Spontaneous Metamagic and Other Variants

Another rule from UA I pulled, though not due to finding flaws with it in practice (as was the case with Armor as Damage Reduction). I liked the idea initially, but I was thinking about it recently and realized that it really takes away from the versatility of the spontaneous casters, primarily sorcerers (and bards to a degree, I suppose). The big advantage sorcerers have compared to wizards is their versatility. They have limited spell choices, but the fact that they can cast "on the fly" is what makes them unique. They can already use metamagic spontaneously, but by giving that ability to other casters, it really takes away from the class. It also seriously devalues metamagic rods. Granted, you do have to burn up other spells to use spontaneous metamagic, but depending on how many battles a party gets into in a given day, the other spells being used could very likely have been ones that weren't going to be cast anyway.

On top of that, by implementing the rules for domain wizards, wizards received even more while sorcerers remained the same resulting in more of an imbalance. I don't have any plans to withdraw the domain wizard rules (or my changes to the metamagic feats, for that matter), but I feel that spontaneity really belongs to the sorcerer and bard classes. I also need to add something for sorcerers to even things out compared to wizards given what they get for domain wizardry...

I'll also be re-examining a couple of other things too, particularly in light of how I handle raise dead and resurrection. The moon/"thread of life" thing isn't going away, but I need to look at some of my other house rules in terms of how they affect long-term character consequences. I've made the all-too-common mistake of adding too many variants too quickly without taking the time to examine the ramifications of how they affect the system as a whole. As others have pointed out, one of the nice things about D&D3.x/d20 is how coherent the system is. Unfortunately, they've also observed that its subsystems are so intertwined that it is difficult to make modifications without causing major problems (potentially) elsewhere in the system.