I feel like this would cause roleplay issues and possible friction at the table. The revolving door of characters, even if its 2 per player will limit character relationships. It will also diminish the 'non' casters if the 'full casters' represent the 'real power' of the group and the others are the lackeys. It just seems off to me. Maybe it will work for your group, but I wouldnt like it.
I also expect to see arguments about whose character needs to be switched out for the 'caster' as they wouldnt get any xp.
Fighter: Hey rogue go get your boss the wizard, we need him for this next fight
Rogue: Heck no I want to get xp, tell the cavalier to get his summoner friend
Cavalier: No way I'm almost at next level, tell the Bard to get his cleric instead.
Kolokotroni's scenario is not an example of PC friction. The characters have absolutely no reason to argue, the players have no real desire to make them argue. It's an example of friction between the players themselves for metagame reasons. It is an example of people who aren't having fun.
Its.. not a matter of knowing hoe to play. If they bring out this spellcaster, they get fewer rewards (no exp from encounters) on an individual basis, not for the whole party. One person woukd be getting less of a reward for an abritrary reason, which I predict would make them either never use those spellcasters or argue one player into using his, making him have less fun.
I never much liked games where I had cool powers, but I had to fuel their use with burning XP. Like spending Conviction in Hunter, or permanently burning a point of Will to use Aegis and remain alive in Vampire.
There are up-sides, I suppose. In Hunter, you can get Conviction back by achieving important goals -- so I guess that critical examination shows that it fosters intelligent play where you go after big bad monsters with a plan, and hopefully don't have to burn too much Conviction while executing it, so maybe you end up both alive and with more Conviction than you started. And in Vampire, well -- there's no raise dead if you die, so a panic button that keeps you alive is pretty neat. Making new characters is more detrimental to your advancement than spending XP is.
But a game whose entire playstyle doesn't necessarily revolve around those premises -- it doesn't really appeal to me. Maybe to a GM that feels that casters are too powerful, but I think I'd be happier as a player just having a fighter to worry about and nothing else, not even a wizard whose advancement is stunted every time he's used.
It also sounds like it would evolve unrealistic player habits, like once a spellcaster has been used at the beginning of the session, they milk it for all it's worth since it has already lost the session's XP. And if most of a session has gone by, they'll do everything necessary to avoid pulling one out because they're so close, even if it means chipping through a stone wall with a rock-hammer.
Have you considered checking out Ars Magica?
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I was wondering if he found these rules in Ars Magica myself.
A couple of things turned my gaming group off AM;
* We didn't like that it was more optimal for a PC not to adventure.
* We didn't like the non-magi being so much weaker. Between the awesome power of magic and a very unforgiving injury/healing system, why would you want to play a non-magical warrior?
You don't see the appeal of having different tiers of player characters? It lets you run two very different styles of game in parallel with each other.
Some would say pathfinder is already trying to do that without acknowledging it. Formalising the divide could give your campaign a low fantasy mode and a high fantasy mode, allowing you to calibrate threats and other content accordingly without making everybody play only a particular kind of character.
I can see it working very well in (new) World of Darkness too. Every monster template has its own kind of human thrall. Play each other's.
All you need to make this work is an incentive. In this case, wizards are considered more powerful, so there is a cost to using them (nobody gains exp).
Personally, I think that's not a good idea. Denying people exp is not fun in Pathfinder and it could easily throw the party way out of whack. I don't know Ars Magica well, but I suspect missing out on exp isn't as big a problem in it and those slow healing rules are designed as another incentive to switch often.
With an appropriate incentive, this could be very fun, I think.
Oh, the intent behind Pathfinder (or at least 3.0 D&D) was definitely to have different tiers of power. Monte Cook was quite open about deliberately putting in trap options to punish non-optimal characters. He thought if it was more difficult to understand, see the value of, or play correctly, it should be better. That's why the full casters have such a huge chunk of the book devoted to them, all the options and all the power: complexity=value.
There's a blog post somewhere in which Cook says it seemed like a good idea at the time, but with hindsight it was probably unwise.
He displays some impressive ignorance about Mark Rosewater's hypothetical Magic the Gathering player, Timmy, explaining how the team set up the game to give players like Timmy a bad experience on purpose, so they'd learn to be the kind of gamer he believed they should be.
That attitude is less respected than doing unspeakable things to kittens, so people have gone to great lengths to undo the damage, but we still live with its legacy. It's very, very hard to reign the casters in at high levels without changing the game more than most people are comfortable with.
Still, if you don't like the idea, fair enough. I can see how it could go badly wrong.