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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5788537" data-attributes="member: 82106">The problem is that's sort of just saying "it was such-and-such a way in 1e, thus it has to be that way forever", which is fine with things that were OK in 1e, but a lot of spells were either too low or too high level by a lot compared to their actual utility and effect. 4e got clever and ranked things by the category of effect in a much more logical fashion, generally. If you're going to improve spell casting and make it work better in the game you're going to have to be willing to make some significant changes to 'spell levels'. Some things can be limited by action economy, yes. Invisibility in 4e for instance uses this technique. It also just grants total concealment effectively, which means you still aren't always hidden (and I guess that was true to a certain extent even before 4th, though the AD&D rules tended to be pretty ambiguous on what that meant). Other things like flying are only somewhat restricted by a technique like that. You still gain a huge amount of mobility, which tends to restrict the DM on what sorts of challenges will be effective. I think people somewhat overestimate how much spells were 'shifted to combat use'. There are certainly a LOT of spells that are not much use outside of combat, but that was always true. About 90% of utility spells are quite useful outside of combat, and whole classes of attack spells are too. This would include things like walls, zones that block LoS, all summons, many conjurations, and a goodly number of other spells. In at least some situations a LOT of spells can be used creatively. I've seen quite a bit of this kind of thing in my games. Really just about as much as in AD&D, except the spells are a lot less like to be just "well, I cast X and that wraps up the problem". Anyway, rituals really help out a lot there, and they're really in some ways more flexible than even old Vancian spells were.</blockquote>

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