The case against Spell Resistance

This is a very D&D specific post.

Yan, one of my long-time players has started playing his 1st D&D arcane spellcaster ever.

One of his feedbacks from last Friday's debacle was that Spell Resistance really stank from a player's perspective. You wait for your turn, you fire your spell, you roll a number and if you fail, you lost the spell. And even when you do succeed, the target's inherent defenses (Saving throws, resistances, etc) kick in and may invalidate your whole action anyway.

Now, D&D players are usually quite willing to accept foes resisting their spells with a good roll or specific resistance to certain spells (ex: elemental resistance). But spell resistance makes you have to pay twice for an effect and does not offer many other alternatives. Yes there are spells that ignore spell resistance but such spells are rare and feel more of a crutch than anything else.

Spell resistance is a holdover from Grandad Gygax's game where sub-systems piled on sub-systems to create that lovable mess that was A D&D. I do not think it was one of the sub-system that should have been kept in D&D 3.x.

Like Yan pointed out, Spell Resistance could have been integrated as an extra bonus to saves (leaving the automatic fail of 1) or as an hit-point like resources representing absorption of spell energies.

While I am not willing to go and touch that part of the game (there are many systems based on SR) I would be willing to make this one small change:

A failed SR roll on the part of the caster does not expend a spell, spell slot or magic Item charge because the target fails to register as a possible target of the spel or magical effect (like trying to cast magic missile at a wall). The caster would still have expended the time to do the action though.

I'll propose this to my players and see what they think.