OK, now we are getting somewhere.
Aycarus wrote:
1. The method of spellcasting should be justified based on the learning cycle of a leveling system.
Oops, this is step one of where you are going off into crazy town. A level-based system makes no guarantees about
learning, it is supposed to make claims about
power. You learn stuff all the time, without gaining levels or even XP. You learn where the bathroom is, you learn the name of the town magistrate, you learn how to get the coffee can open without spilling coffee grounds all over the place. And you don't need levels to represent that.
The levels are there to quantify
power. And that's
all they are intended to quantify. That's why commoners don't gain levels for standing around, and the PCs get XP for screen time. If you try to make the power levels take the place of all forms of learning, the game is going to have to get really pixellated or extremely retarded. Yeah! I just gained a level in "knows how to eat a sandwhich without getting fingers dirty"...
Aycarus wrote:2. The practice of spellcasting should be treated as knowledge – it can be learned by all classes even without investing a level in wizard.
OK, if this is your goal, how about we get rid of all the spellcasting classes? I'm not kidding, either. We have three classes:
Warrior
Rogue
Scribe
And then everyone gets a certain amount of spell knowledge as well. Each class can have selectable abilities that will allow you to be a wilderness or urban version and such. And people can pick and choose whatever spellcasting schtick they want. If we balance the spellcasting out properly by level, it'll work great.
The problem with this plan by the route you are going is that "treating things as knowledge" has no meaning in the D&D rules already presented. The rules don't keep track of knowledge, only of power. So if you try to treat something as knowledge within the previously existing ruleset, you end up just flailing around accomplishing nothing.
Aycarus wrote:A system with spell slots tends away from treating magic as a knowledge-based artifact and instead treats it as a class ability.
Exactly. D&D doesn't even
have knowledge-based artifacts as a codified ruleset. It only has class abilities, racial abilties, and story effects. If you "know the combination to the red door", you can as a story effect open that door without making a disable device check to bypass the lock. Otherwise, you need some numerical (Disable Device) or non-numerical (Knock) ability that says that you can open it. But that's all there is in D&D proper.
Your attempts to make spells into "not a class feature" are not actually doing that, they are just making things "more complex" - which isn't the same thing at all.
Aycarus wrote:3. The system should disallow the problem of high level characters being unable to access high level spells.
OK, well... it doesn't do that. If you wanted it to do that, you would be wanting to hand out various "slots" that were tied to level and were applied directly to spells of an appropriate power level - kind of like we have now (although using another setup to sidestep the problem of the Fighter/Wizard sucking with both hands). Alternately, you could tie spell power directly to character level and then have any rubric for actually learning new spells that you wanted. If knowing "acid splash" at character level 13 means that you can shoot off 3 orbs each of 7d6 no-save acid damage, then people aren't going to grown about people handed spells as if they were still useful. They'd actually
be still useful, which is a whole different thing altogether.
Aycarus wrote:The spellseed system corrects this by granting character major access to a spellseed once they take the feat to allow it - but they will still need to invest skill points to bring the feat up to their current level.
You're fooling yourself if you think this is anything like a correction. It means that two characters who are exactly the same in every way except that one spent a feat on getting in-class magic at 3rd level and PBS at 9th level, and another spent their feats in the opposite order, are going to be exactly the same except one has 3 extra points of spell seeds for no reason. This setup has taken the relatively minor concern that moving skill points around can make characters uneven and multiplied it a hundred fold because now it applies to
spellcasting, the most important and powerful class feature in the entire game by a huge lot.
Furthermore, you've still not made people actually get spellcasting that is in line with their character level necessarily. Even the "maintaining the balance" optional rule doesn't really do that effectively. Druids, for instance, are entirely built around the idea that they are going to be dropping points down a dark hole all the time.
Aycarus wrote:4. Spells should be regained at a relatively constant rate, independent of the length of as abstract a time element as a "day" - which can be interpreted as "period of rest" or as 24 hours.
What?
OK, balancing spells is
really hard. It's so damned hard, that we devoted an entire thread just to talking about the various methods of doing it. That thread is
here. But at no time does deabstractifying the recharge time on charge casting get around its fundamental problems.
The fact is that charge casting blows, and nothing you can do is going to stop that from being the case. Whatever it is that resets your charge casting, the game-balance-importantance of that is actually the ratio of the resetting your charge casting and the resetting of your opposition. The second one is a campaign concern and
beyond the scope of game design.
If you want to build a decent spellcasting system, you should either not worry about it, or attempt to balance things by any other means. Check out the big list, it has a lot of ideas on it.
Aycarus wrote:
5. The system should be simple, logical and balanced. Mind you, this is a criteria posed for any rulesset I'd manufacture.
That's a good criteria. Unfortunately, your current system is
really complicated, and has inherent logical and balance problems. But I'm glad that's a criteria, because it means that there's probably a way to find common ground.
Aycarus wrote:1. Spells should not allow a wizard to mimic class abilities possessed by non-wizards of roughly equivalent level. This makes other classes useless relative to a wizard of equal level.
I agree with you. But let's look at it in a different light... what if there
weren't any wizards? That seems to be the direction you are headed, so why not go whole hog? Why even
have spellcasting classes? You could just have everyone have a certain amount of magic power and not have separate classes that serve only to be "better" than the other ones by virtue of the fact that they get more "magic", and magic is
better.
Alternately, what if there was an actual list of what magic could and couldn't do, like in Shadowrun. Then people would have a certain amount of Column A powers and a certain amount of Column B powers, and their distinction would actually matter because neither could cross the line between them.
But you're not going to achieve this hallowed goal just by trying to spot weld it. That's literally incapable of working.
Aycarus wrote:2. Low-level spellcasters should be able to start with more spells than they're initially rewarded with in the D&D system.
OK, that's actually the opposite of the direction you are going here. In normal D&D, Clerics start with all the first level spells, that's way more than they could dream of having under your system. So I suspect that this isn't a big deal for you.
Aycarus wrote:3. The transition to epic level spellcasting should be clean.
Then you are going to want to ditch levels. Levels are something that are inherently not clean. They are quite pixelated, and each one is supposed to be 41% bigger than the one before it. So the level transitions are by definition getting bigger and bigger as you go up in level. As long as you are in an exponential level-based system, this goal cannot be achieved.
Aycarus wrote:because skills represent...
No they don't. Skills represent a numerical class ability that is allowed to fall behind or "catch up" to your character level. That's all they represent
game mechanically, which is the important part when you are writing
game mechanics.
Aycarus wrote: I decided on a magic point-based system because it seemed to...
Magic points are just another version of charge casting. They aren't actually any different.
-Username17