Spell Redesign: Protection from Poison

Crappy Spells, Old Gold, and Bad Advice

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!

Protection From Poison

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.

My Version (Cooler)

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.