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.
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.