Oh, one other resolution (challenge?). Gonna post a trpg hot take every day
— GelatinousRube (@RubeJelly) January 2, 2024
This is the MOST important table in all of 5e.
"TRINKETS
When you make your character, you can roll once on the Trinkets table to gain a trinket, a simple item lightly touched by mystery." pic.twitter.com/wibll3uMyb
I had a whole rant written up about this spell ostensibly not working with forced movement. This was a common opinion near the beginning of 5th edition. To be perfectly honest, it makes discussing this spell a tad difficult. Whether this spell is one of the few deserving of the evil concentration tag, or a clear example of designer laziness, depends wholly on whether forced movement procs the excellent 2d4 piercing damage. I love my meat grinder spell, it has tremendous combinations with various other druid and ranger abilities (and even more, should you multiclass), especially post-Tasha’s.
But I ditched that rant just in case. Normally forced movement doesn’t proc effects requiring movement, unless otherwise specified. There are Sage Advice answers explicitly contradicting this approach to spike growth. I still feel bad about my beast bond redesign getting a few details wrong in the spell critique section; best not to risk repeating the mistake here. Besides! I need to output these redesigns way more often than once per week.
I wiped out the movement/forced move interpretations with this spell. Some of you may have noticed my ever-hated concentration stayed on for this redesign; yes! I found what I consider to be one of the few useful justifications for the mechanic out there. I took the idea from 5e’s wall of stone, where “finishing” concentration makes the effect semi-permanent.
River briars is making its first published appearance in Chill Mist Valley. I think it’s a fun example of alternate or “spinoff” spells. The fact it needs to be learned from a weird critter (I think) emphasizes the uncommon nature, and might just get your magic user thinking; could I make a spinoff spell? What would it look like?
Ensnaring strike is probably one of the better ranger spells. The capacity to restrain someone at first level with a single-target strike (accompanying a weapon attack to boot) is obviously attractive. Additionally, it deals a little bit of damage! How charming!
To counterbalance these goodies, ensnaring strike can be removed by another creature. Larger creatures have advantage on their save, and Strength is a pretty common save of creatures to begin with.
Also, the spell requires concentration, for no reason other than being a duration spell. This puts it into direct conflict with hail of thorns (a single-use area attack) and hunter’s mark, turning what would be a fine hunter’s toolkit into a mess of FOMO and pointlessly exclusive choices.
This will measure up nicely to my prior hail of thorns redesign. My fixes for this spell were initially quite tame! To be perfectly honest, I could have just removed the concentration requirement and called it a day. In an effort to improve the spell in line with my initial goals (and some recently articulated new principles), I approached this spell with two directives.
Make the spell complex enough to develop an individual strategy around its use.
Make the spell contribute to the sandbox’s incidental effects.
Let’s use my second pass to explain that earlier principle: contributing to a sandbox’s incidental effects. When we describe the mechanical sandbox in video games, we describe the overall feel and expected moment-to-moment play. Most of the sandbox will feel relatively similar or even identical across large swaths of its individual elements. But there’s a category of small additional elements attached to other mechanics (sometimes called riders) and independent elements (environmental assets like boxes or crates) serving no independent purpose (boxes and crates are not standard equipment). These small additional elements are cumulative in a well designed game, taking what would be an unchanging gameplay loop and producing wildly varied results (with a positive bias) within the game.
Web, entangle, and hypnotic pattern all have relatively similar effects for fairly identical purposes. Ultimately, they lock critters out of the encounter. However, hypnotic pattern and entangle never burn enemies alive, whereas web produces a flammable area of effect! The errant dropped torch or barrel of oil interacts with web differently than the aforementioned spells. These are actually critical to game design, despite being the smallest individual additions to any sandbox. Halo would be infuriatingly boring if all encounters boiled down to poking, shooting, retreating, reloading, repeat ad infinitum.
“But James, isn’t that all encounters in halo?”
Of course not! The process I outlined describes the basic building blocks of encounters in halo. However, the outcomes of Halo are more often determined by things like the positioning or destruction of cover, the weapons you gave to AI companions, the detonation of dropped grenades or fuel cells, accidental kills providing you with use of a vehicle, environmental kills from the errant cargo crate or pallet jack sent flying by a hunter’s charge or tank’s shot. The poke-shoot-reload pattern of play may be Halo’s bread and butter, and a lot of work went into making the feedback and results of this gameplay loop satisfying (the so-called 15s of fun). It nevertheless ultimately pales in comparison to the outcomes and gameplay varierty provided by the sandbox’s incidental riders and independent elements, which allow you to win (and occasionally lose) in entertaining and diverse ways.
Here’s where entangling strike comes into play: the hitpoint conditions of the vine make the spell’s results more precarious. Say a critter gets hit by my new ensnaring strike, followed by a fireball. What’s the outcome?
The vine’s hitpoints were decremented to lower than the target’s, giving it a better chance of escaping, or permitting a nearby ally to destroy the vines outright.
The vine’s hitpoints were completely destroyed, but so was the target; it automatically failed its save vs the fireball on account of restrained.
The target’s hitpoints were decremented to lower than the vine’s, so it has disadvantage on future saving throws.
The vine’s hitpoints were decremented lower than the target’s by this fireball, giving it a better chance to escape. This escape allows the vines to target a new creature who was hurt more by the fireball.
These are just off the top of my head, for a single spell which itself has few dynamic riders (but interacts with nominally static elements quite a bit).
It’s a short rest spell that doesn’t last long enough for a short rest.
Rope trick is intended to give your party a brief reprieve from the dangers of your local dungeon, guard, or whatever other excuse you’d like to hide for an hour. The spell is often interpreted as not lasting long enough for a short rest, which brings into question several potential issues with the spell’s design:
If your referee does determine it lasts long enough for a short rest, the spell ejects you from the space at the short rest’s conclusion.
If the spell is deployed as little as 10 feet up, this process will inflict fall damage.
You can pull the rope back in to keep bad guys from travelling upwards, meaning there’s no protective benefit to using a longer rope (making the safe space higher up).
The rope can still be useful for reaching higher spaces, but I’ll note spider climb and levitation both work better for this purpose. What’s that? spider climb and levitation target one creature? If you need more creatures to go up, cast levitation on a grappling hook (tied to a rope of any length, btw).
So all in all, we have a short rest spell that does not actually provide you with a short rest, has some vague protective function, and regrettably can’t be used for much else (that other spells aren’t significantly better at). So for this redesign, I find myself just increasing the utility of this spell.
Alright, quick review of the changes:
The duration now permits short rests without bean counting minutes or what counts as light activity.
I’ve clarified the surface area available.
I’ve increased the length of rope usable. This is purely to inspire shenanigans, because Dungeon Masters are ultimately terrible people who deserve worse.
Easy changes for common problems. Any company not obsessed with nerfing spellcasters until game masters stop complaining (i.e. never) would have made simple changes similar to these long ago.
Well, the biggest new use for this spell is hauling people. It works like floating disc, but isn’t as susceptible to just swiping people or material right off it. However, moving goods into the extradimensional space is more difficult than just loading people into it, requiring extra spells or items to accomplish this. Finally, the rope is obviously vulnerable while tied to whatever giant, carriage, or airship is hauling the spell.
I feel obligated to leave a small note about why I develop changes like this. I don’t like D&D’s spellcasting race to the bottom! Spells were originally released as solutions to problems. To compensate for the reliable nature of these solutions, you were given limited selections of said solutions, and had to choose them in advance. This risk-reward structure encouraged you to find nails compatible with your hammers, which had a bunch of other positive benefits. Following editions of D&D made these spells less effective, because DMs couldn’t bear to see their precious big bad get ensnared by a spell. The big bad had to get a saving throw vs being ensnared, but this sucked for players who still had to choose their solutions (which were no longer solutions) ahead of time. To compensate, the players got to choose even more solutions, and under less strenuous circumstances. To compensate for GM whining again, big bad guys had to be given Legendary Resistances, which would save a bad guy if he failed his save.
What this means is, we have for 40 years sunk deeper and deeper into appeasing GMs who do not want their bad guy to be defeated for any reason other than losing his very last hitpoint. The game gets less strategic, and broadly less tactical as well as a result, because giving monsters interesting options in combat actually doesn’t affect the game master’s satisfaction at all. What the GM wants is to feel like their bad guy didn’t get taken out too quickly, a wish which only the dumbest imaginable “creatives” would think twice about trying (and ultimately failing) to grant. People who do not understand the game think you can put a single encounter in front of the players and still play D&D. Doubling the hitpoints and damage output doesn’t replace the 5 other encounters your players would normally expend resources on. If you want “boss” encounters in a game like D&D, you don’t just need multiple encounters per night; you need multiple boss encounters per night to run the game as intended. You should expect your players and monsters are going to roll higher or lower in a given encounter, making it swing one direction or another. Your players could feasibly trounce a dragon and struggle against 12 skeletons in the next room. If you want to preserve a specific type of encounter and ensure your players struggle, there is no substitute for multiple encounters.
Oh boy, another GM dependent information spell. What is James going to complain about this time, I wonder?
I’m mostly going to complain about the class of spell. Listen, players get a ridiculous number of spell slots as time goes on, especially once you factor wands or staves of extra spell slots. I would like players to use those spell slots! I would like players to use so many of those spell slots, that the obvious benefits they enjoy from each slot that begin interfering with one another. I don’t want players to wait until problems have already appeared to cast spells that help them out. It’s better to let them cast a variety of protective spells, enjoy 1 or two of the spells “activating”, and watch players pat themselves on the back for their good preparation. Players should cast cordon of arrows every single night, excited to see what their magical barbs penetrated come next morning. See invisibility could easily be one such spell, if redesigned properly.
So how exactly do you figure it? How do you make a spell appealing if it only comes up for a specific situation? Real three pipe problem, let me tell ya. For these situations, I like to take a look at a success, a spell that exceeded expectations under the same circumstances. Take a look at death ward here:
Death ward is a spell you only use for a very specific situation, and it’s a much higher level spell than see invisibility. Here’s the kicker; dying? Probably comes up roughly as often as invisible creatures do. No, seriously! Do your players die every session in a 5e game? Of course not! You are legitimately more likely to encounter invisibility. Death ward succeeds where this spell doesn’t, because death ward only activates when you need it. Alright, so the spell doesn’t literally protect you from dying (technically), just going unconscious (which immediately precedes you dying). Death ward has an identical duration to see invisibility, but that’s because advance notice of combat is easier to attain. The outcome prevented (death, or going unconscious) is more proportional to the ward’s level, as well as its duration.
To spice up see invisibility, we need to significantly extend the duration. Giving the players all-day invisibility would be bad, because it would negatively impact the ref’s propensity to actually deploy invisible threats. No, what the spell needs (much like death ward) is a wide window to activate, proportional to the spell’s benefit. In this framework, the spell protects you from being surprised once during the adventuring day. If the ward activates, it’s because you’ve run into something the referee deployed invisible. That, or one of your friends turned invisible within your detection radius (I suppose it’s not the worst incidental use of the spell, though certainly not why you cast it). Accidental activations are probably a good balancing factor to this extended duration. You get both spells at the same level, and invisibility is a huge component of nearly every single adventuring party’s strategy.
On the GM side of things, you too can improve the situation, and encourage players to use this spell more often. Simply deploy an invisible creature roughly every other session, or once every 2-4 adventuring days. Consistent deployment of threats is key to players preparing counters for those threats. As I mentioned earlier, you want to make it easy for players to cast a variety of protective spells once they reach the higher levels. This allows you to use more “unfair” monsters and encounters more often, because the players don’t bitch and moan about how unfun it is to deal with an invisible monster, or a trap they ran into. Instead, they get to feel nice and proud at how they bested your dastardly encounter, and how easy the invisible critter was to deal with.
Then, with the ward expended, you throw a second invisible creature at them.
Old but gold, sleep was among the must-picks for AD&D tables (if they let you actually pick spells). In 5th edition, it’s known for providing you at most a level or 2 of bypassing encounters or making them easier. As we all know, it’s then launched straight into the junk pits, unfit for knocking anyone other than your party members unconscious. I’m not going to spend paragraph’s justifying my position here; you either know sleep is dogshit, or you haven’t played long enough. No between, no exceptions.
I’m just here to fix it.
If only there were a way to future-proof our spells against bad math! If only there were abstractions of what our individual, haphazard, hastily written chickenscratch monster statistics were supposed to represent! Lucky us, there are! Most are wrapped with a neat little bow into a mechanic called Challenge Rating, and it’s one of the least used structural mechanics in 5th edition.
We no longer have to worry about whether 5e monster hitpoint values skyrocket after 3-4 sessions of play. A third party monster book with different HP values needn’t cause us any anxiety. The fear our monster books might be in need of revision, because our hitpoints need to be halved and our to-hit bonuses doubled, may finally be put to rest.
Goblins are supposed to be CR 1/4. It doesn’t matter if we change their hitpoints from 6 to 3. It doesn’t matter if we change their hitpoints from 3 to 12. We know goblins are supposed to have a specific strength relative to everything else, and if that relative strength is in any way already quantified, then we have no need of 5e’s shoddy HP balancing for our sleep spell.
There’s one issue with my version of the spell, and I have myriad ways of solving it; the spell is a tad too strong.
Aha! Much better. There’s no need for sleep to be a 1st level spell in 5th edition. 2nd level spells need more goodies as a whole. I get to keep the d8 scaling, which insures casters are increasingly devastating vs unit-sized groups of enemies. The upper limit on creatures affected is similar to the restriction of polymorph, and gives me an easy way to let players scale the spell further. I might still be tempted to drop the die, by 5e doesn’t have coup de grace mechanics anyways.
Besides, now you definitely won’t forget to include minions in your encounters.
I asked my unknowing buddy 3_C on Aaron the Pedantic’s discord to provide me with a venn diagram of two spell groups, He wasn’t unknowing for long; shortly after our conversation began, I explained why the following two groups of spells were of interest to me:
Spells which seem useless or inefficient once you cast them for their ideal use case.
Spells which used to be of critical importance in saving someone or winning a combat.
The overlap of these two spell groups will be the subject of our next few redesigns. In this process, we discovered a third group of spells with an unexpected (but in retrospect, completely reasonable) overlap with our prior two groups.
3. Spells which are actually Good, but which stupid people (or gullible people, under the influence of stupid people) have ignored in the more recent play culture.
Group 1 includes spells like see invisibility. You don’t prepare it, because you don’t expect to fight an invisible creature. If you could expect to fight an invisible creature, you would’ve prepared the spell. Except, maybe other spells can get the job done. They may not let you see an invisible creature, but lots of spells are addressed “to whom it may concern”, and not overly picky as to whether you witness the victim die.
Our second group of spells has less to do with spells we know were of critical importance back in ye old days. Instead, these spells (which are usually defensive in nature) in some way have the aesthetic of life saving tools. Today’s redesign, protection from poison, falls into this category.
Lots of paladin spells fall under 3. The phrase “smite slots” should be banned from public discourse, anyone who dares utter it going forward should be charged under resurrected blasphemy laws for this purpose, and the old soviet gulags should be rebuilt to house any such degenerates.
It’s best we set an example. Let no one else suffer, as did my poor Gio (or as I suffered, through him), never knowing the beauty of casting crusader’s mantle (I begged him to do this constantly), forever bereft of a massive party-wide damage boost to which a simple 3rd level smite would never compare (we went over this math about a dozen times).
Today’s spell falls under all three groups!
This is not a bad spell! It doesn’t cost Concentration, it ‘s only 2nd level, has an instantaneous curative effect, provides persistent damage resistance, and grants broad advantage on all saving throws versus Poisoned.
What the hell is going on? Why isn’t this spell used more often? For once I’m going to lay this blame not at the feet of designers, but at the feet of game masters. Your players should expect poison damage every single session of play. It provides the easiest justification to increase its damage and players have a lot of ways of dealing with poison! Including high damage poisons every session, to which your players have a number of resources to mitigate or avoid said poison, seems like a trivially easy way to train your players. Ditto for the poisoned condition, include it every other session at least. There are half decent or even good spells in 5th edition which do exactly what you’d expect them to, and are not a waste of resources or preparation. Players just don’t expect them to exist.
This is one of the reasons we’re redesigning spells! If huge swaths of the spell list are trap options designed to waste your turn, eat up your Concentration, and put you in unnecessary danger a mere few hours of scrolling forums would solve, players don’t expect to find spells which work as intended. Bad design may not literally chase good design out of the rulebook with pointy sticks and flaming chair legs, but it may as well for all the damage bad design does to our players. There’s nothing about this spell that needs to be fixed, it’s the system around it that’s the problem.
With all of this in mind, we only have one new version of protection from poison. Much as in our speak with plants redesign, we’ll just try to make players use the spell more often.
When a magic user has more opportunities to cast a spell, they have more incentive to bring it along. An adjustment to casting time is the easiest way to give magic users more opportunities to cast the spell.
There are no ritual spells in 5th edition whose normal casting time is a reaction. There are few reaction spells in 5th edition writ large! Our redesign splits the spell’s use cases between emergencies and preparation. Arguably, the original spell was quite handy for both; defensive spells are weighted unfairly the more specific they are. It doesn’t help that Poisoned will usually fade within a minute at most, often a successful saving throw is enough to fix it. A 10 minute ritual permits you to lay the spell’s protection for some time and opportunity costs on one target. This lasts for the spell’s new duration: 10 minutes. Alternatively, you can cast the spell when someone (including yourself) is affected by poison, whether it’s the damage or the condition. The initial target will benefit from the full duration, but you can upcast the spell to temporarily protect other creatures in the party as well.
This is the best I can do for an already amazing spell! I increased the number of use cases.
Author’s Note: This is a republished article, originally released on 2/23/21. It was lost to my site changes back in the day, but no longer.
This will be one of the very few old-school callbacks that didn’t come directly from Jeffro Johnson (whose OSR insights you should be paying attention to anyways), this actually came from a series Matt Colville did called “The History of D&D”. I pour over the series often, and one nugget (worth 1.5x its weight) was the concept of weight in gold pieces. I filed it away, as I’m wont to do, though I did check with Jeffro to see if he was using it in his ultra-faithful AD&D campaign (he was, good man).
I walked one of my players through buying some trade goods the other day, and in something of a spur of the moment decision, I decided to describe their relevant qualities measured in gold pieces. “Gunpowder is worth 10x its weight in gold. The opals and agates mined from the nearby Gercross Well are worth 4x their weight in gold.” It felt really, really freeing.
Weight in gold pieces acts as a force multiplier for the internal calculations my players are making. By saying “gunpowder is worth 10x its weight in gold”, the players immediately know two facts:
The item’s noteworthy weight is _.
The item is worth (half, 10x, etc) its weight in gold.
Very simple. Let’s say for a sec I want to make a stack of bullets, and the specific variety of bullets I’d like to make requires 1 unit of gunpowder. As we established earlier, gunpowder is worth 10 x its weight in gold. From here, the player has two extraordinarily quick cognitive paths to solve the crafting problem depending on whether they already have the requisite gunpowder.
Therefore, I must spend 10 gold pieces on the requisite materials.
Therefore, I must mark off 1 gunpowder (weight in gp) for this recipe.
We (by which I mean Gygax, but I helped, some few decades afterwards) just solved a major issue in harvesting, distributing, and bookkeeping multiple large categories of loot. Players kill a dragon, the game immediately turns into the part in monster hunter where they start carving it up (since it’ll never be as much fun as fighting the dragon in monster hunter). Your players are gonna ask you to collect blood, the teeth, scales and/or hide, the breath organ, any horns, claws/talons, extraneous organs, and more, and more, and more. You could come up with different measures for the various markers of craft-worthiness, magic-worthiness, trophy-worthiness, sale price, any intersection between the aforementioned, and any intersection between the not aforementioned. You’d probably settle on the closest incremental measures of size or weight, but still. Even those would be different! Gallons or liters for blood, pounds or kilograms for scales, feet or meters for hide.
Know what weight-in-gp does? That’s right, it reduces all of that down. The hide is worth 16x its weight, the scales are worth 20x their weight, and the blood is worth 14 x its weight. The DM now has their direct, practical pipeline into the worth of the objects harvested without this silliness about switching between measurements.
Oh, and on top of all of this, encumbrance has an easy-in for your game, because now a singular conversion exists for crafting, capacity, and sale price. You’re welcome.
Keyboard? Worth 23x its weight. Weight in gold pieces?
Priceless.
[this rapidly expanded past the scope of “thoughtbite”]
We’re back! I bring one present you “missed”, tucked away in the bottom of your stocking below york patties and gift cards.
Boy I sure do hate these regular “deal damage” spells. Routine and favorite critic Particularist half-joked I should get around to a generic “damage spell” design, presumably to save myself some work and embarrassment engaging in the process. While there is a certain dignity to tending the fields on hot days, I find my position of indentured servitude in WOTC’s House easier on my fingernails, and the processed (as opposed to freshly picked) cotton less itchy.
At present, could could sum up the majority of damaging spells in 5th edition with one mega-spell dictating range, area of effect, and damage type by a few modifiers players would need to balance (presumably in a point cost or counter chart) to 0. One imagines 5e with such a spell (or class ability) would then reference this mega-magic in nearly all other spells (with the exception of those producing illusions or charms) before adding an additional effect.
But each day I catch a fleeting glimpse of a bullwhip trailing past Master Crawford and a door slamming to mark his egress to the fields, I find myself preferring my task set by the House. This task is (as a reminder) to discover spells which fail to deliver on the fantasies promised by their texts, fixing that particular error, then “plussing” the spell further. I’m not just cleaning up the garbage, I’m installing something beautiful in its place. By doing so (and by the crack of the bullwhip, I know Master Crawford will not overhear), I prove not only were these spells easy to fix during development (not only after the fact), but could have been improved further before release. The buck doesn’t stop with fantasies provided by the spell; for a designer, attaching new ideas to the spell is a trivial exercise.
With that, I believe I’ve laid some groundwork for today’s changes to witch bolt.
Talk about bad! Spells like this are why Giant in the Playground class guides have a brown rating. Down the list of issues we go:
The initial damage may seem impressive, but you can still roll low on that d12 with no buffer.
The follow-up damage on subsequent turns requires your action to use.
While the spell seems like it would scale well at higher levels, you only add additional d12s for the initial damage, not any followup activations. Why the hell not?
The aforementioned spell, which was already beyond consideration for the reasons I listed above, is Concentration (ending this spell the moment you cast one of 300 other spells with the same tag).
You’d get more from borrowing Master Crawford’s bullwhip! I’d also like to point out something personal/sentimental, as opposed to objective and knowable. Witch bolt is not evocative enough for its name. If you invoke the name of witches, or chaos, or a famous wizard’s name, I’m going to have an artificially higher standard for its mechanics. It’s not fair, I recognize it’s not fair, and the fact it’s not fair matters not. With all that being said, let’s see what a better spell looks like.
Alright, we’ve fixed things up a bit. Let’s go over the changes:
The spell’s type has been changed to transmutation.
Increases to the spell’s damage now apply to reactivations.
The spell’s reactivation cost has been changed to a bonus action.
Concentration has been removed (let all downtrodden spellcasters of the world rejoice).
The spell may now target a creature or surface.
Targeting a surface produces a new environmental effect.
“Witch magic” as manifesting multiple different effects through the same mechanism is a hot way of handling that thematic bubble mechanically. Let’s talk about the environmental effect of witch bolt while we’re at it.
My main purpose for including this was actually locking doors. Chests, doors, anchoring certain objects to the ground (like a weapon you just knocked from someone’s hand), you get the idea. There’s surprisingly few spells like this!. A bunch of spells do produce difficult terrain, but as far as world-layer hindrances go? Quite few. Even fewer spell out additional world layer effects beyond a description or two of conditions inflicted. Grease would be my favorite example, another 1st-level spell that could use some reference to its other world-layer effects. As you noticed above, they don’t need to be comprehensive! Just mention a few things the environmental effect may be expected to do, we don’t need (unimportant) nor want (very important) more details than that.
Might as well be two spells in one! I do sometimes wonder, smoking a pipe and gazing at Master Crawford’s spellbook by candlelight, whether I should be more careful about wordcount when fixing up these relics. There’s certainly a broader trend towards wordier spells on the whole.
Looking at my updates, the most notable is without a doubt my “snapback” mechanic. If you end the spell by virtue of leaving its range, it reactivates the spell’s effects a final time. This is relevant to another major: the area of hexsand produced now scales with spell level! You might worry a prospective warlock might swath entire battlefields with hexsand by dumping a 5th level slot on it, but there’s no need to worry. THe player is still restricted to the spell’s range + producing new hexsand from a point of origin within 5 feet of existing hexsand.
This leads me into the most important change, a mechanic I don’t think I’ve introduced since my barksin redesign: spells gaining new effects if you choose to concentrate on them. In this case, you produce lightning on surfaces of hexsand, and produce hexsand on creatures you target with the lightning. This might again be concerning to folks noting how quickly higher level spell slots can fill a battlefield with hexsand; once again I tell you the caster is heavily constrained by the limitations of range on the spell. Additionally, producing hexsand close to the caster when it’s crackling with electricty is more liable to end the spell early than decimate a battlefield. This is because taking damage while concentrating on the spell can end the spell early on a failed save vs the damage.
There’s one obvious way to get around this limitation; flight! Am I really okay with someone flying around the battlefield on a broom, casting witchbolt to zap and immobilzie some significant swaths of terrain with a 5th level slot?
Absolutely.
Some potential future changes:
I think hexsand could use a line or two explaining how a “cube” of the stuff might act differently.
I’m likely to change reactivation back to a time of 1 action. Witch bolt suffers from a trash action economy at base, sure. My version takes care of this through the “snapback” mechanic, ensuring you can get at least one more instance of the spell’s effect just by leaving range. With this in mind, it probably doesn’t need to be so easy to reactivate.
Following from the above, I might change the actual casting time to 1 bonus action.
When I eventually release this as a book or pamphlet, I’ll be dropping the vast majority of clarification text. We don’t need it! Confused about a spell’s effect? Play through it. Roll a d6 if there’s an argument, higher roll’s interpretation wins this round. It’s not my ideal solution for a game like this, and I prefer the game just work, but I’m tired of including more clarification text than what covers the actual spell’s effects. This game has a Dungeon Master, and whatever else I might think about that role, I might as well make use of them.
Next in our list of spells that do exactly what they’re supposed to, speak with plants. There’s plenty to praise when it comes to this spell; the level, the extra effects, the limitations on interacting with plants, the whole thing.
Look at how many additional effects there are! Someone already gave this the “me” treatment, trying to incentivise the players using the spell by way of broader potential applications. The spell level was a curious note as well; this is a third level spell? Speak with animals is a 1st level spell! Animals are probably more useful for day to day adventuring, right? And besides, speak with animals is divination, why isn’t speak with plants?
Then it hit me; this spell is like passwall (an upcoming entry), but for plants instead of rock and stone! What a conundrum, being able to bypass terrain within a dungeon environment can be extremely useful for escapes, retreats, stealing loot, you name it. This spell could function as an even better passwall in a natural dungeon environment, so much so that I’m tempted to drop a few speak with plants scrolls in the fae hollows players will soon encounter in my active Chill Mist Valley campaign. The players could use the spell to bypass or negate traps and hazards, encounters, and get more information about whatever lays on the other side!
Any issue with “pick rate” is then not the fault of this spell at all, but rather the environments people use it in, and how frequently. This is a tricky place to be as a designer; I could make the spell so good folks couldn’t help bringing it along every adventure. I could make a spell so powerful that folks wouldn’t be able to resist exploiting every possible use case. Alas, a game where speak with plants is more powerful than fireball would be incredibly weird., and we’d all rightfully raise our eyebrows at whatever campaign it produced. There simply aren’t enough natural environments to use the 1-2 punch of asking the vines and leaves you’re about to have make a hole in the wall what’s on the other side of that wall in most of our games.
My only hope, my only hope is to significantly increase the range of potential uses for the spell, such that players can’t help but bring it along without grossly inflating the power of the spell.
I have to break my format, here. Normally I title revisions Better, Even Better or Cooler, Even Cooler in the rare cases I like a spell, or think it’s already pretty good for some reason. This spell was so well done, the margins for a balanced improvement were so thin, and my ideas for modifiers were so constrained that I couldn’t realistically do two separate iterations.
Let’s go through the changes:
Information gained now covers the past week; this makes it far more valuable for information gathering, and gives us a better hook into exploratory play.
Moving plant life is now even easier with this spell, allowing you to rearrange thorn walls and trees.
You can direct plant life to end conditions and other effects on creatures, not just Restrained a la the entangle spell.
Plants can offer you one of several boons in exchange for a bargain. I think the prompts are sufficiently evocative for a GM’s description to boost verisimillitude, when matched with the correct scenario. A treant summoning a dryad for you would certainly be fun!
There is now a Higher Levels addition, which adds range and expands the range of time plants can answer questions about.
Finally, most importantly:
The spell can now be cast as a ward, leaving it behind to activate on some other condition.
I really think this last change will be the most significant for folks considering it. Using plants to bar access to specific individuals, to hide specific places or things from unwanted passers-by, to deliver messages or boons to a particular person, this spell is now a force multiplier for non-combat play. Glyph of warding generally isn’t seen as compatible with this spell, and you usually wouldn’t want to spend 200 gp to cast it with speak with plants anyways. I think this’ll make the spell significantly more attractive to anyone engaged even in nominally exploration focused play.
Well, at least it’s effective?
Congratulations folks, you can summon a big scary lizard unaccompanied by most of the problems faced by summoning spells, because it’s an illusion! What’s more, you also get to ignore many of the problems faced by illusion spells, on account of this spell having a damage effect. Have your NPC ignore the illusion all you want Mr. GM, they’re still going to take damage.
I have a couple issues with this spell. First, dragons suck and are generally unimpressive in 5th edition. By extension, through no fault of this spell, the dragon produced by this spell is unimpressive as well. It spawns, terrifies you, and deals some okay damage each round. I want better from dragons, so how could I help wanting better from this spell? Additionally, it’s a concentration spell (for no goddamned reason at all) using your 8th level slot for the day. Come on, man!
Alright, we’ve expanded the dragon’s damage, range of actions (and effects) to better reflect the dragons we’re stuck with. Additionally, you can enjoy a few status effects, so this spell doubles as a control spell. What I want more than anything else is to use this spell in mass combat, what a joy it’d be.
I’m taking the various built-in workarounds common to most illusions out until I have the final version in front of me. Instead, the dragon starts with 100 hitpoints, and regains hitpoints based on its damage output.
I tried removing saves to make this spell less of a time sink in combat, but I don’t think it works properly. While I prefer passive defenses to active for the sake of combats with more participants, this isn’t the proper place to introduce them. Additionally, I’m considering whether to just give the dragon a small statblock detailing their features and cleaning up the actual spell text.
There we are, adding the dragon’s qualities to a statblock made sure I didn’t miss any important statistics, which would’ve been terribly embarrassing. It also cleaned up the spell’s core text substantially, making this easier to implement at the table.
The roll vs AC has been removed. While I prefer passive defenses for ease of resolution at large scale, this was not the time or place to introduce it to 5e without a significant amount of jank. We’re returned to the Intelligence save, but this time with a new time saving adjustment! Creatures who fail their Int save automatically fail further saves against the dragon until the beginning of its next turn. Now this could really tear an army apart!
One final note, I added a higher level casting of this spell. Go ahead and copy a dragon you can see (or know the true name of). Enjoy yourself!
Barring a few fixes to typos and maybe shifting some text blocks around, I think we’ve captured the terror both a dragon and a level 15+ wizard should be able to capture, all wrapped into one spell.
We’re going to break one of the rules of attunement in this spell. Normally only one person can be attuned to a given item, but identify is going to change that. By the end of this essay, I’ll have decided on additional changes to attunement, which will be collected at the end (or perhaps just a new paragraph to replace your present attunement rules.
The purpose of these spell redesigns are to design 5e spells as if 5e was a more holistic game unto itself, rather than a legacy product. They are not intended as a vehicle for broad rule rewrites, as a general design principle. However, the identify spell’s utility and purpose is almost entirely reliant on the edition’s present attunement rules. Identify could reasonably exist as a reference for attunement in lieu of any rules for it, should a designer write it as such. However if attunement rules do exist, identify simply can’t be evaluated or adjusted in isolation from those rules. The rules and this spell are extremely hyperlinked, so edits to the spell almost must come with edits to the attached rules out of necessity.
Good ol’ identify. Does exactly what it’s supposed to do, and nothing else. Beyond casting the spell on a magic item, you will almost never use this spell, nor will you prepare this spell for really any reason. If you’re a bard, you may have this as a spell known, and some classes might have it automatically prepared thanks to a subclass/archetype. For these characters, assuming they’re willing to dump a spell slot (and there are parties more comfortable with resource expenditure, no shade), identify can come in handy for recognizing specific spell effects.
I’d like identify to see far more use than that.
The change I agonized over most was casting time. I got to thinking on limitations on the spell, what its role in the game was, and the additional benefits I knew I’d add to give the spell repeat value. I came to a fork in the metaphorical road; either identify would take an action to pry away at an item’s secrets, or it would take days or maybe weeks to return any usable information.
Remember, my primary goal is making the spell re-usable, not once every 5 or 6 sessions when the party actually gets a magic item. Technically, the 1 minute casting time would be okay for the purpose of attuning to an item quickly, out of combat.
I’m not interested in a purely out-of-combat use.
If we’re using identify to do more than just figure out the benefits of an item, why not use it for more advanced strategies in play? Swapping weapons before a fight, wrestling over a magic sword? Whether we envision spells as producing success states to problems or producing mini-games, identify can do so much more with regards to magic items.
I’ve also written an opportunity for encounters with NPC spellcasters to turn hostile when the party seeks them out for identify. Turn your attention to the spell’s material component cost; rather than a pearl worth 100 gold pieces, it now requires a pearl worth 1,000 gold pieces. This is still a one time purchase, I have not written the pearl is consumed by the spell. The pearl’s cost now competes with an individual character’s desire to purchase a magic item, or scribe some of the scrolls they’ve discovered so far. It’s beyond what they’re likely to collect in a single or even several sessions, the wizard will likely purchase this pearl a couple sessions before a fighter or paladin snags their first suit of plate armor. Perhaps sooner; a group may view the increased armor class of their frontline warriors as more important than pithy details they can get from a local wizard or bard. Indeed, the high cost of Identify may significantly delay characters even taking the spell until the party is at least a few levels in.
So instead, they take their items to a few higher level NPCs. All’s well and good, until the party brings in something too good for them to have. Until the party brings in an item that spellcaster needs, because it has a property befitting a higher level spellcaster. Until an enemy of the party disguises themselves as one of these higher level spellcasters.
And the identify spell just let this new enemy attune to whatever powerful new item they found fit to betray the party for.
The idea of NPC spellcasters using identify as an opportunity to betray the party was so attractive to me, I took additional steps to preserve it. I didn’t want an NPC betrayal like this to be a one-off event, only as a result of rules ignorance, and never to be seen again by players with a modicum of caution in repeat campaigns. It’s gotta be baked into the spell, baked into attunement. I want these damn players to risk betrayal again, and again, and again, and I don’t care what kind of carrots I have to dangle in front of them to justify chancing that stick. Imagine an NPC spellcaster casting identify on a legendary or artifact item, and immediately wrecking the party to try and get away with the item.
What’s more, I think I accomplished my usual goal of creating a mini-game out of this spell. Rather than generating a mini-game itself however, it does so by interacting with other core mechanics (which I’ve edited slightly, as you may see below).
While this doubtless needs another pass, I think it’ll serve as a neat template for making attunement cool again.
Nevertheless, it’s reminded me why I don’t like doing core rewrite adjustments. It takes a torturously long time, which involves very little writing, and a lot of continuously examining any written work for any potential embarrassment of myself. There’s no reason to spend this much time on it! You’ve already notice I’ve been far less verbose on this post than usual. I just can’t imagine applying my usual in-depth explanations to the idea attunement is relatively boring, and could be better for a game that wanted to focus on it. Am I crazy here? Let me know.
This spell is stupid. In D&D’s long history of assuming the information provided by divination spells will always be sufficient to justify their use, regardless of circumstance, cost, comparison with other spells, or the relevance of any “information” given to play, locate creature ranks among the worst.
Ugly, stupid, devoid of purpose or utility in a game with no need of its existence by a team with no need of real designers.
For the mere cost of a fourth level spell, you may know the direction of a creature, provided they’re within a thousand feet.
Let’s go over what’s missing from a 4th level spell.
Doesn’t provide you with information about the target’s surroundings.
Tells you nothing about the target’s vitals, equipment, spells, or even a single fact about their person.
Has no separate function beyond a thousand feet (seriously, what a tiny radius).
Has no use case aside from tracking a recently seen creature or a creature you came to your location to find.
Can’t actually be used to find the target! You only learn the direction, meaning any significant obstacle while navigating to the target makes the spell worse than useless.
Obviously wastes a 4th level slot, which could’ve instead been used for a spell with more use cases, a better outcome in said use cases (successful use of the spell provides you with an actual benefit) even for the purpose of trying to find someone.
A buddy of mine said this spell could help you avoid encounters while trying to find someone, and as far as I can tell, that’s patently wrong. The spell only provides you with a direction; the building doesn’t suddenly mold itself to accommodate your spell. You still have no path to actually get to your intended target, meaning you have to explore and face encounters anyway. And if you didn’t? If your target was a straight shot away, and your spell told you as much? Congratulations, you just paid a 4th level slot to be certain about something you’d figure out anyways in a few minutes.
The success state of this spell vaguely confirms information you already knew or would know, at the cost of a 4th level spell slot, reducing your ability to make use of said information. The number of edge cases beyond this are infinitesimally small.
First thing’s first; we decreased the level. There was no reason for this spell to be 4th level back when it first came out in Tome of Magic, and there’s certainly no reason for it to be 4th level now. This spell was made in the 90’s, and no one at WOTC has thought to look at it critically since. This is the “quality” of designer I fix mistakes for.
This provides you with real information. First, you get a visual of your target when you come within 100 feet of them. In addition to seeing their current state, you also get to confirm distance (which the original spell does not provide). Furthermore, you can see their immediate surroundings (in poor detail, only outlines) so you can infer their condition and state. You can also see other creatures in a similar fashion! Are there guards? Fellow prisoners? We all know you’d only ever consider using this spell for some kind of rescue or assassination anyways, and the procedures for both are remarkably similar.
Finally, you can find secret doors or paths up or down levels/floors! This only comes up when casting at higher levels, and at further distances. It’s just an extra benefit for upspelling and using locate creature to prepare in advance. Who knows, you might be able to slip in the back door!
Also, we removed concentration, because we have an IQ above room temperature.
I cleaned up the language and changed around the pathfinding benefit a bit. Our higher levels section was getting a bit messy! I prefer the pathfinding element to remain relevant in closer quarters, so I removed the 1 mile interval note and instead made it compete with find the creature itself. It’s only a second level spell after all, we don’t want it to solve too many problems or automatically detect secret features of the dungeon. It just provides that benefit circumstantially.
Alright, back on the bandwagon we go.
I get the conceit of this mechanic is ostensibly fun randomness, but in reality, blink just turns into a waste. 5e combat lasts 2-3 rounds, -+1 for cleanup. Do you want to spend 1/2 or 1/3 of your potential in combat prepping? Sorry, that’s not a good trade for a 3rd level spell. What else could you prep with? Haste is a good option, even though it has the dreaded concentration tag. Maybe that’s the best reason to cast it; only one concentration spell can be maintained at a time per the tag’s rules, so casting at the beginning of the combat usually maximizes its effectiveness.
So, when deciding between a concentration spell and a coin toss for the blink spell’s minor benefits, we’ve discovered one of the only spell matchups in the entire game where a duration concentration spell comes out ahead of a duration spell without concentration. Oof. Let’s give it a face lift.
First thing’s first, no more random spell benefits. I genuinely didn’t want to go in this direction, I wanted to keep the theme of random benefits, but couldn’t figure it out in a way that didn’t grossly exacerbate the word count. Typing that out just helped me add it to the (Even Better) version; I already had the (Even Better) version written out and added to this post. You guys are never going to see the version I already posted to this blog, it disappears the second I finish this section.
Speaking of edited word counts, that was the second adjustment. See, cutting down on the number of words didn’t clarify much. Moving into the ethereal plane offers your character a series of benefits, many of which are very similar to one another but have different restrictions. I didn’t edit the text for blink’s benefits beyond listing them, which highlighted opportunities to make minor adjustments.
Now when a player looks down at the spell, each response to a DM’s question is neatly arranged in bullet points. When you DM asks “Can they see you?”, you may simply read off the line which specifically addresses sight in the ethereal plane. It’s also more accessible; as I understand it, folks who suffer from dyslexia and disorders with similar groups of symptoms have a difficult time reading a paragraph with numerous similar but slightly differing sentences.
Yeah, you see the random mechanic don’t you? This is basically the purpose of Blink to begin with, earning you a brief reprieve. Also, now casting it at higher levels gives everyone the chance to play the Effect and Cause mission from Titanfall 2.
Awesome.
One final note; blink doesn’t have to be a combat-only spell, and the fact it sucks in combat doesn’t mean you can’t use it for non-combat circumstances (for which many spells do exist in 5e). However, this is a redesign, and the entire redesign is built on the premise things could be designed either better or cooler. If a spell which looks like it’s supposed to be used in combat sucks compared to other combat spells, it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a good utility option, because folks will throw the spell out before the utility evaluation. If I make a bad combat spell good for combat, I increase the likelihood of use outside of combat scenarios. Maybe moreso than strictly combat spells!
Peace.
We’re tackling a few different topics of consequence today. Special thanks to Particularist from Aaron the Pedantic’s discord for inspiration.
First, this is another spell which I personally love, and am also going to make substantially worse from a meta perspective, making it an oddity among most of our redesigns. Second, this spell summons creatures, making it a first among the redesigns and will significantly alter how I handle such spells later. Third, we’re introducing social components to the spell, which is related but partially distinct to how I’ll handle summoning spells in the future.
Man, 5e has so few summoning spells. I’m not just talking about the PHB either, the few supplements which include new spells (and notice, we’ve received no supplements dedicated to spells) still only introduce a number of spells you can count on one hand. Not only that, several of the summoning spells don’t summon a creature from a monster manual, but instead summon a generic statblock provided by the spell. The main purpose of summoning spells, which is to briefly enjoy abilities normally restricted to monsters, was intentionally ignored so as to provide stablocks so boring you could’ve simply paid a hireling or henchman or whatever to achieve the same effect, without wasting spell slots.
Conjure minor elementals precedes WOTC’s trend towards more boring summoning spells, but the subject of our redesign may have caused said trend. It’s a tremendous spell! While most monsters designed by the folks from Seattle are boring, elementals look to buck this trend with surprising frequency. What’s more, the majority of elementals available (especially during the game’s release) fit into the spell’s limits.
Emblematic of 5e’s low level elementals are critters called mephits. Mephits have the widest variety of subtypes in 5e (ranging from cr 1/4 to 1/2 in the monster manual and giving multiple options for damage types), a breath weapon (which usually inflicts a condition or status effect), innate spellcasting (so your summoning spell summons other spellcasters), and a death-burst (an effect which deals damage and/or a status effect similar to that of their breath weapon) which activates upon their death. Spellcasting monsters with variable damage types and resistances/immunities, breath weapons, who double as living explosives.
The spell allows you to summon a bunch of extra combatants, who have a disproportionate number of cool abilities and attacks, who are potentially also spellcasters, and can even serve a purpose by dying. If I were a lesser man, this is where I’d say the spell is too strong. In reality, the spell is comparable to the benefits and detriments of other spells at similar levels, in spite of how much more fun the spell is. It’s an important distinction to make, because lots of folks protest a spell being more fun than another as being in some way unfair or unbalanced. If the math checks out between conjure minor elementals and storm sphere, the fact one appeals more to a given playstyle or character theme has nothing to do with whether it’s balanced.
So, why then am I (as mentioned in the intro) toning down the spell’s power? Because the spell disproportionately loads on a DM’s ability to adjudicate the game. Unfortunately, 5th edition uses saving throws to adjudicate the effectiveness of features which inflict conditions or deal area of effect damage. This is one of the slower ways to adjudicate such features, and 5th edition combat suffers for it. However, if a spell allows you to summon creatures with such abilities, all but some of the fastest or resourceful DMs are going to get dragged down significantly. The longer you extend rounds of combat to focus on these summons, the more likely the DM is to forget their monsters’ turns, legendary or lair actions, and any environmental or spell effects. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the principle of summoning to begin with, the problem is with 5e’s adjudication and how it wasn’t even optimized to handle the base players and the monsters they’d fight.
Adding 8 critters to the battle, all of whom have spells of their own, and AOE breath weapons, and AOE abilities procced on death, most if not all of which rely upon saving throws from every creature affected adds too much of a mental load to the game even if only one player does it.
TL;DR: I don’t want a spell’s power to come from overloading the DM’s brain. Conjure minor elementals is fine before that consideration, but now I have to compensate for it.
Alright, so the primary cognitive load of this spell comes from adding a ton of creatures all at once. So, what if I let you keep the same number of creatures, but forced you to spread out their actual presence in the field? A lesser designer would’ve stopped at a restriction which prevented you from keeping more than one summon out at any given time. While sufficient for our goal of preventing too many summons entering combat at once, it would also undoubtedly restrict other uses for summons which didn’t involve combat.
The 1 mile restriction allows you to (if you wish) quickly deploy all of your summons, as quickly as you can get them at least a mile away from you. Congratulations! You may now use them as assassins, messengers, distractions for far-off places, etc, all because I didn’t stop at the bare-minimum restriction as a solution to our problem. Normally it might take a small elemental creature at least 10 minutes or so to get that far away from you, especially depending on your environment (moving a mile away might not be so easy a few hundred feet into a dungeon). Luckily, the folks best equipped to solve this sort of problem are mages, who may no doubt find reason to take more spells designed to transport other creatures around, thus saving their summons some potentially valuable time.
Alright, so I boosted the word count by a lot. Normally, I don’t do that. This is an important spell though, able to support several different modes of play, and we want it to work for those. Plus, there’s a few rebalancing items in order. Some notes to that effect:
The lack of concentration makes this a fairly potent spell, so a few built-in end conditions or countermeasures are appropriate, as are some additional benefits for a final balancing pass.
I specified creatures bonded follow your directions for the duration of the spell. Prior, the text about a summoner’s bond just implied this, but I made the text explicit to actually indicate these critters stayed past when the spell expired, and weren’t necessarily your friends. under those circumstances.
If we can’t end the spell by ending concentration, at the very least we can end it by knocking out the wizard. The critters come out, some of whom might be neutral, others might hate the wizard and try to finish them off, some might be bonded to the wizard in some other way or are just good old fashioned buddies. Yes, it reintroduces the chaos we initially avoided in our redesign, but it only occurs for a special event, which the mage will (under these conditions) do their utmost to avoid.
The idea of summoning spells routinely sucking extraplanar critters to their constant deaths is amusing, but maybe a little dissonant. Introducing a creature type restriction lets us get rid of that dissonance, but more importantly freshens up which summons the mage will employ on a regular basis.
Following from that last point, if the mage wants to repeatedly use the same critter, it must actually be the same critter, and must know a piece of arcana lost to tabletop gaming for far too many years; true names. Now the summons isn’t just anyone, it’s a person, an NPC, a weakness, a mechanical hook, a unique opportunity, a means of making the spell better, a whole pandora’s box of gameable content.
Creatures with true names are subject to a number of potential changes by the DM or player, especially by virtue of their special relationship. The player might offer items, favors, equipment, etc in exchange for the power to summon this creature, which can develop a unique statblock as a result. Even something as simple as a magic ring or spellcasting implement can offer the player even more power in exchange for their willingness to roleplay, and thus turns this spell into a veritable farm for named NPCs.
Did you know the early editions of D&D had chase rules? Your characters would lose track of positioning, direction, and could get seriously screwed if whatever was chasing them backed them into a corner. It’s hard for us to imagine. After all, if you have a map out in front of you, how do characters not just retrace their steps or lose positioning in the first place? I don’t know how the original games handled it exactly. I suspect folks using these rules didn’t allow players access to maps unless they themselves were making the maps. It’s a solution, but it only works so long as the GM remembers and enforces the implementation. I’m not a fan of those solutions, I prefer my games to work regardless of whether the GM decides to keep their foot on the gas.
With those thoughts in mind, I came up with a solution some time ago while discussing monster ecologies and their impacts on playstyle. At the time, the BROSR folks said dungeons were defined by colliding ecologies, with lairs and insulated ecologies within. A dungeon could have a garrison of hobgoblins, a nest of hook horrors, a dragon’s lair, and more all being raided on occasion by drow from another subterranean locale warring with a pod of aboleths. These in turn were all subject to trade, harassment, or any number of other diplomatic or hostile interactions from wandering monsters and adventuring parties. Furthermore, these elements can be added, duplicated, replaced, or removed nearly at will. What makes a true dungeon is whether it can be restocked, whether the subterranean home of adventure is properly suited to receive encounter fodder from a multitude of ecologies and factions. For that, the real breadth and depth of the dungeon must be too large to map out. This is the ideal environment for a location which lives and breathes, which supports expressions of play and encounters which rely on the party not knowing exactly where they are.
The delightful news is this doesn’t actually restrict you from using maps. You can still mark out terrain from room to room, but with the understanding it doesn’t represent the entirety of the dungeon and delineating where these unmappable regions begin. So, here’s my solution; divide your dungeon into mapped and unmapped regions.
Mapped regions are of relatively constant shape and form, the kinds of areas for which maps are actually useful. These are where rooms resembling geometric shapes get to live in harmony. They tend to feature:
Stable cave formations.
Stable mineshafts.
Ruins of ancient civilizations.
Recent construction.
Unmapped regions are too inconsistent and topographically irregular to be properly mapped out. These areas are the best suited for chases, and any other encounters in which the party’s position relative to the rest of the dungeon is best left unknown or vague. Unmapped regions are in flux due a mix or even all of the following factors:
1. Natural disasters:
Volcanos.
Earthquakes.
The world below collapsing inwards.
2. The engineering and warring of opposing factions:
Building forts.
Digging tunnels.
Damming rivers.
3. Relatively Natural Phenomena:
Rivers (whether water or magma).
Megaflora moving sediments through their growth and movement.
Megafauna doing the same.
The living rock of the world below shifting.
ALL of the aforementioned collapsing and compacting themselves.
Now, you may be thinking the distinction between a mapped and unmapped region is relative, if not arbitrary. I don't think it's arbitrary, but you would be right in thinking it was relative. Who's to say which levels are or are not mapped and unmapped don't change from session to session? From delve to delve? Well, clearly the game master is. If they decide to change the status of given levels from mapped to unmapped and vice versa, a single dungeon could multiple methods of adjudicating the delve, of playing through the delve, of exploring the dungeon, and of supplying and restocking encounters from session to session.
Just as Gygax intended.
Hey folks! I know I said I was (as of recent) focusing on higher level spells so as to provide both a greater diversity of levels redesigned and save myself some freebies. While today’s doesn’t match the former’s purpose (empirically speaking, boy I sure do love redesigning 2nd level spells), it very much knocks out an otherwise difficult entry. When I say “otherwise difficult”, I mean “difficult until the solution manifested in my head all of a sudden”. Additionally, fixing (and boy is this in need of fixing) this particular spell is going to do a whole lot of leg work for fixing other spells at higher levels.
Silent image did some leg work for higher level spells via its reaction rolls, today i’ll rely on enthrall to do the same.
This is less than impressive. Honestly, it’s designed for a different game, one which has reaction rolls, a social system, and more than a few crossovers between mechanics concerning awareness, social acceptance, and combat (oh, and magic on top of all of those). 5E is certainly not that game, but perhaps this spell, once adjusted, could point the world’s greatest roleplaying game in that direction.
Let’s go over my problems with this spell,
The target has disadvantage on perception checks on people except you. This is the only benefit, for reasons.
The spell ends early if you’re unable to speak, despite only affecting creatures in the spell’s initial range (and not new potential targets wandering in).
Creatures fighting you have advantage in the saving throw.
Let’s sum it up; the spell has absolutely no use in combat, seeing as though all it does is inflict disadvantage on perception checks on creatures other than you. If this for some reason is terribly devastating to a homebrew monster (because I can assure you this applies to not one creature found in any official monster manual), the creature(s) can simply incapacitate the spellcaster first, thus ending it early. Outside of combat, it’s not clear what having disadvantage on checks made to perceive other creatures even means.
A single scenario makes sense for this spell: the spellcaster distracts a group of creatures so their buddies can sneak by unnoticed. There isn’t even enough flavor to hook to inspire much in the way of other effects.
To note, I was pleasantly surprised to discover this completely useless, undesigned (and likely unfinished) spell does not require concentration. Great job, WOTC! Rooting for you.
Alright, here’s my first stab at enthrall. Already I can tell where this will stick in some folks’ craws, and while I’m sorry for that, I’m not sorry. This is a game where your wizard can solve social conflict by fireballing people to death. A more subtle game of magical cloak-and-dagger isn’t unreasonable and shouldn’t be discouraged by folks refereeing a game, as opposed to railroading characters through tightly gated narrative effects. I’m going to tell you something, and it’s going to hurt, but it’s the truth.
Social mechanics rarely work without the understanding they can and should change your NPCs behavior, up to and including in directions you did not want them to take.
Yes, there are exceptions, and yes, social mechanics can be tuned to occasionally or conditionally fail in this endeavor. This is far easier to pull off in games with dedicated social mechanics, especially when said mechanics are more rigorous. This is for a lot of reasons which will not be explained in a simple thoughtbite, but perhaps this explanation will satisfy:
If a spell to control another creature’s actions directly could end as quickly as the GM said “He decides not to”, the spell is as good as useless.
Yes, a king may say “Sure, I’ll help you with this stuff and not this other stuff my advisors want” in response to an enthrall spell. Yes, this may be inconvenient to your plot. No, tossing away the entirety of a social game, in which certain actions can be expected to reliably change the behavior of other people is not worth preserving your plot. Remember, you don’t know exactly when people should retreat, or when the party should find a friendly face in a dungeon. If you err on the side of your desired plot, NPCs quickly fade to “whatever the GM wants” and cease to exist in some state as interactable entities within the game.
Alright, having added a tiny additional combat/noncombat use (temporary reprieve from the Charmed condition), I feel comfortable adding an early-end condition. Someone who suspects you’re casting Enthrall on the king for some reason can run over and knock you out, but my wouldn’t that be embarrassing. Not to mention a simple “No I’m not!” might turn the King against whoever attacked the caster. The early-end condition adds a bit of drama to GMs attempting to subvert it, rather than giving any GM with a high-damage npc a pass to ruin this spell. What fun!
In an effort to leave myself some easy essays for later, flex my design muscles, and add a bit of diversity of power and tier to these redesigns all in one swell foop, I’m making a good-faith effort towards tackling higher level spells. Many of the remaining lower level spells require outside subsystems to work the way I desire, which means banging my head against the wall until I can fold the specific effects of said subsystem into my redesign, or cut it down to a minor add-on (like I did with Illusion Reaction Rolls in the silent image redesign).
Much like lightning bolt, chain lightning is a fairly boring evocation spell designed to damage a very select number of creatures without the usual nastiness associated with AOE spells. It’s meant for precision, fine. Ehhhhh not fine. We can turn this into something far more interesting with a few minute changes, add a bonus damage minigame, you get the idea. I don’t like spells that just blast something! Simply not a fan.
Much like my lightning bolt redesign, the trick of chain lightning is looping into some quirk or shenanigans thematically appropriate to the spell.
I’m going to defend the potential strength of this spell for a moment, most of which is contained in the bonus action casting. I don’t write these redesigns with rules adjustments in mind; these are, in fact, for 5E as written. As such, the assumption is you can’t cast more than one spell of 1st level or higher in a single turn. If you cast my above version, you’d cast a cantrip, or use a weapon attack, etc with your action. Really, it’s open to cast shocking grasp and proc the additional damage effect.
That being said, this doesn’t quite feel as clean as it should. Besides that, I’d like to give critters an opportunity to avoid damage entirely, given the bonus action casting.
There we are, this feels cleaner. Also added a minigame which allows lingering effects to dissipate quickly.
Hey folks! Was feeling tired and lazy today (which is not an excuse not to do things, but would’ve nevertheless been my excuse for not doing things) until I remembered someone on Aaron the Pedantic’s server requesting a redesign of Barkskin. So in my last hour before the day job, I’ll be knocking that out.
Barkskin raises your AC to a static modifier, preventing it from falling below 16. Nifty little spell, but it costs concentration (of course it does), doesn’t scale, and does nothing else. Most characters will have an AC of 16 or higher by the time your druid reaches 3rd level, or your ranger reaches 5th. What’s more, there are other spells which don’t require concentration, or stack with AC calculations/other bonuses, most of which are lower level. Given effects which penalize AC have largely been turned around to simply improve the attack bonuses of other creatures, barkskin simply can’t compete with other spells outside of specific circumstances.
The one place barkskin outshines all others is in the protection of companions. While you and and the other player characters of your party often have an AC of 16 or higher by the time you’d even consider taking this spell, many of your animal companions, mounts, retainers, henchmen, hirelings, etc do not. What’s more, the aforementioned plethora of spells typically considered superior to barkskin just can’t provide these NPCs with a 16 AC.
Unfortunately, the longevity of companion NPCs is generally poor enough to discourage their use entirely, and barkskin’s other penalties prevent it from being selected, much less used to this end. Most rangers would rather heal their animal companion with cure wounds rather than give up hunter’s mark for their animal companion to get a 16 AC.
We, of course, can fix this.
Aha! Now this is perfect for protecting quest NPCs, hirelings, or your favorite non-humanoid critters. It only works if your AC is provided by the spell, which actually allows for some funky interactions. Your AC is provided by the highest calculation, followed by bonuses. Using a shield spell is fine, but wearing chainmail would violate the barkskin’s requirement…once it actually got to 14. The way the spell works, you can hedge your bets and use another piece of armor, which takes over once you get down to a certain AC. You won’t get the resistance benefit as many times from the spell, but you might get hit less often if whatever armor you’re using as a backup proves too hard to hit.
It also ensures the ranger’s concentration doesn’t go to waste in my next adjustment!
I’ve been waiting ages (2 months, excuse my melodrama) to add a mechanic like this. My buddy and first DM Matt wished concentration was a thing you could choose to do, adding some additional effect in exchange for the rather punishing cost it inflicted. This was while brainstorming some number of years ago, of course. Now you can concentrate on the effect, make it better (and likely longer-lasting) while also hedging your bets, and leaving concentration open to other spells until you should reach that point. Of course, it also opens the door to losing your spell even earlier, if you’re not cautious.
I also scaled the spell upwards, improving AC as a baseline (which should have been present in the spell’s original design, how WOTC missed that no-brainer I can only speculate). Finally, I changed the AC penalty to take effect each time you resisted damage, rather than provide blanket protection until the beginning of your next turn. It’s a little more to track, but it’s only fair for a lower level spell.
I always spend a good hour scratching my head whenever an illusion spell is in queue for redesign. The problem with illusions is how broad they are. It may be regarded as the whole point of illusions that they’re so broad, malleable, and thus presumably able to produce a wide variety of effects. Consider instead the fact rewriting an illusion spell to produce particular effects to begin with takes so much time; is the player going to do that at the table? Well, likely not. The most common class of illusory spells produces a variety of sterile, harmless images (followed by sterile, harmless noises).
I’ve talked before about player improvisation regressing to the system’s baseline (sadly that post is currently inaccessible, but the point is as follows): your players will look to established abilities and features to determine what is acceptable and feasible for them to improvise and the DM to adjudicate at the table. If we have access to a greater number of effects, the more inspiration players will have when crafting these illusions. Yes, it’s a terrible shame they won’t improvise the more exotic illusion effects we develop across the course of these redesigns, but who cares? Exotic effects weren’t being improvised anyways, because the spell’s available gave no indication such a thing was even possible.
Hell, most of the “generalist” illusion spells produce two specific classes of illusions called glamours and figments (a change in how a particular object or phenomena is perceived, and a purely illusory object or phenomena not anchored to an existing one). There’s no generalist spell for phanstasms (illusions which root themselves in a creature’s mind, but are largely imperceptible to others) or shadows (illusions one step below reality, able to interact and fight as real creatures but to diminished effect).
We’re already not taking advantage of the full depth and breadth of illusions available from the fantasy milieu, which has cut off players from both a wider variety of established, cool spells and their own library of invented/improvised effects (no doubt made better by access to better source material).
Back in the good old days of skirmish wargaming, phantasmal force was in fact phantasmal forces. Here’s its description in Chainmail (thanks to both Delta and the BrOSR crew for info regarding this):
So, you’re create some english longbowmen (with stakes planted for cav charge, I presume), some dwarves (no doubt laying a mine in their occupied space), or a hero of some variety ready to turn the tide of morale and battle. OD&D has another version, as do several other editions (none of which I’ll be covering).
Note: I did intend on covering 4th edition’s version as well, but imagine my surprise when I found it absent from the game!
Offers some clarifying language, conditions for the illusions to do damage, etc. Now I see why folks prefer more broad and vague descriptions to rulings like these. Does the illusion need to touch the creature to cause damage? Not all clarifications are created equal, and those which (potentially) ruin the spell’s effects or intention belong in the gutter. Damage being conditional on belief is actually fine if you’re using tools provided by the system. Reaction rolls are an acceptable substitute for determining whether a creature believes or disbelieves something.
Your Player’s Handbook is an acceptable substitute for a rolled up newspaper, should your DM declare monsters disbelieve whenever you cast an illusion spell (and determining just how committed they are to such poor behavior).
Moving on, the phantasm more or less cement themselves as damaging distractions (I don’t mean this in a critical sense, I meant they literally damage + distract a given enemy or unit of such) to a single target (creature or unit). The phantasm is so potent as to be used in mass combat, making for a genuinely terrifying power. How did 5e update this spell?
Miserable trash again, I see. The spell owes its extra word count to now covering hazardous phenomena, extra clarifications and mechanics which belong in a general section on illusions, and a needlessly long justification for dealing 1d6 psychic damage. Now to be clear, I like the idea of producing phantasms which act as natural hazards. They belong in a different spell. When shortswords deal 1d6 damage, it’s reasonable for a phantasmal goblin or somesuch to deal 1d6 damage. A phantasm of falling in lava should probably be more severe, don’t you think?
What’s more, the spell is concentration (of course it is), and on top of this offers several means by which the creature can end the spell early (on top of damaging you). Using up its action to disbelieve the phantasm is real (and potentially failing in the process) is a point in the spell’s favor, until your DM (and thus the monster) remembers it’s a concentration spell. What’s easier than spending your whole action to stare really hard at the phantasm, hopefully breaking it? Using said action to break the wizard concentrating on it. All for 1d6 psychic damage folks!
Ah, back to the land of sanity. We removed concentration (for being a horrific bandaid mechanic with no place in such a wimpy spell), removed the hazardous phenomena text, etc. Look at how much shorter this spell is! Look at how much more it does, by not trying to pack too many niches into the same thing.
For our spell-unique mechanic, the creature does make an attack roll, but it has a static result. If you cast it on a wizard (who somehow fails the save), it may provoke the fellow into casting a spell like shield to avoid the creature’s damage. Now the wizard has a higher armor class, but no reaction with which to counter your spells. If you wait to cast it on a wizard with an active shield spell, you instead ensure the phantasms will nearly always hit their target, having set the static result to the wizard’s normal AC + the effects of shield. Lovely little tactics.
Proud as I am, we could do even better. After all, while 5e has no support for mass combat, many 3rd party supplements for it have come out, nearly all of which involve terminology like “units”. The find the path redesign once again has me considering which modes of play I can support with these spells, given clever enough wording.
Alright, you can throw out all that bragging I did about the reduced word count, but this was worth it. I’ve added one additional effect to the spell, which gives it serious horror vibes: knocking someone unconscious with it allows you to target new creatures, who see an additional phantasm of previously damaged creatures. It doesn’t extend the spell’s duration, but does make it progressively nastier as time goes on.
Additionally, I added the mass combat note. In a different game, I might just add a mass combat tag and detail the differences for that mode of play, but it didn’t add too many words to this. Go make the illusory dragon, I believe in you.
Uh oh, that’s an actual spell. Maybe it’s next for a redesign.