Spells/Powers Becoming Obsolete With Level

[Falling Icicle]

In 3.x and Pathfinder, Sleep couldn't affect a target with 5 or more HD, making it all but useless after 5th or 6th level. There are numerous other spells that likewise became obsolete at higher levels, such as cause fear, hypnotism, pattern spells, and so on. I was never fond of this, to put it kindly.

In 4th edition, spells don't scale by level or have silly and arbitrary HD limits. Sleep is just as useful at level 30 as it is at level 1. While this was a very nice change, 4e still had the problem of spells becoming obsolete, it just did it in a different way. In that edition, you replaced old spells as you gained higher level ones. They literally disappeared from a wizard's spellbook, even! This makes me roll my eyes every time I read it.

In 5e, can we not have any form of spells becoming obsolete at higher levels, pretty please? This goes for fighter "exploits" too. The idea of a fighter suddenly forgetting how to cleave once he learns whirlwind attack is just as stupid as spells disappearing from a spellbook.

 

[FireLance]

I think there are two ways of overcoming this, both of which have been used in later-4e material.

1) The power itself scales as you gain levels, e.g. it deals more damage or has a more powerful effect when you use it at higher levels.

2) The "replacement power" is strictly superior to the power that it replaces. This is effectively the same as (1), except the name of the power also changes.

However, neither of these would stop someone replacing a lower-level power with something completely different. I don't suppose it would be too difficult to allow characters to retain the ability to use the lower-level powers, though. At most, it would just add to the character's complexity without significantly affecting its power.

 

[BASHMAN]

Agreed. When Skill Challenges die in a fire, I hope they use this as the kindling.

 

[Sunseeker]

1) The power itself scales as you gain levels, e.g. it deals more damage or has a more powerful effect when you use it at higher levels.

This is my favored solution to the long running issue of having a list of 324587364587932645 powers which don't do anything unless you're fighting something so weak it's not really worth the effort.

Sure, let players select new powers as they go, let them choose replacements as well, but all powers should IMO, scale with the level of the character. More options and choices=more fun.

 

[trancejeremy]

I disagree.

Level (and hit dice) aren't just arbitrary rules, they gauge a character or monster's relative power.

Lesser, weak, feeble monsters (and characters) should be affected by lower level spells, and things like sleep/charm/fear, while something powerful shouldn't even notice such things.

I think to a certain extent (like a lot of things) video games and MMORPGs have reduced the original concept. Like you might have a 50th level guy. But he's now simply fighting 50th level wolves or orcs or boars as opposed to 1st level ones, rather than truly powerful beings that should be that high a level, like Balrogs and Giant Dragons and Titans and the Tarrasque.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I've heard that hit points and other things will scale much more slowly in 5e (which makes me very happy, if it's true). If so, having spells improve as you level-up may not even be needed. They could also do things 3.5 psionics style, where you can augment lower level spells by paying more to cast them. Monte cook suggested that fireball would work that way.

 

[Falling Icicle]

I disagree.

Level (and hit dice) aren't just arbitrary rules, they gauge a character or monster's relative power.

Lesser, weak, feeble monsters (and characters) should be affected by lower level spells, and things like sleep/charm/fear, while something powerful shouldn't even notice such things.

Higher level monsters already have things to gauge their power, such as better saving throws and defenses. Powerful creatures also tend to have their own immunities when appropriate.

Why should charm person remain useful forever, but not sleep? There is just no reason why one spell should become obsolete but others remain useful forever.

 

[Oni]

I really dislike replacing powers with other different powers in order to remain current, and needing to replace them with almost the same power just higher level seems kind of redundant and silly. My answer is basically that it depends. Some powers don't need to scale they stay fairly useful throughout the lifetime of the character. If the number of uses is fixed, i.e. if its at will or 1/day and that is built into the power it should scale as needed. However if you have a system were both the number of uses of the power (or similar powers) is both increasing per day and scaling then you can wind up with issues. For instance in the classic Vancian model of spellcasting your not only gaining new and more powerful powers, but the old ones are increasing in frequency and becoming stronger as well. Of course not all the spells scale equally well (if they scale at all) and so some get left to the wayside, meaning everyone starts taking the same things. My current thinking on this, is that if they want to have a more balanced Vancian system it needs to scale by slot. If a spell needs scaling to retain functionality then it should it should be scaled to the level its memorized at and each of those scalings should be balanced against spells of that level.

Also instead of having a hard cap on powers, I think that all classes should have some opportunity to expand laterally. Wizards for instance have their spells, other classes should be able to pick up feats or something without a hard cap on the number they can have.

 

[Hassassin]

I think limits should be less arbitrary - DC and number of targets should be enough for sleep, for example. Make the overall power curve flatter and those spells will still be relevant for many levels.

I'd also like to see the number of spell slots grow slower than in 3e. For example, a quick tweak to the Wizard's Spells per Day follows.

[sblock=Old]3/1
4/2
4/2/1
4/3/2
4/3/2/1
4/3/3/2
4/4/3/2/1
4/4/3/3/2
4/4/4/3/2/1
...
4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4/4[/sblock][sblock=New]3/1
4/2
4/2/1
4/3/2
4/3/2/1
3/3/3/2
2/4/3/2/1
2/3/3/3/2
1/2/4/3/2/1
...
1/1/1/1/1/1/4/4/4/4[/sblock]This would leave in low level slots, so that you'll never "lose" the low level spells, but reduce the number once they no longer matter so much. You can still use higher level slots to prepare lower level spells.

For martial "powers", I'd like to see characters never lose an ability, except if they explicitly choose to retrain it to an equally powerful ability. I would also prefer class features and feats that added versatility instead of making existing abilities more powerful. Character power should grow automatically through BAB and defenses, so that ability choices could never make you worse.

 

[Mokona]

Actually, spells become obsolete in 4e in another way. If you like the effect of a 1st level daily but you're 30th level that 1st level daily is clearly under-powered compared to the "best" dailies you could access. Sometimes, however, there was no equivalent effect scaled to the power level of your current level. This was annoying.

If levels give you more options instead of bigger numbers this problem becomes muted.