"2nd Ed. AD&D Spell Points system for clerics & mages" Topic

I know this is addressing a really old set of rules (mid-90's publishing date), but I am curious. The rules in question, are found in the optional book, Player's Options: Spells & Powers. They offered up several spell points systems for both clerics, and mages. Essentially the cleric points system allowed specialist priests to have access to spells outside of their spheres of power -- by paying more points, you could gain access to any clerical spell, even if your priest had no access to that sphere/spell, normally.

It seems overly complex, and it also defeats the purpose of the specialty priest characters: clerics can all be unique, between the pantheons/deities, no more "generic clerics", unless you go with the optional spell points systems. Seems like it was an overly complex rule-bender system. Anyone actually try to play those 2.5 rules? Cheers!

Those rules saw quite a bit of play in our games for a couple of years. They worked but definitely changed up the power sort of. The big issues were;

1) Casters using a powerful spell that drained most of their power and then wanting to stop to rest.

2) Not all players were cut out for the paperwork.

3) I remember endlessly fiddling with the rules between sessions to address perceived balance issues, but that may have been just me instead of the rules.

Cory, thank you for sharing your experiences. That fits with my reading of these optional rules. They struck me as being highly complex to track, in each of the various point systems. I hadn't considered the "stop to rest" thing, though I've encountered that in the past, just using the standard rules. The rules seemed both complex, tedious, and likely unbalanced. They strike me as ridiculously complex. My hat goes off to you for actually playing these rules. Cheers!

play 3.5 or pathfinder both are better by a longshot

RPG tastes are highly subjective and each edition is so different they are practically different games.

On the topic: I'll admit that we never used spell points. Vance or nuffin' :-)

If you wanted to use them and preserve the specialty priests, you could give bonus spell points that are ear-marked for certain spheres but I don't know if that's at all worth the bother.

2nd Edition fan myself. I did not like 3rd Edition and happily returned to 2nd after trying to run a d20 campaign. I haven't looked back since.

I didn't care for the Player's Option books, but spell points would work better than the Vancian-style of spellcasting in some of my campaigns. I'd probably convert the MERP system if I were to use it.