Alzrius
The EN World kitten
Having magic items serve as a less-effective substitute for buffs strikes me as likely being seen by the players as just that: less effective. While there's a lot who won't care (since optimization isn't nearly the pivotal point that the Internet makes it sound like), I don't think building spellcaster supremacy into the system even more is the way to go in terms of reducing the overall degree to which buffs can tilt things.To be clear, I'd push for something like 75% effectiveness of a level-appropriate magic item in the same slot a buff could go, so that the magic item is an effective floor. That, and the ratio of available spell slots vs. available anchor points for buffs should skew thus that you generally can't afford to cover all bases with spell-slots alone (and/or you have to accept some significantly sub-optimal buffs as you rise in level and have to use lower level slots).
That's leaving aside the issues of practicality involved, since this would necessarily require some rewriting of the magic item creation system. Even if we put aside issues of (comparatively) cheap wands and scrolls (along with UMD to activate them), we'd need to establish a reason why you can't create wondrous items that manifest the spell effect on a use-activated/continuous basis, which isn't that expensive for lower-level spells even if you use that ridiculous footnote that 3.5 introduced (the one that staggers the cost based on the spell's duration). At that point, you're basically edging towards a different game altogether, and I'm not sure that the results would be worth the effort.
If you're saying that you'd keep all buffs short-term with regard to their duration, so that the spellcaster had to re-cast them at the beginning of every fight, that just sounds like you're locking down their actions even more due to the "soft pressure" of them being expected to buff again and again and again throughout the adventuring day. So now their buffing is not only expected, but also not very fun for the player, who's being pushed toward a perpetual support role because the party doesn't want to only be 75% effective by just relying on their magic items.The other thing is that buffs come at the cost of spells cast as active actions, which is likely going to be most of your battlefield control/debuffing and some amount of DPS. That trade-off should be hairy enough that it's not a simple calculation to toss all of your spell slots into the fighters each morning, but doing so might be worthwhile in some cases.
This sounds an awful lot like you want to lock the wizard into a support niche, rather than finding ways to boost the fighter so that they can exceed the limits of their current design. I won't say that's not a credible way of doing things, but I'd venture that there are better methods of doing this than making other types of magic sub-optimal to buffing. (Personally, I'd recommend bringing back some of the limitations from AD&D, not just on spellcasting but also on magic item creation, but at that point we're getting back toward "making a variant game" again.)Assuming we're talking about a 3.5 base, I don't have a ton of sympathy for the fireball wizard. If it is effective, it's such a drain on the niche of fighting types. Better that they actually are the most effective source of damage.
The nature of that competition shouldn't be between "make the rest of the party more effective" and "getting to have fun." At least not where the system itself expects the first choice to be the consistent one.More generally though, I don't think it follows that if buffing is good, all active uses of spells are outclassed. Summon Monster and Evard's Black Tentacles should be in competition with Haste, and deciding you want spells left to do them is an interesting daily choice.
I don't agree with your last sentence. If the goal is to reduce the degree to which spellcasters seem to dominate the game, institutionalizing that dominance by making it expected that they'll do certain things (and making alternative choices notably worse, both to funnel them toward their expected route and to protect other classes' niches) strikes me as narrowing options rather than expanding them.I don't think that's true. If you don't plan for it, then your casters are just even bigger force multipliers. What's the difference between "planning buffs is usually necessary to do well" and "planning buffs will trivialize nearly all encounters" from an optimization perspective? A party trying to succeed is still incentivized the same way, but the former will likely have more fun playing the actual game.