What do you think of this idea: 1st-level spells = cantrips
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- What do you think of this idea: 1st-level spells = cantrips29 votes
- Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.44.83%
- Get out of here with that garbage!55.17%
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My recommendation for the Wand of Magic Missile would be to simply make it more powerful--five missiles instead of one, which makes it useful for anybody and less likely to get left behind in a dungeon.
Other than that, it's a promising idea; there's a reason why 4e and 5e both treat cantrips as at-will spells.
Only chill touch, friends and shocking grasp are cantrips though, all the rest are still first level spells. changing or adding spells to others like ray of frost, acid splash, and fire bolt, (even mending - fix those damn broken weapons) can increase the list.
Anything else maybe too OP especially with the ever memory ring. for example identifying everything you come across limits a bards usefulness and saves you a ton of money and time.
The reason is that current spell selection per level do not always make much sense with respect to progression. Doing a large scale moving of spells to different levels to balance out progression (especially unrepresented spell schools for some levels) can improve the game very much. I am not going to give examples since there are too many to take note of but I am sure you get the point.
For me, taking the hallmark assailment of Magic Missiles and the indispensable Level One Finger of Death away from arcane casters is a big no no. Not to mention that an alternate mechanic for handling level 1 spells creates unnecessary confusion.
Tell you what, if you're hell bent on implementing cantrips, Neverwinter Nights has a couple of nice ones. I experimented with them a while back and they translate pretty well into the IE. Most were quite useful while not feeling too overpowered and you can easily invent further ones looking at these for reference.
From my experience, I would suggest introducing a separate item with unlimited uses to facilitate casting cantrips, rather than making a mess of the hardcoded character spellbook. At least that's the implementation I found to be the most convenient solution, especially when teaching my AI scripts to actually make use of the cantrips in combat. Though, admittedly, that was long ago on BGT, so things might look somewhat different in the brave new EE world.
Maybe in thinking too early on this.
Reflected Image is another problematic one. Pretty useless as is, but if cast at-will it's a flat 50% chance to evade a physical attack or a targeted spell. On top of everything else the caster might already have. For free.
But are no garbage, I see how they can be interesting for other players, so I choose to not vote as b ooth the choices are too extreme for me.
The reason why I say that is not my kind of things is that I think that at low levels infinite casting of spells, even rebalanced lev1 ones, is too powerful and lead to cheap kiting tactics almost naturally (considering how much some players enjoy to exploit the AI weakness). At higher levels they become not useful, as I think that resting is wise when the mages have used the bulk of the memorized spells. And the (fully charged) wands cover perfectly the use that centrips would have in my playing style, giving more durability to the mages spellbooks between a major fight and an other.
At very high level those centrips can become game breakers. Imagine a high level mage, or his PI, with IA and RoV, he can spam almost an infinite number of MM, Chromatic Orb, Burning Hands, Spook, Sleep and Blindness. Which enemy (not immune to lev1 spells) can resist to that? You basically kill dragons in a couple of rounds using a single lev9 spell and centrips...
But then how the availability of centrips can change something in the life of a mage with lev9 spells?
And I already exposed the reasons why they can become too powerful in the early game, when enemies have low HP and bad saves, and superfluous between those 2 extremes as wands cover the purpose pretty well.
Some of the candidates to become centrips, like spook, have already good save bonuses and still often fail even using GM an Doom when used against high level enemies. Is an unlimited number of castings that can make them OP, every enemy who will not automatically save (there is not something like a critical miss in ST) will fail a save given an unlimited number of castings.
I see how the proposed mod can be useful in some minimum rest runs or using other styles of playing (ie not selling and buying/stealing wands to have them fully charged) that I don't use, that is why I chose to not vote them as "garbage". The idea is good, even if it is not so good for me.
But the problems I address remain, too much power and possibility to exploit a weak AI in early game, little use in mid game and a potential of OP in the end game where every mage can do things that in the normal game are reserved to sorcerers, much better then the sorcerer himself. Things like 40 or 50 MM, spook or blind in a row.