1 and one at every even level, would that be enough?
Any thoughts?
