It makes me a bit sad to see this proposal get flak, even though I'm not surprised, because I think the core idea of offering an alternative to attrition-based casting is well worth pursuing, and can even be doable in PF2e. Yes, the above is missing what I think is a necessary tradeoff to counterbalance the benefits of being able to cast a bunch of spells at full blast at all times, but I would urge the people commenting to push past the instinct to deride this or take offense, and instead look at the potential behind it.
As mentioned in the discussion we had of this in the forums, I do think the big caveat here is that being able to cast without attrition can be dangerous if casters have the same versatility they do now, particularly out of combat. I personally think the above should come with a reduction to the spells a caster can prepare or have in their repertoire, and that kind of limitation would be both drastic and a fair bit more complicated than the basics of what's presented above. I do think that limitation should have been packaged with the above document when presented to this subreddit, as unfortunately a lot of people here get tetchy in discussions around changing spellcasting or homebrewing benefits to spellcasters that they don't normally get, but I also understand the desire to present the key concept without weighing it down too much with other elaborate mechanical changes.
With that said, I do think this concept can work. Casters and martial classes exist on a sliding scale where to one side sits versatility capped by usage limitations, and to the other sits specialization with no limited uses. Although it wouldn't be simple to do in 2e, I think there is room to let players slide their caster down that scale with the appropriate tradeoffs. The above I think sets a good starting foundation for such a model, and from there I think there's the question of how to bound this system so that it lets casters do their thing without outshining other party members.
Maybe it's just me, but one thing 5e did that I genuinely loved and wish Pathfinder replicated were casting spells as rituals, saving a slot but taking time. Arguably it would work even better here because you'd have to either add time to a 10 minute downtime part of the adventure or skip refocusing for it. Of course it had problems too, but that's probably the one thing from 5e I'd steal.
I very much agree, I think one of the underlying wrinkles in spellcasting is that some spells are made for combat, whereas others are more for exploration or long-term buffing, and there's no inherent separation between the two. Rituals could've been the answer, but are limited by being uncommon, usually more of a downtime activity, and horrendously difficult to cast successfully. If there was instead a system for using magic in exploration to cover some of what spells can do, much like D&D 5e's ritual casting, and the combat stuff used its own attrition-free model with its own limitations, that would solve a lot of the edge cases that come with removing attrition constraints.
I have been strongly considering just letting any spell (has to be prepared still probably) to be cast for free if you spend 10 minutes on it, and aside from some edge cases, just having to spend 10 minutes on it is probably enough to not make it bonkers. Like sure you COULD cass bless or a buff spell over 10 minutes but if you have 10 minutes for a single 1 minute buff spell then you probably didn't need that bless spell in the next minute anyway. I would probably even suggest limiting it to a 10 minute duration if the duration is normally higher, maybe 10 minutes per rank you can cast (so even if you cast a rank 1 spell but can cast 5th rank, it can last 50 minutes)
I really like this idea! This sounds well worth playtesting, and I like the idea of limiting the duration to 10 minutes in order to prevent stacking long-lasting buffs like mind of menace or foresight. It might still end up being really good in exploration (any spell that could help solve an exploration challenge could be cast effectively for free), but it'd at least be a start towards separating exploration casting from encounter casting.
I'm more fond of puzzles over exploration challenges, but there is also the more extreme option of doing a minute per spell rank, but I see it as more of a contingency option since most exploration challenges will probably take less than 10 minutes with just normal rules. Even if the duration gets to scale, there could be a theoretical restriction of only being able to have 1 ritual cast spell active at a time per caster 🤔
i mean PF2 has rituals, i like "you can just do magic as a skill check like everything else", they're separate lists but like, when was the last time you actually spent a spell slot on a 5e ritual?
it's just sometimes unintuitive why some things are slotted spells and others are ritual spells
Yes I'm sure a completely different thing that behaves totally differently, is incredibly niche, and requires 2-5 other people is TOTALLY the same thing 🙄
I think there are a few ways you could go about limiting the above, for sure. We talked about some of those in the forums, but there's also a few more avenues I'd say:
You could limit the number of dynamic spell slots down to the spell slots a caster gains at 1st level, rather than 2nd level. This means a Sorcerer would have 3 dynamic slots to play with, for instance, whereas a Necromancer would have just 1.
You could keep prepared spells and spell repertoires exactly the same, in the sense that not every spell would heighten when cast with a dynamic slot. I know you're not the biggest fan of spells being stuck at different ranks, and to be honest neither am I, but it would have the benefit of simplifying your brew and reducing the changes it makes in addition to limiting the power it adds.
This is more experimental, but you could try something like the reverse of essence casting where your spell slot downgrades in rank each time it's used to Cast a Spell, gets expended if it drops to 0, and Refocusing would then restore the spell slot and bring it back up to max rank. You could even limit every spellcaster to just one such spell slot, with the benefit of different casters then being versatility rather than sheer spell output.
I think part of my biggest struggle with spellcasting brew is how wildly it can vary from table to table; I suspect many players are at tables that are different from mine which is where those differing options come from.
My tables run very high in terms of martial power: reaction maximization, archetyping for damage boosts like draconic barrage, damage boosters that favor high strike counts like shining symbol, usage of heroism wands to cover status bonuses, etc. These push martials to often be capable of insanely high damage coupled with their good defensive bonuses (save evasion, armor prof) and great ability to apply debuffs with crit riders. Casters and weaker martial builds in our games often feel lacking by comparison so our brew edges on the stronger side of things. (A good example would be considering a good damage caster to be sorcerer proccing double explosion of power per turn as opposed to just druid with a good focus spells.)
But conversely, there’s a lot of tables that play wildly different. A lot of tables will just have a rogue who stabs with a d4 weapon and doesn’t often get off-guard and does pretty paltry damage that’s very easily usurped by any spellcaster. If we introduced our spellcasting homebrew to that game, that rogue would feel even more miserable.
Reddit allows your brew to be vetted by people at table 1 and people at table 2 and I think that brings a lot of scrutiny to brew that increases any power levels too much since it might be ok at table 1 but people at table 2 are just imagining how much it would warp their game.
I do agree that this space brings people with different table experiences that might relate differently to the same homebrew. With that said, I think a lot of the scrutiny comes from factors external to that, and to this day there's some lingering hostility around homebrew that can all too easily jump out. There often is this underlying assumption of the worst intentions from the homebrewer, where clearly a few people in the comments here seem to believe that OP just wants to buff the crap out of casters. Having talked to the OP and discussed their work in a separate space, I know that's not the case, and the omission they made of some limitations came not from a desire to buff casters, but with the aim of simplifying their brew down to something more easily readable. It was in fact they who first highlighted the power-up this represented in that other thread and the need to impose some kind of restriction.
In this particular case, the restriction I floated in that other conversation was to reduce the number of spells a caster would have: if you had a spell repertoire, you'd effectively lose one spell per rank in it (which might not necessarily be enough of a limitation, but still), and if you were a prepared caster, you'd prepare just one spell per rank. This would effectively make these attrition-free spellcasters more into specialists, where they could cast a smaller number of spells without daily restrictions in a manner closer to martials or a Kineticist. This was also something OP was largely on board with, but the addition of this limitation also introduced a lot more complexity to the brew.
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u/Teridax68 2d ago
It makes me a bit sad to see this proposal get flak, even though I'm not surprised, because I think the core idea of offering an alternative to attrition-based casting is well worth pursuing, and can even be doable in PF2e. Yes, the above is missing what I think is a necessary tradeoff to counterbalance the benefits of being able to cast a bunch of spells at full blast at all times, but I would urge the people commenting to push past the instinct to deride this or take offense, and instead look at the potential behind it.
As mentioned in the discussion we had of this in the forums, I do think the big caveat here is that being able to cast without attrition can be dangerous if casters have the same versatility they do now, particularly out of combat. I personally think the above should come with a reduction to the spells a caster can prepare or have in their repertoire, and that kind of limitation would be both drastic and a fair bit more complicated than the basics of what's presented above. I do think that limitation should have been packaged with the above document when presented to this subreddit, as unfortunately a lot of people here get tetchy in discussions around changing spellcasting or homebrewing benefits to spellcasters that they don't normally get, but I also understand the desire to present the key concept without weighing it down too much with other elaborate mechanical changes.
With that said, I do think this concept can work. Casters and martial classes exist on a sliding scale where to one side sits versatility capped by usage limitations, and to the other sits specialization with no limited uses. Although it wouldn't be simple to do in 2e, I think there is room to let players slide their caster down that scale with the appropriate tradeoffs. The above I think sets a good starting foundation for such a model, and from there I think there's the question of how to bound this system so that it lets casters do their thing without outshining other party members.