Designing 4ever: Spellcasting Progressions

Estimated read time: about 15 minutes

With the “core four” classes and general rules now out and being playtested, I’m giving myself permission to start opening the floodgates of some behind-the-scenes design thoughts on how the rest of the classes will relate to each other. 

So far, the best way I’ve found to frame the classes is in how much spellcasting they have access to and the rate at which they gain more powerful spells. In other words, the spellcasting progressions.

We’re going to refer to a couple of key terms from 4e: Roles and Power Sources. Feel free to check out those older articles in order to understand what’s up.

Before we can get into all that though, it might help to have a short discussion on an aspect of fantasy roleplaying games that has had designers and gamers arguing for nearly half a century…

(Want to skip the history lesson? Just jump to “Two Ends of the Spellcasting Spectrum”.)

The “Martial/Caster Divide”

So back in the earliest iterations of D&D, classes weren’t balanced against each other. They weren’t meant to be. In low-level games, the Fighter was strong and the Wizard was weak. The Fighter progressed steadily in power as it gained levels. But the Wizard gained power exponentially as it leveled up, to the point that other party members largely became obsolete to the god-like abilities of the high-level Wizard.

The Fighter gets better at swinging their sword, but they’re still just swinging a sword. Meanwhile, the Wizard progresses from magic missiles to fireballs to meteor swarms, just to name some raw examples.

While the game has changed a lot over the years in its journey to and through 5th edition, you can still look at the Wizard’s 9th-level spells like Wish, which lets the Wizard mess around with reality itself. Can anything the Fighter does in its entire career really compare with being able to cast Wish?

It’s an extreme example, but it’s representative of the way that spellcasting classes tend to overshadow the non-casters, particularly at high levels. In the beginning, that give-and-take between the classes was just part of the expectation. But as the game and its players have evolved over time, there’s a strong desire for player characters to be largely balanced against each other in terms of power level. 

One of 4e’s design goals was to address this discrepancy.

The “Sameness” of 4e

In 4e, every class is built upon the same mechanical skeleton of at-will/encounter/daily powers. The Fighter could do just as many awesome things as the Wizard could, pushing the boundaries of what feats mortal skill can achieve. The players of Fighters tended to love being able to do more than just swing a sword, while the players of Wizards often lamented that they had to only be as cool as everyone else at the table.

As much as I love 4e, even I have to admit that it’s strange to have all the classes pull from the same resource pool of at-will, encounter, and daily powers. It feels awesome for the Fighter to have options and resources, but imposing those exact same parameters on the spellcasting classes (instead of spell slots, for example) feels unsatisfying.

(Note: The Essentials line at the end of 4e pushed for some variance in class design as a reaction against this sameness, but it still didn’t grant spellcasters any sort of spell slots.)

The Fighter and Wizard classes gain their abilities, their powers, from different sources. It just makes sense that they’d access those abilities in different ways. 

I’d always assumed that going back to 4e and adding in a spell slot mechanic for spellcasters would be too complicated—and I think I was right. But then Pathfinder 2e happened!

The Compromise of Pathfinder 2e

So D&D 4e and Pathfinder 2e are surprisingly similar in a number of ways. It’s not the purpose of this article to break all that down today, but it really was Pathfinder 2e’s integration of spellcasting that helped to nurture the seed that would become Project 4ever. Because while both D&D 4e and PF2e have options galore for non-spellcasters, PF2e does a much better job of having spellcasting classes that traditionally feel like spellcasters mechanically.

Seeing the designers of PF2e’s attempts to bridge that gap encouraged me to look back at 4e and consider what can be done to merge its good with everything we’ve learned from ten years of 5e.

5e and Multiclassing

5e mainly has one progression at which spellcasters learn spells and gain spell slots. “Full-casters” like the Bard, Cleric, Druid, Sorcerer, and Wizard all increase in spellcasting power at the same rate, starting with the same number of spell slots and getting access to more powerful spells at the same levels. They all get 9th-level spells at level 17.

Then there are the “half-casters”: Paladin and Ranger, and then eventually the Artificer. Their progression is largely the same as the full-casters, but they just take longer to get there, and then they cap out at 5th-level spells at level 17. 

Hidden in the seams of subclasses are the “one-third-casters” like the Eldritch Knight and the Arcane Trickster. Once again they touch the same spell progression as the others, but much more slowly and only reach 4th-level spells by the end of their career.

Multiclassing muddies the waters a bit, but all told the system of adding together your classes and converting them to caster levels and comparing them to the full-caster progression works well. It’s flexible, it’s fairly intuitive. It’s also fairly exploitable, though once again I have to keep myself from going down another rabbit-hole in this article. 

Moving forward! It’s time to talk about our approach to all this in Project 4ever.

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Two Ends of the Spellcasting Spectrum

Let’s start with the two classes that have opposed each other thematically and mechanically from the very beginning: the Fighter and the Wizard.

The Wizard is meant to be the pinnacle of spellcasting that a player character can achieve in D&D. In 4ever it’s an Arcane class, which means it has a focus on spellcasting to achieve its goals; ie., its Role. 

Nobody should be better at outright spellcasting than the Wizard. It sacrifices Hit Die size, number of Hit Points, and training with armor and weapons to accomplish what it does with spellcasting. It’s as “full” of a full-caster as you should be able to get. Therefore, however our spellcasting progression (or “chassis”, as I call it) works out, it needs to end up with those awe-inspiring 9th-level spells. It’s going to bear a lot of similarity to core 5e’s “full-caster” progression.

The Fighter, on the other hand, has absolutely no spellcasting. It is strictly a Martial class, like the Rogue, Ranger, and Warlord. If you’ve tuned in to the article on the Fighter, you know that it gets access to “Maneuvers” and “Exploits”, which correspond roughly to “encounter” and “daily” powers of 4e. It has its own progression, (or “chassis”) laid out for when it gains those features and how often it can use them. 

So with these classes in mind we currently have two chassis upon which to lay class features balanced around spellcasting. They need names. I don’t know that we’ll ever refer to these names or chassis in actual mechanical game-terms, but in our discussions about design it’s useful to have names to refer to these things, a sort of designer-jargon to help us communicate concepts.

I’m going to call the full-caster chassis “Mage”, and the no-caster chassis “Warrior”. 

Here’s what they might look like:

(Yes, I like color-coding things. Also, don’t pay too much attention to the Features column of these tables, there’s a lot in flux there.)

So Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, and Warlord (being Martial, non-caster classes) are all built on this Warrior chassis. Barbarian and Monk are odd ducks, and might not fit well into these categories, but will probably look similar to the Warrior chassis. 

The Wizard is joined on the Mage chassis by the Sorcerer, as well as a new class called the Invoker. But what about the rest of the classes?

Filling Out the Middle

Drawing still from core 5e, let’s talk about the half-caster chassis, or the Adept, as I’ve taken to calling it. This is home to classes that have some magical ability, but still mainly rely on weaponry to get their job done. It’s home to the Assassin, Avenger, Blackguard, Paladin, and Warden classes. 

Here it is:

For those of you keeping track, we’re still missing a bunch of iconic classes. What about the Cleric? Druid? Where’s the Bard, or the Warlock? These are all classic spellcasters. They should have more reliance on spellcasting than the Adepts, but personally I don’t feel they should have everything the Mages do. 

Currently these classes that have a lot of emphasis on spellcasting but aren’t encompassed by it are in a new category. Think of them as “two-thirds-casters” or “three-quarters-casters”. I call it the Gish chassis. 

Here’s what it looks like:

Note that though they start off with spellcasting right from level 1, they cap out at 7th-level spells. Clerics and Druids capped at 7th-level spells? Controversial, to say the least! Still, consider how much the Cleric for example gets on top of its spellcasting. Armor, weapons, pocket-healing, Channel Divinity… Should it really have as much magical firepower as the Wizard or Sorcerer? I don’t think so.

Filling in the Gaps

So to review quickly, we’ve talked about four chassis classifications: Adept, Gish, Mage, and Warrior. I have one more to share, and one more to hint at. 

There are currently no one-third-caster classes in Project 4ever. And yet we do have a chassis for the concept. It’s called the Maverick.

Why bother having it if there are no plans to ever have a class that would fit it? The answer, friends, lies in “hybrid-classing”. 4e vets will have an idea of what I’m getting at, but I’m not going to attempt to explain that whole thing today. Suffice it to say that we’re drawing up rules to be able to cut a class in half, and then combine it with a half from any other class. A Fighter/Wizard, for example, would have half of a Fighter’s features and half of a Wizard’s features, fusing together to become something new.

It’s somewhat easy to imagine how spellcasting progression would work for a Wizard/Sorcerer. Half of a full-caster + half of a full-caster = a whole full-caster, right? And two classes built on the Warrior chassis, like a Fighter and a Rogue, would combine into a hybrid that’s still built on the Warrior chassis. A Fighter/Wizard? That ends up as an Adept, a half-caster. The concept and the underlying mathematical assumptions are fairly simple. 

But what about a Fighter/Paladin? That would be Warrior + Adept. Half of a half of a Mage, right? A combination like that would have less spellcasting than a regular Paladin. That is our Maverick chassis; the unorthodox, against-the-norm, “secret” spell progression in our behind-the-scenes discussions.

What about Psionics?

The Psionic power source is one that we’re definitely hammering away at. We’ve got workable mechanics for the Ardent, Battlemind, and Psion classes, and a chassis all their own, but we’re not totally satisfied with it all yet. You’ll need to stay tuned to hear what we’ve got cooking for those classes!

(Note: Yes, the Monk is technically a Psionic class in 4e. For our purposes today, however, that class fits more easily in with the Warrior chassis.)

Speaking of Power Sources…

When you line up all of these planned classes and how they relate to each other with role and power source and spellcasting chassis, you start to see some interesting patterns.

Check out the Arcane classes, for example. Arcane is the power source most focused on using spellcasting to achieve its role, and thus we see more Arcane classes appear the further up the spellcasting scale we go. As mentioned in the Wizard article, even the Arcane Inspiration feature focuses on the usage of spell slots. 

Of course, the other power sources also have their tendencies. Every Martial class is built on the Warrior chassis, which makes sense since they’re all explicitly about training and skill rather than magical ability. The Divine classes also tend to have a focus on spellcasting, and even have one of their own classes up there alongside the Wizard and Sorcerer on the Mage chassis. The Primal classes, on the other hand, have at least one class in every chassis except the Mage. 

You also see some patterns with the roles. Controllers (aside from the Ranger, as it’s a Martial Controller) tend to have more emphasis on spellcasting. The Wizard (Arcane Controller) and Invoker (Divine Controller), are Mages, while the Druid (Primal Controller) is a Gish because of its options for melee combat in Wild Shape. 

Likewise, the Defenders tend to be lower in spellcasting—with the notable exception of the Swordmage (Arcane Defender), that relies more on spellcasting because it’s an Arcane class. 

Strikers are in every spellcasting chassis category, and Leaders are perhaps absent only from the Adept chassis (depending on where the Artificer ends up in its spellcasting capability).

Wrapping it Up

Well! That certainly got into the weeds, but I hope it managed to share some insights into how we’re going about putting Project 4ever together and how things may look in the future. 

If you have any thoughts on the things discussed above, we would absolutely love to hear them. There’s the comment section below, or you’re always welcome to join the Unraveled Archives Discord server and share your thoughts there! 

Similarly, if you’d like to playtest any of this stuff, our Discord server really is the place to be. We’d love to see you there!

Until the next one, happy gaming! And we’ll see you in the Archives.

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