Spell Redesign: Sleep

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Poppy Lillies

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.

My Version (Better)

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.

My Version (Even Better)

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.