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I was just musing about the unlimited cantrips and it got me wondering would it be unbalancing to increase the level you have unlimited spells for by 1 for each effective tier you moved up in spell casting. That is . . .
Max Spell level 1-3 = unlimited cantrips.
Max spell level 4-6 = unlimited cantrips and 1st level spells.
Max spell level 7-9 = unlimited cantrips, 1st and 2nd level spells.
Thoughts?

Chell Raighn |

Yes and no... it really depends on the spell list and class abilities...
For example, a Sorcerer might not be too broken having unlimited 1st or 2nd level spells, and by the one they get to the levels for them they are probably not using those spells often anymore anyways. A Magus on the other hand, would have unlimited use of their most powerful spell for spell strike as soon as they get their first 4th level spell... Similarly if someone builds an Arcane Trickster, you’d end up giving them unlimited scorching rays for their sneak attacks.
Additionally, most of your 1st and 2nd level spells are actually very effective utility spells. Anyone playing a prepared spell caster in a campaign with that rule would have a massive power boost at each tier due to the sheer number of utility spells they can bring to the table each day then and needing o oh prepare each once from then on.

Quixote |

One of my house rules replaces all those goofy rays and touch attacks you get from your domain/school/bloodline with a single 1st-level spell at will, as long as it does not replenish hit points. Then I allow the caster to change which spell it is at the same time as spontaneous casters can change spells known (so you can swap out magic missile or shield for mage armor or endure elements)
With a single 1st-level spell, it's hardly broken the game. Second level gets into much trickier areas, though. Invisibility comes to mind.

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I admit part of this is my personal dislike for the Vancian system. I prefer something like shadowrun where you have a lot more control over your spells and can vary a fireball from weak I can do this all day casting up to I'll put everything I have into this nearly killing myself and hope its enough. With increasing ability to absorb the damage and cast more powerful variations without trouble. However that would require completely rebuilding the casting system and I'm not good enough to do that. Even the 2-1 system where you can sacrifice 2 lower level spells to cast a higher level one or 1 higher to get 2 lower is more to my taste.

Quixote |

I was working on reverse-engineering the d20 system into one that is not level based and every plus or minus on your character sheet can be increased or decreased independently.
The magic system involved choosing every aspect of your spell; the effect, the range, area, number of targeted, saving throws, etc., and the end result costing you an amount of mana.
But alas, life happened (that, and the realization that I simply didn't have the understanding of some of these issues to effectively tackle them), and my little project has been sitting on the shelf ever since.

avr |

If I were going to write a system from the ground up, or near enough, I wouldn't start with d20. It's got some great stuff but it's far too easy to break - and going the other way and locking it down so hard the game seems pointless is possible too. I've tried my hand at hacking Shadowrun into a fantasy game and come to the conclusion that game design is harder than it looks.

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Indeed game system redesign is beyond me too.
@Valandil
I like that, the only problem is all those spells with different recharge rates as in my brief skim I didn't see any rules for them. So when you get a spell that's not on that list e.g. from a suppliment your just guessing whether it should be general or some other time. Mythic spells for instance I'd imagine would need 24 hours or more to recharge.
Still I do like it you take X spells that recharge over X time the ones that drain more power e.g. teleport you can roleplay as your only being strong enough to power it once every 4 hours but you can do multiple other spells as they take less power/energy.
Do you know if its from a specific book or just someone's house rule?

avr |

It's from D&D 3.5's Unearthed Arcana. The book's roughly the equivalent of Pathfinder Unchained but for that system. The recharge magic system is not nearly well defined enough to extract general rules from that list (just at a glance expeditious retreat is 30 minutes recharge but haste recharges in mere rounds. Huh?) but I expect someone somewhere has tried to build on it.

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Thanks. I think it goes off duration for recharge time e.g. weaker spell with longer duration has longer recharge than better spell with shorter duration.
EDIT
Hmmm not that system but this https://dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Mana-Based_Spellcasting_(3.5e_Variant_Rule) which I found when looking if anyone had is interesting as well. You could drop cantrips to 0 strain and this would make an interesting high magic/level game. Though it'd have the same issues of unlimited 4th level and below spells at higher levels.

OmniMage |
A few thoughts.
It might render wands obsolete. Their entire point is to provide lots of low level spells.
Then again, are you limited to casting just prepared spells and known spells? I mean that wizards can only prepare so many cantrips as is. If they have the same limitation with 1st level spells, then maybe wands could be useful for spells they don't prepare.
It is worth pointing out that Ebberon had something called endless wands. They were basically command activated items (base rate of 1800 gp) with charges per day to keep the prices low. If you scrap the charges per day part, you could have wands with unlimited spells per day.
Casters with healing magic can probably keep the party fully healed by casting cure light wounds. This might be a bad thing because Paizo removed the cantrip cure minor wounds (heals 1 point of damage) when making cantrips unlimited.

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You would have the usual limits of spells known at any one time so wands could be useful as I know there's usually quite a few nice spells I'd like to have available but can't justify putting into spell slots as other things have a higher priority (detect magic for instance which I think should be just an ability of spellcraft).

ShroudedInLight |
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What about scaling up the cantrips instead? There are only about 50 of them across the whole game and you don't need to risk breaking anything within the system itself wen you change individual spells up. Making spells like guidance, ray of frost, or spark more powerful with levels could be very interesting.

Coidzor |
As much as I would find it interesting to play around with, there would definitely be some world-building ramifications.
Expeditious Construction and Expeditious Excavation combined would allow a Wizard or Druid to whip up a Motte and Bailey or most of a fort in short order. A 7th level Wizard would be creating 3' high, 3' wide, 20' long (180 cu.ft.) strips of packed earth or unmortared stone or excavating a 5-ft-cube (125 cu.ft.) every 6 seconds, and able to move 30 feet each 6 seconds, so they'd largely be able to keep pace with their work.
Even if you can't stack the unmortared stone version of the wall created by Expeditious Construction, packed earth is able to support packed earth to a fair height, especially when layered up to thicken it. Each 6' thick, 12' tall, 20' long section of wall would go up in 48 seconds. It would take 3.6 minutes per 10 foot long section of moat if you were making it 15 feet wide and 30 feet deep, I suppose you could round that up to 4 or 5 minutes from having to deal with the cross contamination from some of the dirt you were clearing out from one area ending back in areas that you want to be moat. That's a fairly wide and deep moat, at least based upon some casual googling. Consider that dudes with shovels will excavate dirt at 2 cubic feet per minute per dude, so that 4500 cubic feet of just a 10' stretch of moat would take 2250 man-minutes or 37.5 man-hours, or would take a team of 6 diggers 6.25 hours to dig. (Granted, that all assumes 30' of soil and dirt analogs instead of hitting a layer of rock.)
A 7th level Druid would be able to sculpt their own snow or ice park or what have you, 12 cubic feet at a time, with at-will Snow Shape.
Keep Watch would allow for a city or fortress to have an especially vigilant night's watch if they have the right kind of spellcaster on hand.
Being able to spam out Incendiary Runes would allow for Wizards to create quite a density of traps and with no-save damage, even if it is relatively low damage. Or at least they can create colossal fire hazards.
Being able to skim an entire library at 6 seconds per book using Kreighton's Perusal would certainly be something. Especially for scholarly types that have practiced their speedreading.
The Decompose Corpse into Restore Corpse into Decompose Corpse loop, facilitated by Purify Food and Drink, allows for infinite food provided there is a relevant dead body and the right kind of caster with 4th level spells.
On a similar note, Preserve would actually become pretty good, since even if it's 7 pounds at a time, being able to spam it allows for quite a bit to be preserved, and for an entire week, at a rate of 4200 pounds, or a bit over 2 tons, per hour.
Dream Feast while interesting only actually covers 1 meal, so unless you were willing to take a catnap for each meal, it wouldn't really work to obviate food completely. Though it *would* allow a party to indefinitely subsist on nothing but Dream Feast and Halfling Wandermeal if they really wanted to be cheap about feeding themselves and their retinues.
Old Snowball would allow for the permanent creation of water, to get around the limitation on Create Water going away if not consumed, albeit at a much reduced rate (probably less than 8 ounces per round). Or provide endless fodder for snowcone sales.
While they already have long durations, being able to spam spells like Wizened Appearance or Youthful Appearance or other low-level disguise/transmutation spells could definitely be A Thing.
Being able to spam Ears of the City would mean that a party, or just a random Wizard living in town can basically learn just about everything that's going on. Which, admittedly, would be *great* for evil grand viziers or just mage types wishing to appear subtle and knowledgeable and all-seeing. That condenses 2.5 hours into 6 seconds, or, a character with CL 7 could do the equivalent of 17.5 hours of hitting the pavement in 42 seconds. Spread across a party of 4 PCs, that's 70 hours in the span of 1 minute, with Cohorts and a Familiar to bring that up to a total of 9, that could be 157.5 hours, or about 6.5 days, in less than 2 minutes. Commune with Birds would be similar, but for Druids (until Wizards got it at 13th level, though by then it'd be less significant, I think)
Being able to spam Sow Thought would be quite powerful if you were able to create conditions where you were able to do so.
Having Liberating Command available at-will wouldn't change the face of the world, necessarily, but it could have a pretty notable impact on how combat would work in that game. Similarly, the entire party could always have Mage Armor active upon reaching the necessary level.
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At-will Fabricate Bullets can break the economy (especially with False Focus), as can at-will Enhance Water. Fabricate Bullets produces between 11 and 15 gp of profit per round after selling for half per round depending upon how you read the spell and if you have the False Focus feat to avoid the 2 gp material component cost. After an hour that's between 6600 gp and 9000 gp.
Enhance Water at CL 7 creates 7 pints or 7/8th of a gallon in 6 seconds. Mead is the most valuable alcoholic beverage at average/standard quality at 2 gp per gallon, so that's 1.75 gp produced per round, so over the course of a minute that's 17.5 gp and over the course of an hour that's 1050 gp. That 525 gallons will then fit in exactly 7 standard barrels (75 gal liquid capacity). Even selling for half and taking a loss on the 2 gp barrel, that's 73 * 7 = 511 gp per hour.
The interpretation of Tears to Wine that leaves behind physical wine or mead after the spell duration ends would allow Druids and Shaman to create 3 cubic feet or 24 gallons of mead per round. So instead of filling up 7 standard barrels in an hour like with Enhance Water, that would instead be 192 barrels for 14,016 gp, again, selling at half cost and with a 2 gp loss per barrel.
Aside from that, Tears to Wine would be able to buff quite a few untrained commoners' Craft checks, especially in conjunction with being able to spam out Crafter's Fortune, for a total of +7 to their Craft checks. Admittedly, that's equivalent to a 1st level Expert with no traits or Int bonus and the Skill Focus feat, but it still basically turns a mass of otherwise unskilled labor into a factory. And gives pretty good odds that the mass of them would be able to successfully Aid Another to boost some kind of foreman's craft check. An 85% chance of successfully Aiding Another for a result of +2, multiplied across 100 mooks makes for an average increase of 170. (Admittedly, you could already do this to a certain extent just with regular Tears to Wine once you hit CL 9 and got a +5 bonus to it)
Granted, even without Tears to Wine being interpreted as working that way and without Enhance Water, there is Ferment which, especially in conjunction with Prestidigitation would allow for some amount of downtime profit, but on the level of actually running a bar, not being able to dump goods on the market. And that's not really the kind of thing that is typically tracked by individual sales, anyway, especially given the existence of the Downtime subsystem.
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As for 2nd level spells, I don't think there's too much issue with a level 13+ Druid being able to magically age a tree 10 years in 10 minutes by casting Harvest Season on it repeatedly, but your mileage may vary on that one.
Being able to spam Wood Shape also doesn't seem to be much of a fuss at that level.
And while it still breaks the economy, somehow a level 13+ character being able to produce oodles of booze with Tears to Wine feels like it has less inherent potential to be disruptive. Ditto for using a spell like Rotgut to produce infinite raw material for Fabricate to make distilled ethanol or Spirit of Wine.
Arcane Lock spam could have some ramifications, although the costly material component would add up over time depending upon the scale.
Arrow Eruption could already be used to duplicate valuable materials, especially if combining special materials and durable arrows is OK'd. Being able to do it at-will would be even more of a thing, though it's more fiddly than other matter creation/wealth generation tricks, requiring more details to be hashed out with an individual GM to establish the basic premise.
Spamming Command Undead would allow for an expansion of minionmancy, but it would still be difficult to do the one-necromancer undead horde thing.
Full Pouch at-will would just multiply the potential economy shenanigans that it could allow for.
Ice Slick isn't much ice from one casting, but a thin coating of ice on a thin coating of ice on a thin coating of ice will eventually add up. That said, I suppose it's probably vulnerable to a ruling that, after a certain point, there's no more humidity to freeze into ice, since it is an Evocation spell, not a Conjuration (Creation) one.
Computers and other shenanigans based on using copious amounts of Magic Mouth spells would be able to be done in hours or days instead of weeks or months or years. Admittedly, most GMs will never encounter a player who knows about that kind of thing and is also interested in it.
Rune of Rule could potentially combo using the Rune of Kindness in conjunction with Tears to Wine and Crafter's Fortune to buff a whole bunch of untrained labor to the point where they're adding +5 to a main character's Craft check for even more factory shenanigans. Or skip the Crafter's Fortune and make it a Profession check.

Bloodrealm |

What about scaling up the cantrips instead? There are only about 50 of them across the whole game and you don't need to risk breaking anything within the system itself wen you change individual spells up. Making spells like guidance, ray of frost, or spark more powerful with levels could be very interesting.
I like this, though you would need to avoid doing what D&D 5E PF2 some other games have done, which was make them scale TOO well. For damaging cantrips, you'd want them to scale more poorly than 1st-level Bloodline or Domain Powers in order to not entirely invalidate them, and you'd need to make sure other cantrips don't get more powerful than 1st-level spells.