A Hypothetical on Magicks.

[The Librarian]

Dust to Dust...

[NecessaryWeevil]

Well, limited resources are one of the factors that balance spellcasters, so reducing that factor will make casters more powerful. If the party wizard, for example, can cast an infinite number of Knock, Detect Traps and Invisibilty spells, the party rogue becomes irrelevant.

Whether this is a problem depends on whether you have any players who enjoy non-casters.

You might also want to think about how widespread this feat is in your world. If every small city has a tenth-level wizard with access to this feat, for example, that's going to have some MAJOR implications for the economy.

[Thrice Dead Cat]

Are you familiar with reserve feats from Complete Mage? While they're not as strong as spells, they do give casters extra mileage.

[Sewercop]

Mages lucubration and sanctum spell and your caster got never ending 6th lvl spells and below. That is one heck of a feat.

What about if a divine caster takes it with divine metamagic...
Or illumian with the arcane dmm..

very very powerful feat

[Sith_Happens]

There's no good way to make this anywhere near balanced, and if you're trying to do so by excluding particular spells then you're going to end up with extremely few spells that it does work with.

[aleucard]

Balance this thing for general use? Yeah, no. Balancing it for your party specifically is much less of an issue, but that's mainly because any chance of this working at all that's north of 0 is infinitely easier than an impossibility. What's the rest of the party look like, and what is the caster this feat's going to doing to be a valid member of the party? For a generalized list, your best bet is 1) no minionmancy spells aside from maybe SM1/SNA1, 2) nothing with absurd results if it can be spammed (Fabricate springs to mind, as does Wall of Iron/Salt/etc.), and 3) nothing with absurd levels of versatility (Limited Wish, Illusions on a Shadowcraft Mage, etc.). If these spam-spells count as SLA's, add anything with an expensive material component (that isn't covered by Eschew Materials) or an XP component, with the singular exception of if the player is willing to eat those costs per casting.

[Jeff the Green]

One more comment. Could you tell me what an illumian is? First I've ever heard of it.

It's a race that can effectively use DMM twice a day, except it doesn't need to be a divine spell and it can use it with any metamagic feat it knows.

[Extra Anchovies]

Really, at level 20, at-will Disintegrate is nothing. At-will Bestow Curse is powerful, but it's not actually that hard to remove and allows both a save and spell resistance. At-will True Strike isn't too great, actually. It takes a standard action, and only affects you, so you give up your standard on one turn to make sure your standard on the next turn counts (and even then, most attack spells are touch attacks, so they'd likely hit anyways).

What I'd suggest is scale with level and let a caster swap out which spell it affects at each level, so that they aren't stuck with Magic Missile because they wanted more mileage at level 1, and (this is big) disallow metamagic on the spell. Also disallow its application to spells that replicate other spells. Maybe make the maximum spell level be (caster level/4), rounded up (making the progression 0/0/1/1/1/1/2/2/2/2/3/3/3/3/4/4/4/4/5/5).

Also, OP, your avatar is awesome.

[Urpriest]

If you're just doing this for a specific campaign, why leave it open-ended? Just pick in advance the spells that will be chosen.

[Urpriest]

To put it simply, I've been working on this particular campaign for a while. And I'm in the later stages of its construction where I'm stress testing the campaign with some reliable and amazing play testers.

This Feat that I've mentioned was perviously as you mentioned open-ended and it presented issues, which is why I'm doing the changes for it now that I've been asking for suggestions on here.

What story role/role unique to your specific campaign is the feat filling?

I ask because as-written it seems quite generic, so I had assumed that your player had asked for it in order to get access to particular spells, but if that's not the case I'm not clear what your design goal is.

[Extra Anchovies]

You make a good point with arguments for True Strike and Disintegrate in retrospect. They're very powerful spells, but I doubt they may greatly effect the field of battle by the time my campaign reaches late game. Bestow Curse though...well I have a lot of experience with it, and maybe my bias against it is because I have crappy rolls. That said, I know that Bestow Curse can have a lot of versatility so I feel its a good choice to keep that exempted.

It's... not actually that good of a spell. Sure, it's a hell of a save-or-lose, but it's a touch-range SR-yes Will-negates save-or-lose. Touch range is huge, because it means that if you're really getting much use out of at-will bestow curse, you're entering melee in every encounter. As a wizard. Sure, -6 to an ability score results in -3 to a few things, so unless you're trying to over-encumber someone, the -4 to everything or the 50% chance of losing a turn are your best bets. For a spell slot one level lower, however, a wizard or sorcerer can cast Slow. It's also SR-yes Will-negates, but it's a ranged multi-target spell, and it's much more of an encounter-ender. One standard or one (half-speed) move action means two things:

1. No full attacks, which shuts down melee types hard, especially since most monsters rely on piling on natural attacks to deal damage (one bite is much easier on your HP than bite/claw/claw/wing/wing/tail, for example).
2. Enemies are essentially stuck in place. You move twice as fast as most of them, or four times as fast if you want to double move. If you have an archer (or warlock or caster with reserve feats) in the party and they have no ranged types, you're done. Encounter over, go home with your loot.

Neither of these really affects casters, but you now have enough of an action economy advantage that your archer can even afford to ready his action to shoot anyone who tries to cast.

My recommendation: leave it open-ended with DM approval. If you aren't sure whether a spell should be allowed, ask us. We are good at breaking spells.


Oh, and thank you in regards to my avatar awesomeness. As it says in my signature, Andraste is a boss at creating some sick avatars. If he's still around, I'm sure he could whip up something good for you.:smallsmile:

Nah, my custom Bone Knight (by Chd, based on the original image (http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/5n_gallery/90017.jpg) from Five Nations) is gonna be around for a looong time. Though I might have someone do a Cheasel T. Weasel avatar for me at some point...

[Urpriest]

Heh, guess I kinda failed at explaining it in a detailed way in the original post. Probably because of how hastily I wrote up the original question. :smalleek:

The Feat itself is Role Specific to the spellcaster of my party of adventurers deemed with the Title of "The Hero of Arcana". A kind of one of a kind spellcaster that exists once in a millennia as to my story's lore. Since this is world that has made a lot of effective methods of dispelling or nullifying magic that becomes very prevalent at a fairly early point in the campaign. As a result this feat, which is named Arcane Constance gives the spellcaster in my campaign a bit of an edge in combat.

I eventually plan on releasing a full entry on the details of this Campaign either here or in the Homebrew Section of GITP.

Any reason you're doing this with a feat? It sounds a lot more like the sort of thing that would be typically handled with a Chosen of Mystra-style template.

Alternatively, if the goal is to give your players a lot of high-powered choices rather than one special power each, you could consider porting in Pathfinder's Mythic rules. They're designed for the kind of "party is special chosen ones with extra powers" setup you seem to be running.

Even if you don't port those rules wholesale, some of the mythic powers available to casters could give you an idea of what sorts of abilities are reasonable for this kind of thing.