I'm building a villain for a campaign I'm running. He's a Bladesinger-style Magus 4/Bard 1, and when I was looking at Arcanas, I thought, "Broad Study! It would work great here!"
NOTE: In this particular campaign, I allow bards to be either spontaneous casters or prepared casters, at their choice (subbing cha for int appropriately).
Except it doesn't work great. It seems to be rather useless, actually. Understandably, broad study is a very nifty ability if you're an arcane/divine caster. But I don't think it does enough. Yeah, Spellstriking and spell combat-ing from other lists is nice.
But what I found I really wanted was the ability to use Pool Spell with the bard list. This character isn't going to be spending massive amounts of AP (arcane points) on other abilities, so why not allow him to spam Cure Light Wounds with his AP to heal himself or his allies? Why not allow him to throw out a Summon Monster I a couple times?
I don't know, maybe that's just me. I'm not asking for Knowledge Pool, since that could get really dangerous with classes that have a wider selection of spells. But why not pool spell? I don't think it encourages multiclassing. It just seems appropriate to me...
Anyway, just my 2 cp.
Well, first Broad Study requires a level 6 Magus, but thats beside the point.
I think your suggestion seems quite reasonable but the following things have to be adressed to prevent abuse:
- Pool spell is limited to level you can cast, even if you remove the magus spell restriction or add spells to the list for this ability. A potential abuse would be a Magus 6 / Paladin 1. With the suggested change this character could access quite powerfull Pala only spells.
Suggestion: limit it to spells you can actually cast in the origninal class.
-Arcane only: By allowing it to work with divine spellcasters, a Magus 6/ Cleric 1 could use pool spell to cast shield of faith quite often each day, it seems just a bit too effective. Then again if you multiclass into witch you can get the same.
Still I would suggest arcane only - just to prevent a Magus from going into Ranger for lead blades.
So I see your point - have to mention that the level requirement for Broad study seems a bit stiff, even if level 3 might be just a level to early - I can see a Magus 6 or even 3 / Bard 4 using spell pool in the way you suggested. But I would argue against Magus 10 Bard 1 with access to all those effective bard spells.
Totally missed the level 6 requirement. My bad. Other than that, I absolutely agree that you should limited by class, not magus. You shouldn't be able to use Broad Study/Pool Spell to cast any (example) bard spell that you couldn't normally cast at your current bard level.
As for limiting it to arcane...not a huge fan of that idea. I understand the spamming of shield of faith/whatever other nasty cleric spells is a problem. But I think that the magus is varied enough in its use of AP that it wouldn't be too much of a problem.
Again, just a suggestion. I won't be using it in my game, obviously, but if the guy survives the battle...who knows?
Perhaps a greater (or improved or something like that)broad study arcana with a suitable level requirement could let the magus use his arcane pool with whatever list he selected for broad study. This, or something similar, could allow flexibility without it overpowered (provided the level was set appropriately). Personally, I would like to see more crossover with the divine spell lists at some level with this class. Even just giving them the inflict line of spells (to balance out the bards getting the cure spells) would be a big improvement; you would automatically have some more touch spells, and it would be harder for people to argue that it is nothing more than a battle wizard. Flame blade and produce flame would also make good thematic additions to the spell list for the magus.
The divine/arcane split in general is seriously a headache at this point with so casting classes; it may have made sense when there was one, maybe two, classes drawing from each list, but at this point, its an arbitrary division that just makes creating alternate classes a pain.