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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 5882539" data-attributes="member: 87792">You could.  Just give them a casting time measured in minutes and a cost and few are going to bother.  And that makes your spellbook the spells you know well enough to cast reflexively.  (For that matter I have the house rule that a wizard can cast any wizard at will attack power in 3 rounds as long as they don't move - it doesn't happen IME).  Ultimately I don't mind Vancian casting.  What I mind is the classic Wizard (and Cleric) class.  Spell points are trying to fix the symptom not the cause.What's wrong with the wizard can be shown easily by looking at Lord of the Rings.  In the whole of Lord of the Rings, Gandalf casts about six spells.  A third level 3.X specialist wizard can cast seven significant spells (plus cantrips).  Per day.  And then even if they've spent a night sleeping on a bed of nails (and a night's sleep is something everyone needs so it's not a specific inconvenience), they can cast seven spells the next day.  It's absurd by the standards of Lord of The Rings - or just about any protagonist from Appendix N.  For that matter I'm not sure Harry Potter normally casts seven spells in a day. The problems with Vancian magic to me boil down to the same two things. 1: The Wizard has too much magic.  A fifth level wizard makes Gandalf look like an amateur.  If you cut the wizard (and other primary casting classes) out of the game, the top tier class that remains in the PHB is the Bard.  Cut all the primary casters out and the best caster is still right at the top of the power tree. 2: The recharge times are wrong.  Resetting your spells should be something much more significant.  It works in classic dungeoncrawling where you make far to many wandering monster checks to make an 8 hour rest healthy.  And the penalty for recharging isn't a night's rest but schlepping back to town.  But for a less focussed game this does not work.  It means that for any situation that takes time to unfold the wizard can reprepare quite happily.  Make it at least a full day and much more of the problem vanishes. (3: In 3.X the crafting rules were broken.  But that's not inherent). Most of the spellpoint systems or the like don't fix either of these problems - if anything they make them worse as they mean with a very few versatile spells the wizard always has a good one to hand.  "True Vancian" casting with only a handful of prepared spells and needing time in a lab to prepare would be fascinating.  But that's not what we have.</blockquote>

Verification