Zaruthustran
The tingling means it’s working!
Partial prep was all the rage in 3E Organized Play, at least in the Pacific Northwest. A caster would prep his auto-includes but leave at least 1 or 2 slots open. This way, you had a shot at dealing with whatever the adventure threw at you. It really suited Organized Play because you often had no idea what adventure you were going to play, or what it contained. And no time to construct a full list on the fly; convention games were on strict schedules and some adventures started with "roll initiative."
Anyway.
5e is not 3e. As others have stressed: the list of prepared spells interacts with, but is different from spell slots. The rules says that the complete list of spells is prepared all at once. There is a mechanism for changing that complete list after a long rest, but no explicit mechanism for partial preparation / completing a partially-prepared list.
That said: sure, a DM can certainly come up with rules for partial prep. Just allow the player to prepare less than their full list, and use the "preparing a new list" times for adding spells to that list.
PS for folks coming from 3e: once that list of prepared spells is made, it stays "intact" until you change it. If you're not changing your list, there's no need to spend time re-preparing that same list each day. In other words: if your cleric is jumped in the morning, he's still got all his prepared spells available. There's no longer a requirement to take time to pray to "regain" spells.
Anyway.
5e is not 3e. As others have stressed: the list of prepared spells interacts with, but is different from spell slots. The rules says that the complete list of spells is prepared all at once. There is a mechanism for changing that complete list after a long rest, but no explicit mechanism for partial preparation / completing a partially-prepared list.
That said: sure, a DM can certainly come up with rules for partial prep. Just allow the player to prepare less than their full list, and use the "preparing a new list" times for adding spells to that list.
PS for folks coming from 3e: once that list of prepared spells is made, it stays "intact" until you change it. If you're not changing your list, there's no need to spend time re-preparing that same list each day. In other words: if your cleric is jumped in the morning, he's still got all his prepared spells available. There's no longer a requirement to take time to pray to "regain" spells.
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