Spell Redesign: Chain Lightning

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).

Decent But Boring

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.

My Version (Cooler)

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.

My Version (Even Cooler)

There we are, this feels cleaner. Also added a minigame which allows lingering effects to dissipate quickly.