Care to share the full spell descriptions for these? Some interesting ideas here!
They're fairly simply worded (except steal spell). However, when shared before, there was a lot of feedback and discussion like below - so I encourage DMs to work the ideas out for themselves if they like them. If you really want you can search ENworld for my name and the spell name of some of these spells. People come to these with preconceptions on balance and they rarely line up with what playtesting over the decades has revealed to me. However, I rarely convince people that my experience matters more than their assumptions.
I do have to note that campaign design has a huge impact on the effectiveness of these spells. In a world where the PCs are the only spell casters these are irrelevant. In a world where your local farmer is a 7th level wizard, these take on a different role. My setting is designed so that only a small percentage of people have powers of a 3rd level PC or above. A typical human that studies their entire life might become a 5th level mage. An elf over a thousand years might reach 9th level. Unless you're God touched, advancing as quickly and as high as a PC is effectively impossible. That means that many of these spells are only useful amongst battles of Godtouched which are fairly rare.
Love this idea[Deflection] - very Dr. Strange. I would hope the roll is a little trickier/harder than standard counterspell.
It always requires a roll (no automatic use for spells of level 3 or below). The offset here is that you have to prepare it, and it is useless against certain spells that only have 1 legal target. For a lot of these spells, you need to factor in that 'preparation' cost to see the balance.
I would bump this [Delay Spell]to 4th level as it is a (potentially) more offensive use of counterspell (unless the target caster knew their spell had been delayed).
That is not how it plays out. People get out of the way of a fireball, or move out of range of the spell before it goes off, or do other things - but generally it plays weaker than counterspell. There are
select situations in which it plays out better than counterspell, but not many. People see this as a cheap counterspell and then learn it is more limited.
I like the ideas here, too, but I would bump them up (especially for no concentration!) unless they are limited in some other fashion. Maybe you can only suppress a spell you could cast or only of a certain level (and the spell would still get to roll)?
These have decades of playtesting behind them. They're non-problematic because of what you need to give up in order to get them - they are conditional and most of these spells fail against counterspell in important ways - meaning that counterspell tends to be more universally useful - but situationally some of these spells
can be more powerful.
Think back to an old goodie like Spell Immunity from prior editions. It gave a PC immunity to a specified spell. It was a 4th level "Priest" Spell in 2nd Edition.
There were quite a range of spell-countering spells back in 2e... It was an interesting puzzle, but having to solve it every time became tiresome, and more importantly, it took round after round of back-and-forth before their defenses were worn down sufficiently that you could start hurling actual damage-dealing effects at them, and 5e combat just doesn't tend to last that long.
There is a difference in the design here - it isn't the old "use X spell to counter Y specific spell". It is a broader technique for countering magical attacks - but you have to pick your method when preparing/learning spells. A spell dualist might select 4 or 5 of these spells if they are going to hunt a wizard - but most mages can't affford to have more than 1 or 2 of them prepared.
They create more dynamic situations than just relying upon dispel and counterspell. That means there are ups - where they are more effective than just countering a spell - and downs - where you wish you had counterspell because deflection/delay/steal/etc... just don't do anything useful for you.
Deflection is useless when the spell being cast can only target the caster, or otherwise only has 1 legal target due to range restrictions.
Delay spell often requires people to take a further step to effectively negate the spell benefits for the caster. Further, it sometimes doesn't really change the battle at all. A note is that it is a concentration spell for the Delay Spell caster to 'hold the spell' in stasis in this edition.
Suppress Spell sounds cool - but most times when it is cast, either the opponent knows you have it and can anticipate what you've suppressed (or identify it with an identify spell if they have a chance), or there is the chance that the spell you anticipated seeing never comes up for natural reasons. This is less of a problem with the advanced version, but that requires a high level slot and effectively is a counterspell that lingers.[/quote]
