Talk:Delayed Spellcasting (3.5e Variant Rule)

Ratings

	Ghostwheel dislikes this article and rated it 1 of 4.
	While I'm a fan of nerfing casters, I dislike the implications this rule has where 80% of the combatants delay their actions to right after the spellcasters. At that point, you may as well just have casting go off right before the start of their next turn, since in the end it'll amount to the same thing.

What prevents people from doing that now (matching initiative rather than initiative -1). That, and the caster could delay if the others delay. They end up in a delaying stalemate until someone moves.

Of course the more pressing issue is that it's a caster, and thus would never willingly be in melee to begin with. It's behind seven proxies mirror images, flying, and all other sorts of caster tricks. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 11:40, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Standard -> Move?

How does it work if you cast as a standard and then move? Are you casting while moving? Do you still count as casting? If you get AoO'ed do you have a chance to lose the spell? --Ghostwheel (talk) 11:06, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

You cast, you move, and then the spell goes off X initiative later. The actual act of casting technically is the standard action, the rest is finishing up SFX and huzzah. And yes, if you get AoO'd you might lose the spell. -- Eiji-kun (talk) 11:15, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Delay Issues and ideas

Some ideas for improvements:

• It might be more interesting to have the delay be equal to twice the spell level.
• To make the whole "wait until just after the wizard's init" less effective, have it delay either 1d4 - 1 per spell level or 1d6 -1 per spell level.
  • It adds a bit of slowdown with the rolling, but makes it possible to whip off a 9th level spell in the same round with a lot of luck.
• Maybe allow wizards to mitigate the delay. For every 2 initiative points they delay, their next spell immediately after the delay has its delay reduced by 1.
  • This makes the whole standoff a bad idea in some cases, which brings the idea back to what it was originally intended to do.

Cheers! --Aarnott (talk) 17:55, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

Also, I was under the impression on first glance that attacking the wizard during the delay time could fizzle it. It seems much more interesting that way. --Aarnott (talk) 18:20, 26 November 2013 (UTC)

That would also be better for the game overall IMO (and similar to what I did with my variant), though it would still suffer from the fact that people would all just delay until right after the wizard declares their action before doing something much of the time, which is fixed if you made it go off at their initiative +1 on the next round or somesuch. --Ghostwheel (talk) 18:26, 26 November 2013 (UTC)