Systems like that basically play the wizards turn for him. In one e, I might get to cast lightning bolt once, so the game was deciding when to do it. In PF, o get it 4 time so I just spam it whenever I feel like.

If you decree that I can do flame sphere instead of lightning bolt, and I can only do it once every few minutes, but I can do it all day, I guess I always know what I'm doing. There is no ge - my turn is played.

Quote from: Cranewings;506575Systems like that basically play the wizards turn for him. In one e, I might get to cast lightning bolt once, so the game was deciding when to do it. In PF, o get it 4 time so I just spam it whenever I feel like.

If you decree that I can do flame sphere instead of lightning bolt, and I can only do it once every few minutes, but I can do it all day, I guess I always know what I'm doing. There is no ge - my turn is played.

I was pretty specific that you can't cast your top-level spell every turn.  So I don't see how you can know how your turn is played.  

I respect other preferences. Still, I'm a bit puzzled.  It sound like from your view, the one key decision you make playing a wizard is when to cast your single lightning bolt for the day.  Once that is decided, then basically there isn't anything else to think about as a wizard.  

That sounds really boring to me.  I would prefer to have a bunch of turn-by-turn choices among different spells, picking the one that is best for the particular situation.  If it turns out that flaming sphere is always the best choice among spells for any situation, then I'd want to change the system around so that other spell choices are competitive.

Well, good luck with that. For the record, flaming sphere is lower level than LB. I think it will be hard to make the system you are talking about not play itself.

Quote from: Cranewings;506594Well, good luck with that. For the record, flaming sphere is lower level than LB. I think it will be hard to make the system you are talking about not play itself.

To add a bit more:

I can see that there are a bunch of hurdles to tackle, but it seems to me that it shouldn't be that difficult for there to be interesting choices among what spells to cast for a given encounter - as opposed to which encounter to cast your lightning bolt in.  I should probably break this out into a separate thread if I want to follow up on it - and I'm not sure if this is the right forum.

Quick side-question; I've always wondered how come you had to be a few levels above a spell's level to cast it... why didn't they just have 1st level caster spells, 2nd level... etc.. instead of the odd way it was handled from 1st edition onwards?

Because The Gygax sayeth it was so.

I mean, how come 5th level characters can hang around the 3rd level of a dungeon? How come when characters have to go down levels if they want to go up levels faster?

I think there's an Order of the Stick strip on this....

In my humblest of opinions, spell slots should be capped at 2/day of your highest level, 3/day of your second-highest level, and 4/day of your third-highest level.