Bonus Spell Slots: Do We Need Them?

I think just about everyone who has played 3rd edition D&D to any extent will admit that spell casters have it good. In fact, all editions up to and including 3rd edition are very favorable to spell casters. Even at 1st-level, a wizard can end a battle before it begins with the casting of a single sleep spell. In AD&D, I often marveled at the sheer power of spell casters and for a time wondered why anyone ever bothered to play anything else. Then 3rd edition came along and just made everything better for spell casters. I indulged for a few years, playing wizards, clerics, sorcerers and druids to the exclusion of other classes. Things had just gotten too good not to be a spell caster in my own humble opinion. Of the reasons for this, not least of which was the introduction of bonus spell slots for all spell casters (not just clerics, as was the case in previous editions) based upon their associated spell casting ability score (and even clerics got a boost with the addition of domain spell slots, but I digress).

In my eternal quest for a simpler version of 3.5, not just a version that would serve to teach new players the game, but one that would just be simpler and easier to play for everyone, I have begun to ask one key question about a number of elements of the game: "Do we really need this for the game to work?" Today I have come to the subject of bonus spell slots and honestly, truly, I cannot answer "Yes" to this question.

Now I imagine that back in AD&D bonus spell slots based on a high Wisdom score were added to the game to encourage more players to choose to play clerics. It seems like there is an eternal struggle that is never-ending to this very day each and every time a new campaign begins. Who will play the healer? Well, clerics are so much more than that, of course (as any experienced cleric player such as myself will tell you), but they often get distilled down to that, appearing to the rest of the party as so many boxes of Band-Aids. I imagine this was discovered early on by Gygax & Co. and so when they published their definitive 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook, part of the thinking was that the cleric deserved a few extra spell slots because some of his spell slots would inevitably end up being used as healing spells. Now maybe I am incorrect on this, but I would not be surprised at all if this were exactly the case. So bonus spell slots perhaps make sense for the cleric class. But for everyone?

Well the nice thing about 3rd edition is that the system is so internally consistent. I imagine having separate rules for clerics gaining bonus spell slots probably seemed like yet another sub-system that the designers of 3rd edition wanted to streamline. What this really came down to, in my opinion (and feel free to disagree), was making lower level a little more interesting for spell casters. But while their intentions were good, and certainly made other classes like the wizard a little more fun to play at 1st-level, they actually tackled this from several directions and ended up with what I like to more properly call a mess.

You see, along with bonus spell slots, they also introduced 0-level spells (cantrips or orisons) as a core rule, which had appeared as a variant rule in various official and unofficial versions for years. This gave several more options to low level spell casters, minor though they may be. Furthermore, crafting magic items and the assumption of availability of magic items changed as well. It was now possible to make scrolls as early as 1st-level, allowing a spell caster with only a small cache of XP and GP to add significantly to his arsenal of spells after only a session or two, provided a bit of downtime was provided (I have taken full advantage of Scribe Scroll more times than I care to count, even on sorcerers if you can believe that; it's just that good). Scrolls and potions were also exceptionally cheap. And campaigns in the Forgotten Realms in 3rd edition often began with the assumption that a brand-spanking new 1st-level character could come equipped with either several potions of cure light wounds, or a single potion of cure moderate wounds, not to mention the vast options for other both divine and arcane scrolls, potions, and even wands. A character from The Golden Water, for example, could choose a wand of cure light wounds with 20 charges at character creation!

So we now have 0-level spells, easy crafting of scrolls, cheap scrolls and potions (and 1st-level wands as well), cleric domain spell slots, and bonus spell slots for a high ability modifier. And if you are feeling really generous you give your PCs some extra equipment a la the Forgotten Realms and who is really thinking that hard about resource management? Well, I say enough already. I think a lot of this can be done away with. But let's just focus on bonus spell slots since that is the subject of this article. Given all of the options that are now available just in the core rules of the game, why do we really need bonus spells slots again? We don't. It's that simple.

Spell casters already receive a benefit for having a high ability score in their spell casting attribute, which is improved saving throw DCs. Do they really need more? I believe if you think about it, you will agree with me that they really don't. And by the time you get to level 10, they are exceptionally superfluous. So a fix intended to address a low-level problem just balloons into a nightmare of book-keeping for spell casters as they progress higher and higher. So many spells to choose and so little time! I don't know about you, but I want to play the game, not the meta-game.