I was mulling over the merits of a Practiced Spellcaster variant today. This might be it's own feat instead of PS, or maybe it'd replace it.
Practiced Spellcaster [GENERAL]
Your training in magic allows you to maintain mastery in your field.
Benefit: You add one to your effective caster level for purposes of spells known, spells per day, caster level checks, and level-dependent variables of spells for one casting class. You cannot use this feat to raise your effective caster level higher than your total hit dice. You must have at least one level in the selected class for this feat to have any effect.
Normal: Multiclassing out of a casting class sucks, and you shouldn't do it.
Special: You may take this feat multiple times. You may either apply it to another casting class or to the same one. If you apply it to the same class, its effects stack.
Special: You may take this feat before you've taken a level in a casting class to help facilitate multiclassing, but you do not gain any benefit until you take your first level in the casting class. For example, you could start out as a Fighter at 1st level and take this feat to save it for 2nd level, when you take your first level of Wizard. This is handy because you would otherwise have to wait until 3rd level for your next feat.
So, what are your thoughts? All in all, it seems kind of cool. It makes multiclassing a bit more feasible for casters, but it costs a feat. In theory, at 20th level, you could blow seven or eight feats all on this, but then you don't get any feats. Also, a couple of caveats I was thinking about throwing in anyway:
- I want all casters in my game to be spontaneous niche casters like the Beguiler/Dread Necro, so they're on a slower casting progression and this is less makes casting less awesome overall.
- I'm thinking of only applying the +2 "good" save bonus only once per save. This gets rid of the incentive to take this feat several times and do bullshit like take Fighter 1/Ranger 1/Paladin 1/etc to boost your saves through the roof.
- This may or may not be too powerful with dual casting classes like the Mystic Theruge.
Also, I'd like to make a very similar version for manifesters and invocation-users. I'm not sure a feat like this would be very useful for martial adepts though, given how they already add 1/2 IL from other classes. I guess it could still be handy.