Spell Points

"Spell points add nothing to D&D except more complication, more record keeping, more wasted time, and a precept which is totally foreign to the rest of the game." - Gary Gygax

I love that Gygax hated spell points. It's wild to me that spell slots have persisted in the game for 50 years. While spell slots have plenty of fans, game designers these days avoid the concept. Other than D&D clones or games specifically designed to use the 5e engine, I can't think of any recent games that use the mechanic.

I think that the spell slot system is underrated. It's a great sorting mechanism, especially at high levels. A player can either start at the top of their spell slots when facing a tough opponent, or start at the bottom when facing something easier.

However, hiding behind that ease is the system's overwhelming complexity. Sure, it's a good interface, but it's an interface for a sprawling system that becomes unwieldy at high levels.

My 5e revision takes the first six levels of the game and turns them into two apprentice levels for beginning players and 10 levels of advancement for the meat of the game.

In that design framework, spell slots don't provide enough of the sorting mechanism assistance to make slots a necessary part of the game. I like the simplicity of spell points, but in core 5e casters grow so powerful that a points system built within the game's math becomes unwieldy.. Juggling a big pool of points and remembering how many points a spell of a given level costs slows the game down.

Crunching the numbers for spells, I created a system where 1 spell point equals 1 spell level. 1 point lets you cast a 1st level spell. 3 lets you cast a 3rd level one. Simple!

From there, it was just a matter of building out a caster class that wraps around the core casting mechanic. I also took the chance to purge out overly complex spells, presenting a lean, core list.

Note that magic-users can add any spell to their list from a scroll, including cleric ones. I am going to attach specific ability scores to spells - Intelligence is needed for arcane spells, Wisdom for divine, Charisma for innate ones. That means a magic-user can theoretically use any spell, as long as they have a good ability score for that type of magic. Clerics, sorcerers, and other casters are more limited in what they can do.

I've attached the class text as a PDF to avoid the weirdness Patreon has in handling tables.

Enjoy! Comments, as always, deeply appreciated.