tweaking Wizards and Sorcerers to high-magic setting

[Herobizkit]

I am in the process of tweaking Wizards and Sorcerers to suit a friend's campaign. He has stated to me that his campaign is intentionally high-magic, meaning that the spellthrowers are the people in power.

Before WotC released the Sorcerer class, back in 2nd ed, we had already dumped memorization in favour of spontaneous spellcasting. You could cast any spell on your list, you could find new spells, and when you cast spells they came out of your "spell slots" as usual. With the advent of 3.x, it looks like they took that ability away and gave it to another class altogether...

So, we decided to try an experiment. Wizards stay the same; they will always be spontaneous spellcasters and can pick and choose whatever spell they have in their spellbooks to cast. But what about Sorcerers, who can do so already?

We've decided that Sorcerers gain feats just like Wizards, one every five levels plus one bonus feat at 1st level. The Sorcerer can choose any metamagic or item creation feat for which he qualifies. In addition, we've decided that Sorcerers must stick to the smaller spell lists and cannot learn spells like wizards. To compensate, we've decided to allow Sorcerers a special metamagic ability: a Sorcerer can apply any metamagic feat to their spells without suffering a full-round action, PLUS they get their first spell slot cost "free". So, a Sorcerer may use Silent Spell or Still Spell without using one spell slot higher for their spell. Casting a Quickened spell costs 3 levels higher, not 4... and so on.

Ideally, We would like to see Sorcerers work towards being able to get Quickened spells "at cost". So, I put forward that, for every bonus metamagic feat the Sorcerer gets (1 at 1st, 1 at 5th, 1 at 10th, 1 at 15th), he reduces the metamagic "cost" by one spell slot. I would like some kind of nice ability to cap off 20th, but can't think of one.

What does everyone think? Comments, thoughts, ideas, suggestions?

 

[Li Shenron]

It's hard to tell. The boost you've already done for Wizards is very big, but it sounds like you've played it before so it must work fine for your game. Roughly, I think that the suggested boost to Sorcerers is probably big enough as well to compensate.

The metamagic discount could easily be abused in some cases, so watch out for metamagic feats which cost a +1. Being able to Enlarge, Silence or Still all your spells is already huge, but can still be accepted.
But other metamagic feats could be quite broken, especially if you find feats (not core) that add some damage to the spell for a +1 which becomes +0.

A very powerful but different option could be to instead boost the number of MM feats even more, for example making it 1 bonus metamagic feat per sorcerer level (instead of wizards-like bonus feats). If you still keep the cost of metamagic as normal, this will add a lot to the sorcerer versaility but without being abusable in specific cases.