Giving up spell slots to "permanently" maintain spells cast from them?

[Moppy]

Originally I was thinking of ways to maintain undead, but this could apply to other spells. When you create an undead, you can maintain the undead by giving up (losing) the spell slot used to summmon it. The ability to do this would be gated behind an archetype, as I don't want any random wiz being able to do it.

But I think losing a 3rd level spell slot "forever" to get "permanent flying" would be a bit good. What about if we paid 2x (or even higher) the cost?

[Fumarole]

Do you mean an 8th level slot is permanently lost to maintain fly (it's fourth level) permanently? Heightening the spell using a 7th level slot RAW only extends the duration to one hour, so an 8th level slot to make it permanent seems overly powerful.

[Moppy]

Fumarole wrote:

Do you mean an 8th level slot is permanently lost to maintain fly (it's fourth level) permanently? Heightening the spell using a 7th level slot RAW only extends the duration to one hour, so an 8th level slot to make it permanent seems overly powerful.

I had wrong edition disease. You are correct that Fly is 4th level in 2E. So the caster would be giving up a 4th level spell slot making 7th character level the earliest it could be done.

I guess for a spell like Fly where heightening increases duration, you'd need to base it off the highest level.

The balance may indeed need to be worked on ... though it might work as currently written in worlds that aren't Golarion. It was mainly for maintaining undead minions, I am still working on it.

[Claxon]

2nd edition deliberately got rid of extra long spell duration to make this sort of thing not really feasible. Paizo doesn't want people walking around with buffs all day, it's part of the balance they're attempting to strike.

That said, I do think some spells should be able to be maintained for a full 24 hrs, and be kept up continuously by continuing to expend the appropriate spell slot each day.

I could certainly see spell like Pet Cache or Ventriloquism being expended/heightened in a higher slot to make them last longer, the question really becomes what level spell slot is appropriate for the advantage. Keeping in mind that you only get 3 spell slots per level of spell you can cast.

[Ediwir]

There was some sort of thing to this effect in playtest, where some spells with long duration added the note "you can forego regaining this spell slot to extend the duration by another day".

It seemed pretty popular, but it didn't make it in final for some reason.

[BooleanBear]

Ediwir wrote:

There was some sort of thing to this effect in playtest, where some spells with long duration added the note "you can forego regaining this spell slot to extend the duration by another day".

It seemed pretty popular, but it didn't make it in final for some reason.

It did make it into the final, see here. There just aren’t that many spells that last until your next daily preparations.

[thenobledrake]

Outside of spells which are designed to last until your next daily preparations, the most balanced way of getting more constant usage of a particular spell would be magic items.

Permanently committing a spell slot is a lot like the old XP cost to craft items or make spells permanent rules from D&D 3.X - the theory is that you are paying a heavy cost for what you are getting, but the reality is that the benefits so greatly outweigh the costs that there's no reason short of not wanting to "cheese" the system to not go the route of the alleged trade off.

[shroudb]

A blanket pay X to have Y permanent is almost impossible to balance.

There are spells of the same level that one has 1h duration and the other has 1 round duration. Obviously, the cost to make those two permanent cant be the same even if they are the same level.

The easiest solution, if you want some permanent spells, is to find the *utility* (certainly not numerical buff) spells you want to have permanent and offer a high level heightening that makes them permanent.

Like, darkvision being a level 2 spell with a level 5 option of being permanent. (that's on a base of 1 hour duration, for a 1min/10min spell, it should be way more than just +3levels)