Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 5862366" data-attributes="member: 6688937">What I'd do, anyway.Yoi, solving the CoDzilla problem...and the Vancian problem?....Okay, so CoDzilla issues, broadly speaking:1) Stepping on other classes' toes: Simple, don't design those spells, OR design them to be strictly worse than the thief (or whoever) that they upstage. This is accomplished by giving them low chances of success, obstructive casting requirements (time, money, etc.), or other significant drawbacks. This is easier to deal with when such spells are all ritually cast, rather than combat castable.2) They can do ANYTHING with magic: This is a little more controversial...Simply limit what any individual caster can know/learn. If you can only know 4 third level spells, you'll be more picky about what they are, and not become the party's swiss army knife. Bonus - this could be worked to make metamagic feats more interesting. I'm thinking something similar to the spell/level charts from 3e would stand as a "maximum known" spells for a caster, rather than castable/day.3) At higher levels, they can have a spell memorized to neutralize any threat, and have killer combos:...Simple, drastically limit the number of spells they can have prepared. (compared to historical values, anyway) So maybe a primary caster can only prepare 3+intModifier spells or something. I suppose feats or class features, etc. could raise that number as the character gains experience. This "nerfing" is somewhat alleviated by allowing the caster to make some of his old lower level spells "at will". 4) Quadratic power: while somewhat an effect of #s 2 and 3, this also became a particular issue in 3e. I feel that Magic use in 3e became too scientific and reliable. Spells and magic use need more risk. Whether that should be a "systemic" risk, or worked flavorfully into individual spells is an arguable point. (I prefer the spells, personally.) 5) Wildshaping, Polymorphing, Summon Monster, etc.: Super open abilities like this can go two ways - either make individual usages into spells Bear Shape, Summon Badger, etc. Or make them into rituals with complicated rules. Both can happen simultaneously.6) Wand of Cure Light Wounds: make wands work more like metamagic wands instead of a bag of 50 scrolls. Vancian issues...IMO, all the Vancian issues are issues with whole setup of D&D magic vs. a lot of the fantasy genre. (Although, magic works very differently amongst the breadth of Fantasy.) This is especially true if we take the entirety of the spellcasting architecture from the first three editions as the definition of "Vancian" rather than the "Fire and Forget" aspect, which is easily solved by refreshing our newly short list of prepared spells with short rests or something like that. Changing this refresh value would provide an easy "dial" to raise or lower the magic power in a campaign world.I favor keeping ritual magic around, and reserving spell "slots" for magical actions that make more sense for use during an encounter (combat or otherwise). Most fantasy sources seem to distinguish between magic that is used as a rather spontaneous ability and magic that requires a big(ger) setup.In any case, that's how I'd go about "solving" it while keeping an old(er) edition feel. I have no delusions about the likelihood of that being how WOTC does it.</blockquote>

Verification