How Broken Would This Be?

[Ursus Spelaeus]

What I'm imagining is a six level class for an Epic 6 campaign. It's a fixed list, spontaneous, arcane full caster. Not sure which school to focus on yet. Here's the gimmick, though:
At every even-numbered level, you can choose one spell on your list and treat it as though it were one level lower. At 2nd level, you can cast one 2nd level spell as a 1st level spell. At 4th level, you can cast one 3rd level spell as a 2nd level spell. At 6th level, you can cast one 4th level spell as a 3rd level spell. What do you think? I guess it depends on the spells, right?

Or, what if you had to spend some kind of resource or make a skill check to cast spells at a lower level?

[ShiningStarling]

Well most people agree Precocious Apprentice is a super broken feat, especially at 1st to 4th level, so I imagine a better version of that would also be pretty broken.

[Gorum]

TBF, spells are broken to begin with. On the other hand, sorcerer is a full tier under Wizard for its lack of versatility. I would suggest limiting the schools of spells available somehow.

I would give him more spells known and spells per day, but only access to one of the following schools: Conjuration, Illusion, Enchantment, Necromancy and Transmutation.

This way you have power at the cost of flexibility. Conjuration is control, Illusion has deception, Enchantment rule social encounters, Necromancy debuffs, Transmutation buffs. And every member of that class blasts.

Oh, and this class is as useless with wands / scrolls of its forbidden schools as they are for divine stuff. But I would allow them to use their own stats for wands and scrolls of the specifically enhanced spells.

An hyper-specialist needs to be very good at what he does.

[Just to Browse]

The primary issue with an early spell access system like this is that it can lead to degeneracy. Level 1 invisibility and knock can obviate a lot of level 2 encounters, and that will happen whether you had to make a Spellcraft check or a coin flip beforehand. The same is true at level 4 when you get fly and stinking cloud early.

This kind of degeneracy is compounded by how many times you can cast a low-level spell. Depending on the spells/day progression, you can cast a lower-level spell 1-3 times more per day, which is usually the difference between saving it all day for emergencies and throwing out one major spell each encounter.

On the whole, I don't really recommend this kind of system unless you're willing to curate the list of spells carefully... but if you're doing that, you're probably close to writing an entire spell list and you could just do that instead.

[AtlasSniperman]

Conga line the level of a spell down to one. Spam it like no one's business.
To extrapolate; level 1 Disintegrate