User talk:Tarkisflux/Rants/Scaling Spells

I'm Not Seeing the Significance

Are you saying that your preferred version of Dominate Person would have a Save DC of 10 + half CL + ability mod, but a range of always 45' and a duration of always 9 days? I can see some of the appeal in that, but it seems like a rather minor alteration to the style of spells which requires rewriting a lot of things.

What provoked this rant, anyway? --Foxwarrior 23:58, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

This was a "perfect world" rant, not an actual "let's make this a variant rule" rant. And yeah, it requires a lot of rewrites. It was prompted by this disagreement.

I've since changed my position slightly, and mostly just don't want spells to get new targets or effects as players level. Scaling damage based on damage category and CL, completely independent of spell level, is what my next random thought rant will be about. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 01:03, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I feel that you can actually treat attack spells and other spells differently here. After all, the primary resource that an attack spell costs you is combat actions, and the primary resource that a utility spell costs you is uses per day. If burning hands had a range that scaled with level, it still wouldn't be used in combat by a character who also had cone of cold except in exceptionally long battles (well, until the range was actually higher). However, invisibility would still be worth preparing for a level 20 character even if it only had a static duration of 3 minutes. --Foxwarrior 01:36, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I agree that utility spells occupy lower level slots when the combat options for those slots aren't needed anymore, it's my retort to the complaint that this levels out some combat effects. And while I could treat them somewhat differently, I don't see a benefit in doing that nor do I know what I would even want to adjust in them. There are already mechanisms for boosting a spell's effectiveness even in a static spell setup. If you want a longer Invis, you stack a bunch of metamagic on it and use a higher slot. I'd rather use the metamagic mechanism (and likely make it more accessible) than have two standards for spells. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 03:44, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

I suppose that it's perfectly fine for there to be Wizard classes that lack scaling in their lower-level slots such that they only put utility spells in them, so the higher-level the Wizard is, the more utility-focused they become.

It's a bit uglier for the Sorcerer though, what with not being able to retrain every low-level spell as attack spells become useless, and all that. --Foxwarrior 04:09, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

They only become more utility focused as a percentage of their total spells. The actual number of highest (or near to) spells that they have ready for combat applications is unlikely to decrease appreciably as they level. They just have lower level slots for buffs and utility effects on top of then.

Since the static parts would be set several levels into the scaling of low level spells and their DCs would scale, I don't think it's that much uglier for the Sorc. They lose a couple of levels of scaling, maybe. And a lot of the basically non-scaling spells like glitterdust never really go out of style in the first place if you have a level appropriate DC. - Tarkisflux ^Talk 04:53, 14 June 2012 (UTC)