General issues from the spells chapter

[JoelF847]

heightened spontaneous spells - this is not only limiting to spontaneous casters, but it’s completely counter to them being the flexible, on the fly casters. Fooling around with limited heightened spells just makes for more unnecessary anguish picking which ones.

powers - if you get spell points from multiple sources, you should be able to add them together, not take the highest, or you should be able to keep separate pools of them. Otherwise it’s like cheating the character out of an honestly earned ability, and limiting the whole reason for getting them in the first place.

Summoned - why would being summoned reduce its actions? This feels like a rule for the sake of balance that simply doesn’t make sense nor fit within established world lore. (I know it's the same as minion rules for animal companions and controlled undead, but those don't make sense either.)

areas, line of effect - don’t refer to an entirely different chapter of the book for these. Present them under spellcasting where they’re used most.

long durations - why would the spell end when you prepare new spells - if it’s not a concentration spell, it should last as long as it lasts.

walls - why can’t they be diagonal? The orientation of the square grid is arbitrary - how does this make sense? What does being adjacent with the previous section of wall have to do with diagonals? A 45 degree angled wall is adjacent with the wall it forms the angle with.

why do arcane spells have so many more than others, and divine have the fewest? Shouldn’t they have roughly equal numbers?

[JoelF847]

Also a few types of spells seem to have common issues:

Battlefield control spells all take 3 actions now - I'm guessing as an attempt to "balance" them, but they don't need that. It also weakens the 3 action economy and makes a certain type of caster immobile basically. I'd much rather spells have options of how to add an action, such as cone of cold or magic missile, so it's in the player's choice if they want to do more with their casting at the expense of not moving.

Polymorph spells - all of these don't make a lot of sense and are overly balanced. They should provide more increases due to size increasing - while most of the time the damage doesn't change at all - this is inherent in the PF2 system but doesn't make sense.

heightening is far underused - there's lots of spells which should be combined further and be heightened versions of the lower level one - example: invisibility and invisibility sphere, could just be the same spell heightened to different levels. Also, lots of spells could heighten to allow more targets (and by level, not just +4 to go from 1 target to 10), or similar effects.

[Draco18s]

The divine list also lacks...well...a lot of basic stuff. Like any decent, reliable, damaging cantrip. Chill Touch doesn't cut it.

[Xenocrat]

JoelF847 wrote:

heightened spontaneous spells - this is not only limiting to spontaneous casters, but it’s completely counter to them being the flexible, on the fly casters. Fooling around with limited heightened spells just makes for more unnecessary anguish picking which ones.

Heightened spontaneous spells are a bonus, granting free spells known at higher levels. I don't understand why people complain about this.

Choosing Charm Person in PF1 didn't give you any options to get Charm Monster or Mass Charm Monster as free spells known. Now you can. Similarly for Paryalze, an investment of a 3rd level spell known (and one use of spontaneous heightening) gets you free spells known of what used to be Hold Monster, Mass Hold Person, and Mass Hold Monster.

This is an advantage that Sorcerers didn't have to be given. It's pretty weird to see so many people demanding they get effectively dozens of free spells known at higher levels.

The only oddity is that Wizards (apparently) can heighten without learning the higher level spots, thus saving quite a bit of gold. I'd be ok with getting rid of that, although the spells are already pretty expensive, so maybe cut back on that.

JoelF847 wrote:

powers - if you get spell points from multiple sources, you should be able to add them together, not take the highest, or you should be able to keep separate pools of them. Otherwise it’s like cheating the character out of an honestly earned ability, and limiting the whole reason for getting them in the first place.

What are you talking about? You do add them together. The only thing you don't add twice is your ability score if you multi-class and get powers from areas like Wizard and Cleric that derive their base pool from different ability scores.

JoelF847 wrote:

Summoned - why would being summoned reduce its actions? This feels like a rule for the sake of balance that simply doesn’t make sense nor fit within established world lore. (I know it's the same as minion rules for animal companions and controlled undead, but those don't make sense either.)

Why wouldn't it? This is made up magic following whatever rules they decide. Pick a reason: (1) summons fight control and therefore don't have all of their actions, (2) summons aren't real, and as fake copies of real creatures don't have full abilities, (3) something other, a wizard did it.

JoelF847 wrote:

why do arcane spells have so many more than others, and divine have the fewest? Shouldn’t they have roughly equal numbers?

Physical and mental essences provide a wider variety of effects. Spiritual and primal are more conceptually limited so far.

[Draco18s]

Xenocrat wrote:

JoelF847 wrote:

Summoned - why would being summoned reduce its actions? This feels like a rule for the sake of balance that simply doesn’t make sense nor fit within established world lore. (I know it's the same as minion rules for animal companions and controlled undead, but those don't make sense either.)

Why wouldn't it? This is made up magic following whatever rules they decide. Pick a reason: (1) summons fight control and therefore don't have all of their actions, (2) summons aren't real, and as fake copies of real creatures don't have full abilities, (3) something other, a wizard did it.

s/summoned/animal companion

[RazarTuk]

JoelF847 wrote:

Battlefield control spells all take 3 actions now - I'm guessing as an attempt to "balance" them, but they don't need that. It also weakens the 3 action economy and makes a certain type of caster immobile basically. I'd much rather spells have options of how to add an action, such as cone of cold or magic missile, so it's in the player's choice if they want to do more with their casting at the expense of not moving.

On a tangential note, decouple actions and components. 90% of spells in 1e had both a somatic and verbal component, so if you're inheriting that and saying those each require an action, you don't have much design space for adding actions like with magic missile or heal.

Also, an issue of my own:

For as long as there are specialist wizards, spell lists should list spells by school. In the 2e playtest and in D&D 5e, they don't do that, so I have to flip back and forth to see that.

[JoelF847]

RazarTuk wrote:

For as long as there are specialist wizards, spell lists should list spells by school. In the 2e playtest and in D&D 5e, they don't do that, so I have to flip back and forth to see that.

Good catch - haven't built a wizard yet, so hadn't noticed, but that is pretty key.