Throttling caster balance: a simple solution

[Gherrick]

This seems so obvious, I have no idea why it never occurred to me before, and I don't recall this solution ever being proposed before.

Cap effective caster level by spell level.

Spell levels 1-2 are capped at 5
Spell levels 3-4 are capped at 10
Spell levels 5-6 are capped at 15
Spell levels 7-8 are capped at 20
Spell level 9 is uncapped

The primary purpose of this house rule would be to soften the quadratic nature of a caster's power curve. This means spells like mage armor (spell level 1) will never last more than 5 hours without adding metamagic to extend, etc.

An alternate use of the Heighten Spell metamagic would allow you to raise the effective cap. Intensify Spell would have a similar effect (but specific to the damage, not other aspects).

[Helaman]

Food for thought

[GeneticDrift]

i have had similar thoughts Gherrick. Maybe allow specialists up to 1 cl higher on their school and -1 on others.

i am more in favor of minimum caster level with ways to boost up to your CL, a small bonus to specialists, a small bonus if you spend a move action. with meta working as you suggested.

[Valandil Ancalime]

I doubt it will have as big of an effect as you hope. The power of spells come from getting higher level spells, not the caster level of the lower level spells. While it might take 2 castings to get mage armor to last "all day", a high level spellcaster probably isn't going to run out of low level spell slots anyway. Magic missile is now limited to 3 (instead of 5) missiles, that's only -7 dam. So unless you are playing a build that uses the wonders of metamagic to boost low level spells (scorching ray, I'm looking at you), you won't see much of a difference.

[Devilkiller]

Yeah, this would really rain on the Scorching Ray parade since you'd never get more than one ray. I guess the biggest effect besides selling a lot of lesser matamagic rods of extend spell might be pushing casters to use higher level spells to beat SR. Maybe it would be easier to just boost everything's SR by 4 or make your roll to overcome SR a d20 plus half your caster level and the level of the spell being cast. I guess it depends on exactly what aspect of spellcasting you're trying to nerf.

[williamoak]

I tend to second Valandil ancalime. The issue isnt with the power of low level spells, it's that of the high-level ones. It will make lower level spell slots less useful, that's all. Oh, and sell extend rods.

And I cant think of a single spell that would effectively be "controlled" by that method. Magic missile/scorching ray/etc. dont get that much more powerful.

[Drachasor]

This doesn't help. It also screws over casters that are not a problem (like direct damage dealers).

All simple solutions to casting are the same. They don't fix anything and they screw over non-problematic casters.

You are not going to find a simple solution, because the only real solution is going into the spells and changing them or tossing them out. There are a ton of spells that are perfectly fine. It's the ones that are too powerful that are a problem and there are a ton of those too. These spells exist AT ALL LEVELS OF PLAY.

People forget when "fixing" casters that casters generally have a very low floor on capability, meaning with a bad player they can really suck. They also have a very high ceiling. A "solution" that ignores both of these facts is going to be no good. In fact, it will probably just encourage casters to be min-maxed even more and not really change anything except ruining the fun for other people that play casters.

Also, you seem to ignore any caster that's not a full caster with your "solution." So they all get hosed too.