My House Rule for Prepared Casters...

[Banatine]

Ever since 3.5, no-one i have ever played with has ever wanted to touch the wizard with a 10-foot pole, because we all find the book keeping of the class, and the need to select spells/metamagics every morning, to be time consuming and very tedious, and because there's nothing less fun than entering a dungeon and discovering that NONE of the spells you spent an hour looking up that morning are likely to do you any good, so we have used the following rule ever since.

prepared casters work the same way as spontaneous casters, being able to cast any spell that they know at any time, with any metamagics they want at no extra casting time, as normal for prepared casters. However, the price of learning new spells (beyond the number they learn every level) is equal to the cost of a pearl of power of the equivelant level. It's also impossible to copy another wizards spellbook, since everyone understands the 'formulae' of magic in their own unique way. And of course, they still need their spellbooks to 'prepare' their spells in the morning.

For us it works very well, as it makes people actually want to use prepared casters every now and again, but i just felt like throwing our rule out there to see what others think of it?

[Talynonyx]

Well that would certainly bring the number of people playing wizards crashing down... that's one of the biggest nerfs to a wizard's power I've seen... aside from barbarians with lances.

[Tom S 820]

Well what you are talking about is spell selction. Any class has that problem if they cast spell. But prepared caster have it over spontaneous casters. Bad spell pick for wizard learn new next day. Bad spell pick for sorcer wait 3 levels to swap it out. It take brians and hard work to make caster good. Wizard has work hard at the table easy to build. Sorcer easy to play at the table hard to build.

[utsutsu]

It really doesn't take much time to do your daily prep. Most wizards will find they have a standard set of spells for different situations, and maybe tweak it from there.

Chances are, you'll know when you're heading for a dungeon on a given day.

Also, you can leave slots open! Especially with the fast study arcane discovery, this leaves you much more versatile than trying to guess every slot first thing in the morning.

[skrahen]

wow.
so learning a new 3rd level spell costs 9000 gold.
jeee--zus

[Malignor]

Wizards don't have to prepare all their slots at the start of their adventuring day.
They can leave slots empty and fill them during short breaks (15-60 minutes) in the day.

For example, for a dungeon crawl, a wizard would prepare, say 50-75% of his slots with spells he knows will be useful, and leave the remaining 25-50% open.

As the dungeon crawl goes on, he figures out that he'll need spells X Y and Z, so the group secures and fortifies a room while the wizard spends 15-30 minutes preparing those spells for the coming encounters.

This method works very well. You should consider this instead of the houserule.