Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Advice

Question about bonus spells

Advice

Search Thread

Fractured Jester

Aug 3, 2018, 01:22 pm

the books aren't really clear on the progression of acquiring bonus spells so I'm asking for some clarification.

My group's pretty heavy on rogues and fighters, but one of them wants to play a wizard and managed to roll really high and through some house rules stat exchange system he got a 20 Int.

But I'm a little confused on whether he gets all of his bonus spells at once or as he progresses; IE: he gets his higher level bonus spells as soon as he gets a spell slot open in that level. None of my players could find a clear answer either.

I took a gamble on making him excessively powerful and said 'you get them all available now' but was that what the core rule book meant to happen?

Smallfoot

Aug 3, 2018, 01:51 pm

Fractured Jester wrote:

the books aren't really clear on the progression of acquiring bonus spells so I'm asking for some clarification.

<snip>

I took a gamble on making him excessively powerful and said 'you get them all available now' but was that what the core rule book meant to happen?

The only way I've ever played (or seen played in PFS) is that you get bonus spells as soon as you reach the appropriate level. I.e. With a 20 Int, your wizard starts with two bonus first level spells for a total of 3/day. When he reaches Wiz3, he gets his bonus spell as well as the usual one. And so on.

Cavall

Aug 3, 2018, 02:00 pm

You can only use the levels you can cast even if you have bonus levels past that.

So an 18 may give you some extra spells but you can't utilize them without being able to cast the bare minimum for that level. Usually at least 1.

I say usually at least 1 because some archetypes trade away spells for extra stuff so they could have a 0 for that level, meaning that they could cast spells of that level but ONLY if they know the bonus spells.

Basically if it's got a - not a number, you cant yet.

Cavall

Aug 3, 2018, 02:02 pm

Think of it this way, if they got them all at once the average wizard could kill anything at level one with fireballs all over the place, and the like. If he was really smart he'd have teleport. That's not a level 1 power!