Spontaneous Casting for Arcane Casters

[accipiter]

Okay, so one of my players suggested a potential house rule for our Eberron game today. His idea is that, essentially, a specialist wizard could pick a fixed spell from his selected school (I was thinking maybe one new spell every three or four levels) to spontaneously convert other spells into ala a cleric's spontaneous healing or a druid's spontaneous converting to summons.

The nearest rules analogue I can think of is the Signature Spell and Spell Mastery combo, but there are some serious drawbacks to that. I think the wizard is already pretty darn versatile, but maybe something like this would be incentive to take a specialist?

I was wondering if there was anything already out there like this (I'm almost positive I remember reading about something similar), or if not, what your thoughts are on balance, other ideas for cost (maybe a feat?), or refinements to the idea?

 

[Spatzimaus]

Not to sound too much like a broken record, but we do something very similar in our homebrew. In our system, the Wizard (a WIS-based caster class that's a cross between a Wizard and a Cleric) can swap his spells, similar to how a Cleric does it. This started as a reworking of the Cleric domain rules, but it's a little different. Translated into 3.5E terms, it'd go like this:

At the start of each day, the Wizard picks any number of spells from his specialty/domains, whose total level equals his character level (NOT class level), and stores them in a special Focus item (sort of a cross between a Holy Symbol and the Harry Potter-style wands, although you could make your sword or hockey stick a Focus if you wanted... the only limitation is that it has to be held in your hand while casting). This Focus has other uses, like the ability to cast cantrips from his specialty more or less at will.

He can then swap any prepared slot for one of his stored spells of equal or lower level (or ANY cantrip), expending the spell slot but not the stored spell. And in an emergency, he can just cast the spell directly from the Focus, expending it for the day.

So, for example, let's take Bob the 10th-level Evoker Wizard. Bob can cast 5th-level spells. Bob stores 10 levels of spells in his wand, all of which must be Evocation. So, for today he picks lightning bolt (3rd level), fireball (3rd level), scorching ray (2nd level), magic missile (1st level), and burning hands (1st level).
He could swap his 5th, 4th, and 3rd-level prepared spells for any of the five listed spells, although anything other than the top two would be a huge waste. He could swap his 2nd-level spells for any of the last three, and he could swap any of his non-cantrip spells for the last two.
He could have dropped burning hands and one of the 3rd-level spells to take ice storm instead, which'd give a slightly smaller drop in power when swapping out the 5th-level spell slots. But then again, why wouldn't he just memorize his big attack powers in his top slots from the start? At level 11, instead of adding another 1st-level spell, he might drop burning hands and lightning bolt to pick up cone of cold (5th level).

Any metamagic must be placed on the spells BEFORE they're stored. That is, if you want to put empowered lightning bolt into your Focus, it'll count as 5 levels towards your total, but you can then swap any 5th-level or higher spells for it spontaneously, without increasing its casting time.

Now, this is substantially weaker (in number of spell levels, anyway) than the 3.5E swapping for Clerics, but it's far more flexible. If you want three or four 1st-level spells in there, you can do that. Besides, swapping high-level spells for an 8th or 9th-level spell is kind of a waste, because if your swap spell (the various heals) were that good, you could just have memorized those to begin with. So most of the demand for spell swapping came at the low end anyway.

 

[accipiter]

Interesting (and thank you for the link)! An entire class might be a little deeper than I was thinking, but I really like the idea of a focus item! How did you find it worked in play? Did it scale well? I wonder if I could convert some of your class features into, say, a feat that allows a similar use of a focus?

I think we were discussing using the specialist wizard mostly because my players seem to feel specialists are underpowered (ie, not worth taking ever). I'd mentioned that my own wizard character had Signature Spell and Spell Mastery, and my wizard player thought it was a neat combo, but that the drawbacks made it useless to him (essentially, he'd have to wait so long to take Spell Mastery with spells powerful enough to make it worthwhile that he could have long since gone another route).

I'm also trying not to outshine the cleric or the druid, or to elide the sorcerer or warlock -- just to give a wizard willing to go the specialist route some perks that might make it worth playing in my players' eyes.

What we hashed out was basically that a specialist wizard, in addition to what he already gets and loses, can pick one spell from his particular school every few levels that becomes basically a Signature Spell for him. So, say one every time he gets a stat boost, plus one at first level, would be 5 spells over the course of his career... roughly equal to Spell Mastery? And Signature Spell requires you to pick one of those Spell Mastery Spells, so it'd be like getting five free Signature Spell feats.

I think that seems to be overpowered, on paper -- six free feats plus the regular benefits for giving up two schools of magic? On the other hand, the spells would be across a range of levels and entirely from one school. On the other, other hand, this might be way too good for the guy who specializes in fireball, but not nearly good enough for the guy who wants to be an illusionist.

 

[Spatzimaus]

Interesting (and thank you for the link)! An entire class might be a little deeper than I was thinking, but I really like the idea of a focus item! How did you find it worked in play? Did it scale well? I wonder if I could convert some of your class features into, say, a feat that allows a similar use of a focus?

It worked very well, but there was a drawback I didn't mention: the Wizard needed his Focus item to cast anything other than cantrips or spells within his specialty. So, it was pretty crippling if the DM found a way to disarm him. (To compensate, Focus items get a bonus to HP and hardness, and we we're also thinking of giving them spell resistance; frankly, we're rapidly reaching the point where we call them "familiars" and just use the 3.5E table.)

It scaled well in practice, simply because most specialties have "dead" levels. Take the D&D example I gave; does that Evoker really NEED to pick a 4th-level spell to swap to? He has so few good ones within his specialty to begin with. In our system we don't quite use the same array of spells, but the effect still holds.

Or take a healer, for instance (since our "Wizard" class combines the Cleric and Wizard, and so has heals as well); if at 20th level he could swap to mass heal (8), heal (6), cure critical wounds (4), and cure moderate wounds (2), that's more than enough for most people. While he'd have to drop his 3rd-level spells down to 2nd if he wanted to swap them, the improvement in the high-end spells (mass heal is FAR better than mass cure critical wounds) makes up for that, and if he wanted to put harm instead of heal for the 6th-level slot, he could do that too. Or, more likely, drop the mass heal from the swap list, and pick up a few more low-level spells to compensate.

If you're talking about adding this ability to the 3.5E specialist wizards, then there really needs to be some major drawback to offset. I wouldn't even make this unlockable through a Feat or two unless you found a way to add more negatives.

I think we were discussing using the specialist wizard mostly because my players seem to feel specialists are underpowered (ie, not worth taking ever).

Never had that problem; most people I knew went specialist just for the extra spell slots. Our campaigns tended to be very combat-intensive (or rest-limited, depending on your perspective), where those extra few slots mattered; Sorcerers became very popular because of this.
But then again, our semi-core campaign (i.e., not the homebrew) basically dumped the Wizard class entirely in favor of the Psion long ago, partially because we made a small change to how Clerics handle their domains that basically made the Wizard semi-obsolete.
And that's why in our homebrew, the other caster classes (Channeler and Mutant) are effectively unlimited in spells per day. It's just more appropriate to our playstyle.

What we hashed out was basically that a specialist wizard, in addition to what he already gets and loses, can pick one spell from his particular school every few levels that becomes basically a Signature Spell for him.

It's not necessarily a bad concept, but you might want to limit it so that it's not the full Signature Spell effect. Give only half the benefits, for instance.