Caster nerfs still needed... suggestions welcome (esp ACG stuff)!


Homebrew and House Rules

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Plenty of useful ideas popping of here.

We play with an oversized table (6-7 players in a room is the norm.), so trimming the fat off casters is appealing on several levels. Despite having a lack of interest in the system as a whole, the following homebrew rule owes much to 5.0. The caveat being, it does cause hiccups systemically for a few classes and is far from a universal panacea, but it beats no oversight over casters (or the limited magic rules), the status quo.

Maintaining a Spell: spells with durations measured in rounds/ level require swift actions to maintain beyond the first round of casting. The caster must use a swift action at the beginning of the round that the caster maintains these spell. No concentration check is required to maintain these types of spells. No more than one spell with a duration measured in rounds/ level can be maintained by one caster in this fashion.†

For example, Ezren the wizard is currently using a swift action at the beginning of his rounds to maintain a haste spell to buff his party. He is then threatened by an ogre and responds by casting greater invisibility on himself. At the beginning of the following round, he must decide whether to use his swift action to maintain haste or greater invisibility. The spell that he chooses not to maintain ends at the beginning of that round.


Bluenose wrote:
Melkiador wrote:
The problem is that there isn't anything to stop the wizard from raising a regular army either.

There's nothing to stop the Fighter putting out money to raise a body of troops in addition to the army that he can raise just through being a significant warrior. It's a common phenomenon in both literature and reality that a significant warrior-figure will have people who want to follow him, emulate him, and who will try to join his personal band of warriors. This is not something that's commonly true for wizards in literature. So while the wizard might, once they get high enough level, be able to spend money on followers and create undead to follow him, the Fighter also has money and has people who want to follow him as well.

You're severely overstating the "commonality" of a warrior gaining bands of followers and/or disciples.

The "lone warrior" archetype is vastly more common than the warrior-leader archetype.

King Arthur had an entourage of 20-some Knights, yes. But every single one of those knights was a high-level badass in his own right, and very few of them had armies at their command.

Leadership as a feat covers the trope quite expertly.

If people want to give Martial-types, or the Fighter exclusively, Leadership at lv9 by default, that's fine; it's even a fine throwback to 1st and 2nd Ed.

But it's hardly such a common trope that every Martial HAS to have it there.


Also, a quick read-through of this thread on WOTC's own site point out that trying to fix "martial/caster disparity" is a Sisyphusian task that's as old as the game itself .

4E DID manage to "balance" things by making the mechanical difference between Martials and Casters nonexistent (leaving everything that made them different entirely up to fluff).

FantasyCraft and 5th Edition came to the same conclusion as Pathfinder Unchained: remove the importance of "Caster Level" and instead make the power of a spell based almost solely on the level of the Spell, and things become significantly more-balanced. You still have problem spells, but on the whole, "Caster Level" is what really makes spells the quadratic mess that they always have been.

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