Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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Hello!
My dnd group uses a modified version of the spell point system, specifically found here:
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/dmg-2014/dungeon-masters-workshop#VariantSpellPoints
Does anyone else use this system or something similar? If so, what is the best way to track it within D&D beyond? Currently we are level 16, so we have quite a few spell points and it's getting quite difficult to track.
at level 20, you get 133 points?
and a 9th level spell costs 13 points to cast?
So you can regularly cast ten level 9 spells per long rest?
How does this not break literally everything?
Because it's limited to one spell per long rest above level 6.
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Granted, it still can lead to casters just going nova with 5th level spells, especially on low encounter days. Which is one of the reasons why they've left the spell slot system in place- it allows the power level to expand without encouraging casters to completely ignore low level spells and just constantly throw the biggest punches they can. Note that per the example case given, it's 43 points for your 6-9 slots. That leaves 90 points for other casts, which breaks out to 12 5th level casts. Given the way spells typically scale in 5e, that's a lot more DPR than a character working off of slots.
At the end of the day, you can't really reconcile a Vancian tiered system with a spell points system- any pool size and spell costs balanced so that it can imitate the slot progression also allows for the user to simply keep throwing the heaviest punches they can until they're empty, typically to much greater effect.
Well, not necessarily, you can construct a system that doesn't allow that, but then it allows absolutely spamming low to mid level spells instead.
But isnt that just spell slots at higher levels?
45 points for 1 spell of 6-9 and 133 points total leaves 90 points for level 5 and below.
Thats 45 first level spells?
Or 18 third level fireballs?
I must be reading something wrong...
Well yeah, but if you put too many chokepoints on the flexibility aspect, it defeats the point altogether and you're basically using spell slots again.
Thats the neat part……. it does break things.
This is why things should go back to vancian casting, and carve out exceptions and modifications as class and subclass features. Like Wizard. schools getting extra slots that can only be filled by a spell in that school. Or bring in a whole new class feature concept with spell substitution to replace a spell in a slot on the fly.
The martial/caster divide isn't wide enough, someone goes and proposed a system where a wizard can cast 20 fireballs in a long rest?
Probably, but at high levels, spamming low-level spells just isn't that big a deal.
The system in question does not strike me as particularly well thought out -- it's supposed to more-or-less replicate the spells available to a caster of that level. (It's actually more restrictive at very high levels due to the "no multiple 6-9 slots" hack.)
A better point system for a spell-level system would probably have costs increase faster (maybe O(n log n) or so), and a caster would not have enough points to replicate the full capacity of a slot-based caster of the same level. The reduced firepower would be made up for in flexibility, and the higher costs would mean that spamming top-level spells runs you out of juice fast.
(But, fundamentally, a spell point system ought to have a spell list designed around it -- in particular, it ought to allow for pumping extra energy into spells.)
Well, not really choke points. It would be more like
Level 17 has 148 spell points. That's still potentially four level 9 spells in a day. Of course, that assumes you allow casting exactly what what you could do with spell slots, which isn't really a necessity, you could easily do some additional balancing.
Well, the issue here is that there's enough level 5 damage spells that far outstrip level 4 damage spells that the 1 spell point premium is still far outweighed by the DPR gain. And yes, theoretically with enough fiddling with costs and other balancing factors you could throttle it all back, but again at that point it's losing so much flexibility that it's likely to feel especially distinct from the current model.
That's just because all the level 4 damage spells are terrible at doing damage; compare to an upcast fireball instead. But sure, could change the cost of level 5 spells to 8.