LEVEL 5: MEMORIZE SPELL Studying your spellbook for 1 minute, you can expend mental and magical effort to memorize a spell. Choose one spell of level 1 or higher from your spellbook that you don’t have prepared. You now have that spell prepared until you use this feature to prepare a different spell.
Pros
-Amazing and wizard-like feature in general
-Really reduces my optimization pressure with spell prepping - makes room for those fun spells in a high stakes situation.
-Makes mid-game spell prepping smoother, because you don't have to be so careful
-Tremendous boost to utility. Makes wizards even more resourceful, which I think is thematically perfect but has some downsides. Warning: May lead to DM headache.
Cons or possible problems / suggestions
The 1 minute Ritual causes problems (detailed in the next chapter)
My top suggestion: Maybe the ritual should be 10min instead of 1min.
My second best alternative: Limit the number of uses to maybe int or profi /lr. But I actually like that it can be used however many times you want.
Alternatively a part of Short Rest, but that would be a major nerf and remove some of the nice possibilities it offers.
Also limit the maximum spell level to maybe 5th level for Memorize Spell.
Add a detail that active non-concentration spells cast with a Memorized spell are dispelled if another spell is Memorized.
Reasoning
What the 1min cast does is basically make low level ritual spells obsolete at mid-levels. At mid-levels, low levels spells become very affordable.
With memorize spell you can take 1 min to Memorize Identify or Comprehend Languages etc., cast them as an action and then re-memorize the spell you had before that. Altogether in just 2 minutes and a lvl 1 spell slot. 10 minute time for memorizing would fix this and it would still maintain its major benefits.
1 minute memorize also turns Long Duration non-concentration spells like Mage Armor into something you just don't need to prep. You can just Memorize the spell in 1 minute, cast Mage Armor for 8 hours and then memorize a different spell. I would make such effects become automatically dispelled if another spell is Memorized.
There is rarely any point in prepping any spells that have a casting time of more than one Action. You can probably spare the extra minute to just Memorize it before casting. For example Fabricate has a 10 minute casting time. With memorize it would be 11 minutes, which would rarely make a difference. Adding another 10 minutes with Memorize could encourage some players to actually prepare it. In calm situations you can spare the 20 minutes, which is ok and in those cases the spell probably just advances the story, but sometimes even 10 minutes is a lot of stalling to consider. In those cases 20 minutes is not a luxury the party can afford.
Playtest feedback regarding Wizard's Memorize Spell feature
Pros
-Amazing and wizard-like feature in general
-Really reduces my optimization pressure with spell prepping - makes room for those fun spells in a high stakes situation.
-Makes mid-game spell prepping smoother, because you don't have to be so careful
-Tremendous boost to utility. Makes wizards even more resourceful, which I think is thematically perfect but has some downsides. Warning: May lead to DM headache.
Cons or possible problems / suggestions
The 1 minute Ritual causes problems (detailed in the next chapter)
My top suggestion: Maybe the ritual should be 10min instead of 1min.
My second best alternative: Limit the number of uses to maybe int or profi /lr. But I actually like that it can be used however many times you want.
Alternatively a part of Short Rest, but that would be a major nerf and remove some of the nice possibilities it offers.
Also limit the maximum spell level to maybe 5th level for Memorize Spell.
Add a detail that active non-concentration spells cast with a Memorized spell are dispelled if another spell is Memorized.
Reasoning
What the 1min cast does is basically make low level ritual spells obsolete at mid-levels. At mid-levels, low levels spells become very affordable.
With memorize spell you can take 1 min to Memorize Identify or Comprehend Languages etc., cast them as an action and then re-memorize the spell you had before that. Altogether in just 2 minutes and a lvl 1 spell slot. 10 minute time for memorizing would fix this and it would still maintain its major benefits.
1 minute memorize also turns Long Duration non-concentration spells like Mage Armor into something you just don't need to prep. You can just Memorize the spell in 1 minute, cast Mage Armor for 8 hours and then memorize a different spell. I would make such effects become automatically dispelled if another spell is Memorized.
There is rarely any point in prepping any spells that have a casting time of more than one Action. You can probably spare the extra minute to just Memorize it before casting. For example Fabricate has a 10 minute casting time. With memorize it would be 11 minutes, which would rarely make a difference. Adding another 10 minutes with Memorize could encourage some players to actually prepare it. In calm situations you can spare the 20 minutes, which is ok and in those cases the spell probably just advances the story, but sometimes even 10 minutes is a lot of stalling to consider. In those cases 20 minutes is not a luxury the party can afford.
Here are my thoughts. Feel free to comment. :)
Finland GMT/UTC +2