The Wizard in D&D is the sort of "arcane scientist" of spellcasters. They research and learn their spells, and copy their formulae into their spellbooks. Wizards are among the most legendary lore figures in D&D, and their names grace the names of many famous spells - Mordenkainen, Bigby, Melf, Tenser, Tasha.
More than any other class, Wizards understand magic on a deeper, more rational level, and in the lore, it's Wizards who go around inventing spells, teaching their creations to apprentices, who then teach those to others - or, rival wizards might conspire to steal one another's spellbooks almost like a form of industrial espionage - to reverse-engineer the new magical capabilities of a rival and replicate the results.
The One D&D Wizard introduces a new way for Wizard players to not just add found spells to their spellbooks, but to create spells of their own. With enough gold and time, Wizards of a certain level will be able to permanently add spells of their own design and name to their spellbooks, and potentially to the game itself (at least among the same group of players).
Wizards will now automatically get four spells added to their spellbooks at various levels. One of these is Scribe Spell, which turns the process of adding spells to your spellbook into a spell itself, but one that no Wizard will be without. Memorize Spell is another one of these that now gives the Wizard the chance to swap out prepared spells in the middle of the day, given enough time.
These spells are also rituals, except for the final one, so you can safely keep them unprepared and bust them out only when you want to make use of their functionality and avoid spending spell slots on them.
The latter two, however, are where we really get into that spell-design realm.
The first is Modify Spell. This allows you to remove a spell component (as long as it's not a consumed material component,) remove a concentration requirement, change a damage type, increase its range, give it the ritual tag (only if the spell normally takes 10 or more minutes to cast) and can cause it to only affect allies or enemies.
You can change an additional element of the spell with each spell slot above 4th level, so at 9th level, you can change every single element of the spell listed in Modify Spell. Notably, to do so, you're not going to be able to cast this as a ritual.
I think it's notable that, aside from changing its damage type, all of these changes make the spell strictly better than the original version. On its own, that's fine, given that at the very least we're spending 11 minutes at the beginning of our day performing this alteration. This spell is "Modify Spell" after all, and so it makes sense to be something that tweaks something that already exists.
Create Spell is the other piece of this puzzle. This is the only free wizard spell that is not a ritual spell, but, interestingly, it more or less requires you to cast it immediately following Modify Spell, and then you need to immediately (or within 10 minutes) begin to cast Scribe Spell to actually make the 1000 gold and hour+ poured into the task worth it.
So, on a day-to-day basis, I can start the day by making my Fireball into Thunderball.
But let's say I have lots of time and money to throw at making a new, awesome aoe spell. I want to make Vodalos' Thunderball, which deals thunder damage and does not hit my allies.
First, I'll need to cast Modify Spell at 5th level, in order to make these two changes, and that means expending a spell slot. It thus only takes one minute to cast, at least. At the end of that minute, I immediately (as a reaction) cast Create Spell, consuming some 1000 g rod or wand or something. To complete the process, I need to concentrate for one hour. Hopefully my day is uneventful - we're between adventures at the moment - and so I finish my hour without incident. Now, within the next ten minutes I start Scribe Spell.
Now, ritual casting still counts as casting, so I think I can actually complete this process even if I ritually cast Scribe Spell - as long as I've started within 10 minutes of finishing Create Spell, I should be ok.
This is a 3rd level spell, so I'll need to spend 150 gold and 6 hours in order to complete the Scribe Spell... spell. Or, 6 hours and 10 minutes because it's a ritual (granted, Vodalos is a Scribe Wizard, so make those 6 hours into 6 minutes, but we'll ignore that for now).
So, ignoring the subclass, that means that we've got to spend 1150 gold and 7 hours and 11 minutes, and two 5th level spell slots. But now, we have Vodalos' Thunderball, a 3rd level spell that does 8d6 Thunder damage to creatures within a 20-foot-radius sphere or half as much on a successful Dex save, and which ignores any allies of the caster.
I am slightly conflicted. This system will allow Wizards to make objectively better spells (it also has the added benefit of letting a Scribe get spells of desirable damage types at each spell level,) but which still work more or less like they normally do.
However, you aren't going to be able to create any truly new or unique effects using this system. These aren't going to feel like truly brand-new spells, just upgrades to existing ones. And they will be pure upgrades in almost all cases.
Now, let's talk about the really insane thing:
Concentration has been a part of 5th Edition to prevent "buff stacking." Yes, you be invisible, or you can fly, or you can have all the benefits of Tenser's Transformation, but typically you won't be able to do all of these at once.
Not so anymore!
If I just chop the Concentration requirement off of Fly, Greater Invisibility, and Tenser's Transformation, I'll be able to have these crazy bonuses all running at once - and even if I get hit (which is much harder to do, what with being invisible and all) for 60 damage, which normally would be impossible for all but the most specially-designed wizards to successfully concentrate on, I'll still be trucking.
It's a big investment, to be sure, but this could genuinely be insane. In fact, even if I'm killed, if I've made our Paladin invisibly flying, they should still get the full duration of those spells.
This is one of those things that I expect will require iteration in design. Nothing else here, even the Ritual tag, feels totally overpowered, but I could see Concentration getting removed in a future version.
Ultimately, I don't think this totally fulfills the fantasy of coming up with entirely unique spells, but what it does do is allow players to alter enough aspects of existing spells to make something original to their own characters, while still remaining reasonably balanced (again, I think nixing concentration is way too powerful - maybe replace it with "damage can't interrupt your concentration on this spell" instead).
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