Guest post from Jonathan: Spells-per-day in 3E

The spells-per-day tables for spellcasters in 3rd Ed could easily have been a lot better. Recently I talked with an academic about designing the wizard and barbarian classes in 3rd Ed, and it got me thinking again about the wizard’s spells per day. A problem that we on the design team inherited is that spellcasting got better in three ways as the caster levels up: they get higher level spells, they get more spells total, and their individual spells get better (eg, fireball’s damage of 1d6 per level). There’s no way that triple progression is balanced. One way to address this (probably a partial fix) is to reduce the number of spells gained by level.

Here’s the original wizard table.

And here’s my first draft of a new wizard spells-per-day table.

I also like the fix in 5e (and 13th Age) whereby spells get better with level only when they’re cast as higher-level spells. In Fighter Wizard Elf, spellcasters get better the same single way that any class gets better: by its class powers becoming more powerful.

What do folks think? If you have comments, you can find me on Bluesky.

--Jonathan Tweet