So, I've been fairly conservative in how I've imagined the 2024 new rulebooks (which I've typically referred to as 5.5, though they could be considered a 6th Edition - some previous editions saw a fair degree of compatibility with their predecessors, after all).
But I did see some comments (well, complaints) about the Sorcerer's many weaknesses compared with the Wizard. I suspect Wizards are a more popular class, and their versatility is unmistakable. Not to mention, there are occasions where a Wizard does something that feels Sorcerer-like better than they can - such as how Sculpt Spells in the Evocation Wizard subclass is superior to the Careful Spell metamagic.
The subclasses introduced in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything for the Sorcerer brought subclass spells to the class, which are pretty cool. Not only that, but this system is even more flexible, as it allows you to, when you level up, swap out these spells for any within the Wizard, Warlock, or Sorcerer spell lists, as long as they fit within specific schools.
But the Aberrant Mind takes the whole concept even further when you hit level 6.
The Sorcerer can cast the spells on their Psionic Spellcasting list using Sorcery Points rather than spell slots if they want. Normally, that'd probably be useless unless you've been very conservative with metamagic. However, in doing so, you no longer need to provide Verbal, Somatic, or even Material components that aren't consumed by the spell. Notably, this allows you to skip expensive spell components (such as the pickled tentacle for Summon Aberration, which costs 400g). This means that you effectively get Subtle Spell for free by doing this. And lest you think this will get too expensive in terms of Sorcery Points, you can always just convert the spell slot you would have used to cast this into SP, replenishing whatever you just spent, as a bonus action.
In other words, unless you're in an extremely tight spot in terms of action economy, needing to quicken spells and dash or disengage with your action, there's no reason to cast these spells normally anyway, so you'll always get those benefits.
What's interesting, and what was brought up in the tweet that got me thinking about this, is that perhaps Sorcerers deserve a special kind of spellcasting. Perhaps they could use the Spell Point system described in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
This optional rule in the Dungeon Master's Workshop segment of the book replaces the Spell Slot system with something more akin to "mana" seen in a lot of other fantasy RPGs.
Spell Points work thusly: you have a pool of spell points that you use to cast spells. There's a chart that shows how much a spell of each level costs in terms of points. Essentially, they start off at 2 points, and go up with each spell level, but jump up by two when you get a spell level that you'd get at a new tier of play.
If that was confusing, here's the list:
1st: 2
2nd: 3
3rd: 5
4th: 6
5th: 7
6th: 9
7th: 10
8th: 11
9th: 13
Your "caster level" (in other words your level if you're playing a pure caster, half your level if you're a half-caster, and a third of your level if you're an Eldritch Knight or an Arcane Trickster) then determines both how many Spell Points you have and the highest level you can cast a spell at, which are both just found by calculating the value of the spell slots you'd normally have and the highest level of them.
Ultimately, this means that you could cast spells at the levels you'd have spell slots for normally, and the result would be identical. But this introduces a flexibility in the system that allows for a few crazy things.
For instance, a level 18 character has 114 Spell Points. That means that they could cast 57 1st level spells in a day, if that was all they needed. On the other hand, they could cast 8 9th-level spells in a single day as well, and have 10 points left over.
And you know what, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that casting 8 meteor swarms is going to probably trivialize most late-game combat encounters.
So, if Sorcerers were going to get this, I might adjust the system a bit - one suggestion is to borrow some of the ideas from the Warlock, where low-to-mid level spells still use the spell slot system but high-level spells use the once-a-day Mystic Arcanum system.
7th, 8th, and 9th level spells (and to an extent 6th) are generally designed around the idea that they'll be a huge, showstopping event when you cast them, and so it make sense to limit them.
The Font of Magic feature does, in a roundabout way, let you already kind of treat your total spellcasting pool as variable, but the exchange rate is costly - while a 5th level spell slot will give you 5 sorcery points, the number of sorcery points you need to produce a 5th level slot is 7 - so you generally want to just cast things with those spell slots - except, as we've seen, with the Psionic Sorcery ability.
I wonder, then, if there's a place in the Sorcerer class as a whole to get a kind of "tax-free" way to spend sorcery points to cast spells. If you think about it, an Aberrant Mind could cast Dissonant Whispers four times with an 8th level spell slot converted into Sorcery Points. And they could fuse together two 2nd-level slots to give them the 4 points needed to cast Summon Aberration.
Perhaps, then, as long as the spells aren't too high-level, this kind of flexible casting isn't broken.
One thing of note is that it's a little ambiguous whether one can up-cast spells using Psionic Sorcery. It says you can cast them if you spend Sorcery Points equal to the spell's level, which seems to imply that you cannot.
If this were to become a more robust aspect of the class, perhaps that restriction could be eased - maybe putting a cap on the level to which you can upcast (5th is probably the right one for that) but basically allowing the Sorcerer to really mess around with their spells.
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