>Remove arcane focuses >All casters now actually have to

>>55003591
You can literally have your bat familiar crap into your hands.

All this does is increase the autism levels.

As if counting single arrows and coins of loot wasn't enough, you want to count ounces of bat guano and rose petals now.

>>55003591
No, because either they'll just buy a whole bunch of components whenever they're in town adding bookkeeping for no benefit except acting as a money sink, or they'll drag the party into holes to scrape up guano or into the ocean to look for pearls or whatever, thus making the game more about them.

>>55003591
No, it just adds pointless book keeping.

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>>55003591
How about instead we make components interesting?
>to cast a fire spell, you can use suphur, brimstone, burning candle, or matchstick and all they'll do same (or differently)
>more intricate spells require more intricate components, with harsher byeffects when something wrong gets to the mix

So your wizard has a bag with a bronze chandelier, mulicolored pebbles, a fish skeleton, a jar of a syrup and other assorted stuff and has to use them creatively.

No, the problem with caster supremecy is the spells themselves, the way they are written and the way they are allowed to be used and more importantly the perception of who can use them.

So you have a wizard who's done nothing but sit up in his tower learning spells but he can cast some kind of invisibility spell and is suddenly more stealthy than a perfessional spy or theif who's been doing it for years and would get better use out of invisibility but it's magic so only the magic user can use it unless it was a magic item.

The same wizard who's never picked up a weapon or been in war is suddenly able to wipe battle fields from the comfort of a lazyboy. On top of not realizing how something like this would change how wars are fought how is the wizard suddenly a hardened military commander and warrior who jazz hands lightning and suddenly war over? And yet he's also somehow immune to being assassinated and there are no other spell casters.

A lot of this is based on memeing that has come up over the years and stupid fucks who can't seperate mechanics from the setting but otherwise magic is only as powerful as you allow it to be.

No amount of changing around how often or how hard it is for casters to use their spells. The only way to reduce their power is to reduce the power of their spells.

You don't balance a game by making mechanics less fun/more tedius. You balance the game by actually balncing what characters are capable.

The funny part is literally every edition has fixed this issue. Even 3.5. Just ban wizards, druids, clerics, and maaaybe sorcerers and force people to play Psions, Totemists, Warmagers, Healers, Beguilers, etc.
>>>55003804
This, you either reduce the overall power of what "spells" can do (Psionics route) or you actually force their spell lists to take on a theme(Warmage, Dread necro, beguiler, etc).

>>55003795
>stupid fucks who can't seperate mechanics from the setting but otherwise magic is only as powerful as you allow it to be
This is something I've been mulling over as my players have been using spells to bypass more or less every obstacle I throw at them. Bad cursed item? Remove curse, all good. Instead of going on some side quest or something to cure a disease or blindness suffered by a monster, just cast greater restoration. There's a place nobody knows where it is and I've made a pseudo-dungeon through the spooky forest to find it? Guiding hand will show us the way! The cursed item I've worked with by just making the item absorb into them and basically not be in effect for a short amount of time, and guiding hand I said just kinda pointed everywhere because of the intense magic concentration in the area, but some of these things just shouldn't exist period and if you don't let your players use certain spells you don't like then you're an asshole. According to some members of my group, anyway. I think I was going somewhere with this but my basic point is fuck magic users, and fuck people who say "but of course I can use it, it's in the book!" and fuck me for not placing restrictions on magic before the campaign started.

>>55004038
It's only curse if it harms. Returning arrow that returns to impale your shield is a "bugged feature". Armor of teleportation that teleports away and then back isn't cursed. A helmet of blindeness is. A helmet of blindness that grants echolocation because wizard made it to transport a light sensitive potion in the dark isn't.
Then you make them get rid of not-cursed items in creative way and stop blaming players for using the tools available.

Play something other than D&D.