Substantially changing magic-user spell slots.
I should let every one here know that I'm not exactly an old-school gamer. While I like some old-school games and retro clones/semi-retro clones as basic chasis I tend to add on features inspired by more new school game. See, there are some old-school features I don't care for much. Such the first level magic-user's one spell per day. It's not that I want magic-users to be all powerful, certainly not at the start. I just don't think they should start out as basically walking once a day magic items. So to remedy this mistake as I see it, I'm going to make the following changes to magic-user spell slots and memorization.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking at the basic casting system for LL and BECMI I've noticed two senseless extremes. On the one end magic-users get only one spell per day at first level but later gain an unweildy number of spell slots at higher levels. To fix this I'm barrowing a bit from 3.5s Tome of Battle's maneuver progressions. All magic-users may memorize and cast up to three seperate spells at first level. Every two levels the magic-user may memorize one more spell of any level allowed at a time up to 13 spells at any one time. Magic-users still gain the ability to cast more complex and powerful spells at the same rate under the normal rules. This means that a magic-user would still have to reach 5th level to cast 3rd level spells, just that those spells memorized are now taken from a standard pool of slots. No spell may be memorized more than once at a time and each one requires five minutes of memorization per spell level to cast. Once cast any one spell can be re-memorized without need for rest.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Looking at the basic casting system for LL and BECMI I've noticed two senseless extremes. On the one end magic-users get only one spell per day at first level but later gain an unweildy number of spell slots at higher levels. To fix this I'm barrowing a bit from 3.5s Tome of Battle's maneuver progressions. All magic-users may memorize and cast up to three seperate spells at first level. Every two levels the magic-user may memorize one more spell of any level allowed at a time up to 13 spells at any one time. Magic-users still gain the ability to cast more complex and powerful spells at the same rate under the normal rules. This means that a magic-user would still have to reach 5th level to cast 3rd level spells, just that those spells memorized are now taken from a standard pool of slots. No spell may be memorized more than once at a time and each one requires five minutes of memorization per spell level to cast. Once cast any one spell can be re-memorized without need for rest.