| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Having level independent durations is good. I like the new duration on mage armor. However, buff spells have gone down to between 1 minute to ten minutes. This decrease feels more low magic and low fantasy to me than perhaps what was intended.
I feel like having a hand full of duration increments is probably a good idea from an accessibility standpoint. Plays can ask "Is this a one minute, 4 hours, or 24-hour spell?"
4 hours seems like an improvement to me over the 10 minutes per level former duration of long-term buff spells. It allows them to be cast as part of a preparation phase without having to rush right away from encounter to encounter to get the most use out of the spell.
If you are trying to avoid the paradigm of casters eating the martial or skill monkey's lunch by self-buffing then you could have them have a reduced personal duration such as ", or 10 minutes personal." for spells that allow casters to circumvent having to make skill checks or on spells that improve their combat capabilities. (Although a utility polymorph spell that lets you keep a shape for hours would be very nice.)
As things stand, one-minute durations make it impossible to prepare for difficult encounters except to demand spells from casters from round to round. This change does not feel more accessible over the last edition to me.
Just assigning a new duration increment to these spells seems an easy fix that would take up no more space in the rulebook.