New Idea: Counterspell As CL Reduction

[CopperWyrm]

So basically, as I see it, there are three reasons why counterspelling is hard to balance in any d20 system:

1-It negates spellcasting, the most powerful thing in the game

2-It’s all or nothing: Either a counterspell completely negates the entire spell, or does nothing at all. This makes the mechanic too “swingy”.

3-It is intuitively predisposed to have great action economy, since it logically is “supposed to” take up the “reactive” part of your turn (5e’s reaction, PF’s immediate action, etc.) in exchange for negating a major part of another creature’s turn. This is obviously very powerful.

Clearly, having all three aspects active is unsustainable for game balance. So, developers decide to tackle the problem in different ways:

1e Pathfinder decided to tackle this problem by addressing reason #3: It made counterspelling have a large toll on your action economy. However, this nerf was too much, and ended up making counterspelling useless.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have 5e, which… didn’t really address any of the problems at all. As a result, 5e counterspell is somewhat OP.

However! There is another option.

I have an idea for a new version of counterspelling that is based on tackling the #2 problem: That counterspelling is too swingy a mechanic.

We can solve this by using the mechanic of caster level: Instead of completely negating a spell, counterspelling can weaken a spell by reducing its caster level. A spell is only completely negated if the caster level of a spell is reduced to zero or less.

However, I’m not sure how to exactly implement this, so I thought to ask these forums: Any ideas?

TL;DR: Give counterspelling a buff by reducing the action economy needed, but also introduce caster level reduction instead of full spell negation as a new mechanic to nerf counterspelling, hopefully making it balanced.

[Bjørn Røyrvik]

Regarding 2: Why is all or nothing bad?

3. Intuitively predisposed? Logically? I'd like to see the full reasoning behind these qualifiers, please.
In d20 counterspelling is not 'supposed' to take up a reactive part of your turn. If it were, it would. It is supposed to take a ready action, which it does. Now there are various feats and abilities and items that allow you to play around with what sort of action it is, but at base it is a readied action. This is because cancelling a creature's action is a powerful ability. Counterspelling is spellcasting of a sort, and reducing spellcasting to a reaction is a very powerful effect, more powerful than quickening.

INE, counterspelling is not nearly as overpowered as you seem to think. Powerful, yes, Useful? Often. Overpowered? No. If you spend your time coutnerspelling you are not doing anything else to win the battle. Locking down an opponent can be good but you are not guaranteed to be able to counter everything an opponent throws out (you still need the appropriate spell or a Dispel, which can fail). If you fail to counter an incoming spell then you've wasted your turn. Frankly, it's nicely balanced IME.
A powerful but not always useful ability with a significant but far from burdensome cost; seems balanced to me.

As to your proposed fix, do what you want with your game, I won't judge (much ;) ) but there are a few things to consider. There are many spells where reducing caster level won't matter in the slightest, like Miracle/Wish or Time Stop, so your proposed fix would not help against those at all unless they are reduced to 0. The spells that would be hardest hit are direct damage spells or in-combat healing, which are already pretty weak unless you specialize in them.