Why I Don't Ban Spells (With One Exception...) | Worldbreaking
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- Опубликовано: 14 июл 2024
- Should you ban any spells in your D&D games? Let’s talk about the most contentious spells in the game!
Thank you so much to the Luminous Lore Kickstarter for sponsoring this video! Check out the Kickstarter now: www.kickstarter.com/projects/...
Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
03:39 - A Word From Our Sponsor
04:17 - Guidance
06:58 - Comprehend Languages
09:15 - Goodberry
10:35 - Identify
13:57 - Healing Spirit
16:50 - Counterspell
20:45 - Speak With Dead
21:48 - Summoning Spells (Conjure Animals, Conjure Woodland Beings, Conjure Elemental, etc.)
26:02 - Remove Curse
29:59 - Resurrection Spells (Revivify, Raise Dead, Resurrection)
31:59 - Charm Monster
33:34 - Polymorph
34:05 - Teleportation Circle/Teleport (/Transport Via Plants)
35:31 - Wish
37:46 - Silvery Barbs
41:14 - Outro
Recommended Reading:
Dungeon Dudes - Ten Commonly Banned Spells in Dungeons and Dragons 5e: • Ten Commonly Banned Sp...
Zee Bashew: Goodberry: • (animated) D&D 5E a sp...
Playlist on Character Death: • Character Death
Highlight Reel Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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creativecommons.org/licenses/b...
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Игры
Do you ban any spells in your games?
Thank you so much to the Luminous Lore Kickstarter for sponsoring this video! Check out the Kickstarter now: www.kickstarter.com/projects/luminousages/luminous-lore-5e-guide?ref=2yypd6
I mostly work around the spells. I want to know what my players are running so encounters fit their power level.
I'd been thinking about banning silvery barbs, but instead I just go with a stricter interpretation of the requirement for casting it "1 reaction, which you take when a creature you can see within 60 feet of yourself succeeds on an attack roll, an ability check, or a saving throw." I essentially say that you have to actually see them succeed on the saving throw or ability check or attack, as I don't actually *have* to tell a player when that occurs. Dm's usually do, but their character shouldn't know these things if they are not _visible_ to the character, even if the creature is. (How do you _know_ the creature succeeded vs your charm person spell? Or that the creature succeeded on its perception/deception/arcana check? Etc.) It sounds harsh, but personally I find the language of the spell's requirement really annoying, because it requires a character to be close enough to see a creature succeed on mechanics that ostensibly don't exist for them, but not actually see that mechanic, and the dm to tell the player of something their character wouldn't in a way that's a little weird in action at the table.
This change means the spell is good for obvious physical things, like undoing a crit, or someone beating some kind of visible physical save like dex or strength, but less useful for less obvious things like wisdom or charisma that the character shouldn't be aware of.
I didn't outright ban it, because I don't mind a spell being able to undo something through distraction, but it also felt like for a 1st level spell it was working outside its power to just undo saves and checks with no limitation. (I mind less for attacks, because a lot of enemies get a ton of those, and missing one is a good save for a PC, but doesn't hurt the creature overmuch. A failed save however, especially of certain types, can totally undo an encounter.)
But otherwise, I don't ban anything. (I do mod other stuff, like good berry, I make it cause a save or non-casters of it (or druids and rangers) so that it requires a save, or you fall into delirium and get hooked on it. So it's useful in an emergency, but there's a risk it might make some people less useful.)
CORRECTION: Conjure spells do NOT say the DM pick, it says they have the stats. Some spells, like find familiar, tell you to find the stats in the PHB. Conjure spells are just telling you who has the stats, not who chooses them. In fact, it says “choose one of the following...”
@@HorizonOfHope It says "choose one of the following options for what appears." and in conjure animals for example it lists the following:
*One beast of challenge rating 2 or lower
*Two beasts of challenge rating 1 or lower
*Four beasts of challenge rating 1/2 or lower
*Eight beasts of challenge rating 1/4 or lower
Those are what you get to choose. There's no mention of choosing specific creatures. The DM has the statistics for creatures that meet those requirements. So you don't choose which creature, cause you don't have the stats. You tell the DM "I want one beast of Cr 2 (or lower)" then they have the stats for that and give you a beast of Cr 2. Otherwise it would tell you to consult the MM for those creatures. Find familiar lists the animals for you to choose from, they could have done the same, or created a list for you to consult if they wanted you to choose, but instead you choose from those options. It's pretty clear. (Whether that's a good way to do it or not is debatable.)
@@HorizonOfHope Yes, but that strictly only says the player chooses the CR/number of creatures. The spell descriptions do not give any definite word on who decides the exact creature summoned.
In a game where “Disguise Self” exists it’s crazy how many players would innately trust a victim who says they were murdered by the butler when they cast “Speak With Dead”.
Also there are a lot of more mundane ways that a corpse would be unable to correctly answer the question.
1) "I was poisoned, I don't know who slipped it into my wine but" [insert some less direct information which narrows down the suspects to a manageable number but doesn't instantly reveal the killer]
2) As you kneel to touch the corpse you see a hole in the neck roll a medicine or investigation check, [on a success] you see that there's a lack of blood around the wound suggesting a post mortem mutilation and the cut is placed around the voice box, looking inside the mouth and you'd also see the tongue has been removed. (spell literally says the creature needs to have a map but i think a reasonable DM ruling is that they also need to have the other equipment for speaking to) this doesn't instantly spoil that element of the mystery, does still let players use mechanical skills, and gives them important information that the killer is probably someone with the education in medical and magical matters to understand both that a spell like speak with dead exists and enough medical knowledge to precisely disable the ability of the corpse to speak.
3) "I didn't recognise my killer but...." give a description of some elements of appearance and description, the players have to at least do the work of matching it to the pictures and/or descriptions i gave. Although maybe not this one as the time I did this once and repeated the a certain detail on the boots with a living witness, both victims they used speak with dead on and use the same line specifically when they met that character both before the murder and later on after the speak with dead and players never caught on and actually ended up helping the killer.
True. Just wait 2 more levels to learn Divination.
Also that's assuming it WANTS to tell you. Maybe they were a rival or enemy or they died as part of some scheme. The caster gets five questions but the corpse could lie or refuse to answer. It's not compelled to be truthful or cooperative.
Yup, being able to deal with powerful spells is a DM skill that nobody mentions. There are many solutions, but to one powerful player tool, the DM can always with an equally powerful, but opposing player tool. Which requires the DM to expect what tools their players will use, but the more you play the better you get at it and even if you fail to counter a tool, it's good. It's actually fine if your players managed to take a shortcut, outsmart you or just cheeze something you prepped. They will explode with happiness when they manage to find just the right way to solve that problem way too early, it will be an accomplishment they will remember fondly.
@@Kardfogu I agree, but I think it's at least partially the DMG's responsibility to highlight world-altering spells so that new DM's aren't constantly blindsided by them. Just simple stuff like "if you need to hide a magic item, putting it in a lead-lined container will block most low-level magical detection", "the following means can be used to detect an invisible creature if you suspect one is present: ..." or "if you want to make something truly secret and mysterious, the following steps will protect it from all but the highest-level divinations". Make sure to include the disclaimer that overusing these tools can be frustrating to players and to remind players that even if a spell is 'countered' it still provides some utility (ie: an enemy has to waste an action to throw flour to negate a player's invisibility).
PF1e's Gamemastery Guide has the "Villain's escape kit" section, which highlights a bunch of spells that can be used to evacuate a plot-important character, which I think is a generally helpful resource to include.
I think people also forget spells like Guidance have Verbal and Somatic components. A lot of times my players would want to cast Guidance in situations where randomly casting a spell during an encounter or intense situation might prove problematic/difficult. IE: Trying to lie to or convince a guard/king of something. Ultimately, I don't mind the spell and don't actively ban anything in my games, but reminding players that casting spells aren't automatically stealthy might be a good way to go.
I agree, the components of a spell overall get "glossed over" by players.
Annoying, but happens
I use this approach too
This bothers me so much, especially when I'm another player and someone else does this and the DM just lets it slide right in front of if the NPC 😂 😭 mUh iMmErSiOn gone
Much like Elan, "Sneak, sneak sneak past the stupid goblins!"
True enough, but it's also not a matter of a caster making a sonorous intonation loud enough to cut through conversation either. In particular Guidance is most often a Cleric spell, and hearing someone murmur 'Oh God Help them' may be a little weird but not unheard of, even in the real world. Ever hang out with overtly religious folk? Things like 'I'm praying for you' or 'Jesus watch over you' are pretty commonplace, same with making the sign of the cross or touching a rosary. It's just in the DnD world, those things convey literal holy power. Yeah, it might make someone more suspicious but unless they're completely paranoid it's not going to seem that odd. Even in a world where everyone knows about magic, that just means it's impossible to tell between when it's a spell and when it's just someone saying it.
My rule with Guidance is Guidance is an action. So if you're discussing an action you are going to do and want to help, you can precast Guidance on someone. But if you say you're doing something, you can't cast Guidance as a reaction to panic help them get better.
I run it that It also means that you can't take the help action- which gives them advantage and is arguably better for their roll. So its a way to have 3 party members work together on something- and if 3 people are all working together their odds should be pretty good I think, so it makes sense to me.
I play with a bunch of forgetful folks, so letting them have it as a reaction let's them feel more helpful.
...so you're running it rules as written?
I just made it a reaction when a ally is making a skill check,
Punishing your players for the minute difference of “I would like to make a skill check” vs. “I make a skill check”. Lovely.
34:10 You put up the spell card for True Resurrection, not Transport via Plants. That said, you can technically use True Resurrection to fast travel if you kill a party member, go somewhere, and then True Resurrect them to the new location. I should find a way to use that at some point
Sounds like an 80s movie involving a spell caster and dragon.
True Res costs 25000gp of diamonds. That's a pricey teleport.
@@seeker38 Lucy in the sky with diamonds. You can travel in style or not at all.
True resurrect also could work as a time machine. Just imagine a legend about it used that way:
An elf and a human fell in love, but their relationship were not meant to let them die together holding each other. The human decided to give their whole world (and die multiple times in the process, depending on how long elves live in particular setting) to have a chance to grow old together. Many years the elf has to live with that knowledge, resurrecting their loved one once every 200 years for a brief moment, and then killing them. All of that just for the elf once they grow old enough resurrect their loved one for the last time (about 50 years before they expect to die, I imagine). Or maybe the elf resurrects their loved one once every 100-200 years for 10-20 years, to be able to spend time with them.
@@RottenRogerDM plus the new body forms butt naked with no equipment or weapons.
Best way to deal with Silvery Barbs is to have the occasional NPC cast it when it would be funny as hell.
I think they way they handles Speak with Dead in the latest DND movie was hillarious as others ask questions to the caster and the corpse answers them directly wasting a question
Honestly, I've always seen Speak with Dead handled in similar ways. 😂
I love seeing the spell run like that because so often players dont plan out what they’re going to ask and what should be 5 pretty simple questions turns into a round table discussion about what they should ask and takes 30 minutes while a corpse is just floating in suspended animation waiting for them to make up their minds
You can have curses that require Remove Curse with a higher level spell slot, rather than just "cannot be removed by remove curse", so it can afflict your characters for a few levels or until they go find a powerful allied high priest.
Pathfinder 1st Ed does something similar to this. Some curses just need Remove Curse, others need Break Enchantment or Heal (1st Ed Heal is a big deal) and the big stuff might even need Wish or Miracle.
Fun fact: The curse of Euryale from The Deck of Many Things specifies that it can only be removed by the power of a god or the Wish spell, meaning that Remove Curse does not work on it.
yeah I tend to treat remove curse as written for most cursed items (ie it allows the cursed creature to unattune from or relinquish the item), but for other curses I treat it like counterspell/dispel magic. That is, have the caster roll a check with their spellcasting ability modifier against a DC based on the curse's power, or auto-succeed if it was cast at a high enough level
Do something similar to what bg2 did. Casting a high level healing spell causes the tired or fatigue condition if it's not cast as a ritual spell.
They should really just call it "remove lesser curse"
I think the biggest problem with guidance is that it only lasts for one minute. It makes players see it as a reactionary spell that can only be used for one roll especially in exploration. If it had a longer duration even like 10 minutes I think it would help player cast it before hand like when they enter a new room in a dungeon and they start to search it.
Weird that the fix is actually to buff it lol
But...guidance can explicitly be only used for one roll
I don't outright ban them, but if I ever play with a Shepherd druid I ask them to either take the single summon spells or limit them to the 1 or 2 options for summoning instead of all 8. I had a Shepherd druid who would take even longer every time she wanted to cast Conjure Animals but would always end up just going 8 wolves and every time I asked her to please keep track of their initiative to take the load off of myself, but every time she always pushed the burden of tracking their turns onto me.
i hate running games for druids, seems like everyone who wants to play a druid can't seem to keep track of their stat blocks and initiative lol
I require the player to give me a copy every creature they want to summon. And the creature goes after the player
if she doesn't track the turns skip them. I don't respect that behaviour and will treat it as the character zoning out as much as the player is.
Baldur's Gate treats all 8 wolves as having the same initiative
Give ‘em all the same initiative
Ah yes, my favorite transportation spell, True Resurrection.
Our table has a small check to Counterspell, where you don't have the Meet it to Beat it feature, the cast always requires the DC roll, upcasting doesn't provide any benefit.
I nerfed counterspell by treating it like a nuke. If they use counter spell, it opens the door for me to use it.
They haven't used countrrspell in years
I love that your suggestions about Remove Curse were basically the same thing I suggested in your Discord while we were waiting for the video to go up 😅.
The fix we've made to Silvery Barbs in the groups that I play with is to make it reduce a roll by 1d4 and allow another character to add 1d4 to their next roll. That brings it more in line with things like Bless or Bane, it's a good "oh this needs *just* a bit less to miss let's try it", and even when it doesn't succeed you still get that crispy +1d4 to your next roll. It definitely brings it down to a 1st Level spell.
Problem with that is because you are rolling a D20, you can actually roll higher, so you are taking a chance that the NPC might critical an attack.
@SuperSpartan3000 what? They just made it so its not dis/adv and instead +/- 1d4
I just made it so yo have to actually *see* the success, not just the creature. So if the success on the check or save isn't somehow instantly visible to your character, it doesn't trigger the spell's reaction. So, it will work on strength and dex saves, possibly con saves, but is unlikely to work on int/cha/wis saves/checks. I like your 1d4 thing though, I think it's cleaner, plus it should stack with other +d4 spells. So I might try that too.
I really like this.
I like this but I’d probably also limit SB to only being triggered by successful attack rolls or ability checks to make it less universally useful. Even with these restrictions, it’s still a level 1 spell that, in the right situations, can turn an enemy’s hit into a miss and an allies miss into a hit so it’s pretty nice.
For me and my group, we do talk about certain spells that can cause an issue, so we dont get everyone just casting summon spells with silverybarbs support. But the most important thing is if there are problems with spells, change them to make them fit your group. Playiny in a campaign that is heavy on survival? Make goodberry consume its material component. A horror campaign through the realms of ravenloft? Make identity not reveal the curses on the item and loot you find so the surprise is still there.
The most important thing is that this should be communicated and agreed with everyone involved for improving the health of your game.
Identify already doesn't reveal curses. Sorry for the nitpick just wanted to point that out 😂
For inspiration on speak with dead, try Pushing Daisies, they ask a man who killed him, he said his wife, he tasted something off in the coffee she made him, he went back to being dead, they then learned he was a polygamist.
Pushing Daisies has a bunch of examples of how speaking with the dead can complicate matters instead of simplifying them, hah. Good shot.
Speaking as a player, I have issues with the way some DM's deal with remove curse by making it into a non-spell. Curses are already something that doesn't come up very often, at least in the games I play, so it kind sucks that the one time you get to use the one spell to help, you're effectively told "no, go fuck yourself." Like, I was in a game where my rogue had a sentient cursed magic sword. It was really strong, but it also actively wanted to eat her soul when she would die. But I couldn't get rid of it even if I wanted to because the DM straight up told me "no, remove curse doesn't work." And that's been the case pretty much every time I see curses come up in games.
I personally like how Pathfinder does it, in that it's a check against the cruse's dc to get rid of it. The more powerful the curse, the higher the DC to counteract it. It feels more fair so players have a chance against it even if it would be difficult and the DM doesn't get cheated out of their plot hook they came up with. That would be a more balance way to fixing it instead of making it into a useless spell.
Speaking from the other side of the fence, precisely because curse are rare and often debilitating, I dislike how easy it is to remove them.
For context, when I GMed "Curse of Strahd", one of the PCs and a child were bit by a werewolf. I rolled to see how much time they had before the next full moon (roughly two weeks). An allied NPC had a Remove Curse scroll, so there was the problem of what to do... until the paladin remembered that he had Remove Curse. So, a potentially debilitating curse, that could have cause much grief and moral quandaries was solved with just an action after the next long rest.
My take is that Remove Curse is a badly designed spell, because it remove challenges at a pretty negligeble cost.
I like that, giving it a Counterspell/Dispel like check. But it does put some load ono the GM to set a DC if it's not immediately obvious.
Sitting on top of he fence, curses and similar things can be great, if you've got an interesting curse and a person who's invested in the roleplay opportunities it can give them, but they can also be a boring or stupid aggravation, or even the sort of thing that entirely wrecks the fun of a character for it's player, if there's a bad match between the curse's effects and what the player does and does not enjoy roleplaying.
Remove curse and some of the other status removal spells (like raise dead) tend to be very anti-drama. Typically curses in fiction are removable in some way via an escape clause. You can remove your werewolf curse by killing the werewolf that bit you, or some kind of original werewolf that started the chain. Other curses involve something like the kiss of a princess or true love and so forth. These create interesting situations in play. Not all D&D curses have these, and I think if it's just a generic curse with no escape clause, remove curse should just get rid of it. The condition itself isn't interesting so its means of removal can be just a spell. But if there is one, the spell should just help but not remove those qualifications.
For remove curse I prefer revising it to: "If the curse in question has no escape clause, you remove it. If there is an escape clause, remove curse tells you what it is and points you to the nearest source of something that can remove it (The werewolf that bit you, or the nearest princess, etc)."
I'm in a game where the DM has homebrewed a "blood" magic mechanic that gets used in some situations. Remove curse works fine to rid you of cursed magical items but if the curse is ON YOU like Lycanthropy it takes a blood sacrifice to boost the spell. Just how much depends on how powerful the curse is. My wizard has been using their own blood for this sort of thing and it's always a risk that it might take too much. If you want to take the darker route you can use something/someone else's blood.
I made Guidance and Resistance reactions, so they fit with the way players want to use them. I made True Strike a bonus action, so it has a reason to exist. All three spells add a d4 to a d20 roll of the appropriate type. Changing True Strike to +1d4 instead of granting advantage was necessary to prevent it from becoming a must-have for every rogue, and requiring a multiclass.
I like this solution for Guidance and Resistance. And it means there has to be a triggering action so you can't spam it without cause. But I really like making True Strike a bonus action. It makes it actually worth using and 5e could really use more bonus action spells anyway.
True strike could’ve been acquired through at least 2 feats, Magic initiate, and Aberrant Dragonmark, so multiclassing wouldn’t necessarily be necessary, however it’s on the wizard spell list so Arcane Tricksters would be able to take it innately so it which is often considered the strongest most versatile of rogues would just become even stronger.
@@AtelierGod - Yes, there are other ways to get True Strike, but the point was that if an option is too good, it sets up an illusion-of-choice situation.
(And I wouldn't allow Aberrant 'marks in a setting that doesn't have the equivalent of the 12 'marked houses to hunt you. Those 'marks make you a pariah in the way that being a half-orc or tiefling used to, so no one cares that 12 multinational corporations want you dead.)
@@AtelierGodrogues already have a binus action that gives them advantage
@@xolotltolox7626 at the cost of their speed, true strike if like the UA would not cost their movement speed and would increase the damage the rogue could do.
I dont ban any spells, because i find it sort of lazy on my end as a GM however, there are some limitations i enforce, typically on things i claim to be game breaking, like the technical infinite simulacrum loop.
Infinite simulacrum only works if you don’t read the spell. It no “technically works”
@@BroKenYaKnow Pretty sure they are referring to the situation of "my simulacrum casts simulacrum on me, rinse repeat for the new simulacrum." In that case, each of your simulacrums only has 1 simulacrum spell active, so they don't fade unless you interpret your simulacrums casting a spell as an extension of "you" that is casting it, but that opens up a lot of other questions for the spell. Pretty simple to fix though.
@@humblehonchkrow1609 There's no situation in which you have a simulacrum that has the spell slot to cast simulacrum at 8th lvl. They only get the spell slots you have at casting simulacrum, which uses your 8th lvl spell. Meaning your simulacrum has no 8th lvl spells. And if they used a 9th lvl, the most you can have is 2 simulacrum that way. They can't recover spell slots. They turn into a normal dude after using them all. This is reddit misinformation again, reddit likes to not read spells and make nonsense up.
@@BroKenYaKnow For simplicity sake, lets assume a 15th level character with a level 8 and 7 slot as I think that is the earliest point when I think it is doable:
Say I use a 7th level slot to cast simulacrum (call it simulacrum 1). My simulacrum and me now both still have an 8th level slot but no 7th level. Simulacrum 1 uses that 8th level slot to cast simulacrum on me creating simulacrum 2. Simulacrum 2 copies MY slots as I am the target of the spell not simulacrum 1's slots (who expended both their 7th and 8th). Since I still have an 8th, then simulacrum 2 also still has their 8th as they are a copy of me and there is nothing stopping simulacrum 2 from repeating the process.
To be clear, its not like I want this to work. I just fail to see why it doesn't work the way it is written.
@@humblehonchkrow1609 I was mistake on the fact that this is a 7th lvl spell and not a 8th lvl spell and the fact that it is a touch range, not a self range. This is indeed a wack spell that clearly wasn't thought out. If it were 8th lvl, this cheese at least won't be possible until lvl 20. You're god at that point anyway.
Though I feel it is notable that the material components cost 1,500gp of ruby dust, a resource the dm directly has control of the scarcity of.
I’d say guidance has to be stated before the player rolls after a roll has been asked for. Allows a chance for them to give guidance and helps prevent pre rolling
i love how when the wish spell is brought up, suddenly everyone turns into a lawyer XD
i dont ban anything, i explicitly make my enemy spellcasters learn from the spells the party defaults towards, and plan their tactics around it.
You need to actually be able to SEE two enemies at once for say, silvery barbs to function, which means keeping the enemies seperated out of LOS of the party caster.
tactics, i have found, are more fun for the players to try to overcome with all their fancy tricks, rather than taking their tricks away for "fairness"
See, I love this in theory. But it’s really really hard to make it not feel like punishing the party for playing the game.
I have this problem in my game with a cleric with a racial fly speed. Nets and arrows fix this very easy to still put a level of risk in. But when the cleric wants to cast spirit guardians and fly above them…. Everyone’s going to target that. This often just feels like punishing the play for using a good spell
@@BroKenYaKnow I mean in your defence, the player is using spirit guardian and going right near the enemies (just above instead of next). It shouldnt be free to just do that, it would be like if the enemies ignored a non-flying version of this situation. And thats simply the cost of such a good spell, small range, easy to retaliate.
@@blazichaos7181 true, and honestly I never hear my players get upset about the situation or my dming. I just really want them to do cool powerful stuff, but I’m not going to make the enemy stupid to let them. Weird balance trying to let them feel powerful and have fun while also challenging them.
I’ve started just giving them an idea of the difficulty of a fight (within the game) with NPCs and whatnot. If it’s a surprise, ambush, or underprepared fight- then it’s not going to be as bad as the bandit fight they got to fully devise a plan for and initiate on their terms.
The worse fight they had was when I used nets to ground the cleric so the ground people could hit them. Definitely didn’t seem to have fun with that one, but it did have a story reason behind it
@BroKenYaKnow i: don't allow racial flying speed because fly is usually only accessible at 5th level for 10 minutes at a time, with concentration.
free flight at level 1 with no concentration is overpowered and you cannot balance around unless you want the player with flight to always be the most important party member at all times
@@BroKenYaKnow It's also just realistic that enemies would focus fire on the flying glowing party member capable of burning them to a crisp if they get close enough
9:06 a few aspects about comprehend language that dms should consider before outright banning number one the spell does not decode codes or secret messages meaning you can set an entire adventure around finding a cipher
number 2 you must touch a page for a minute to read it meaning dms can keep things from being translated by adding some time sensitivity or preventing the text from being touched
Or evil DM. COntACT Poison on the page. Or Glyph of warding goes BOOM first. Or other evil stuff.
Depending on my prep, I've actually had cyphered a message/handout for the characters. If they have the comprehend languages, I'd give them a key to break it, and they'd still have to long hand translate it. Or it gives them a word for word translation, but not the metaphorical meanings if it's hidden behind that.
Spells I banned or changed:
1. Comprehend Languages (and any other spell or feature that works with languages) - only works on living languages. It's still useful, but doesn't raise questions like "why is this ancient, dead language of a civilization that disappeared 10 000 years ago not completely understood?"
2. Goodberry and Create Food - again, not only to enable some survival gameplay, but also for worldbuilding. (Goodberry is only partially banned, it still heals but doesn't nourish.) The worldbuilding part is that with airships around, if there wasn't _some_ limit on their range, there wouldn't be any unexplored continents. Columbus' expedition wasn't considered a folly because 15th century people thought the Earth was flat, it was considered a folly because he thought the Earth was much smaller than the - more-or-less correct - consensus of the day, so if he had tried to cross from Portugal to India westward then he and his crew would have starved to death (if America hadn't been in the way). If Earth had clerics who could cast Create Food, this wouldn't have been a concern.
3. Remove Curse - only works on most curses if it is cast within 24 hours. Beyond that, it is only one component, and usually requires a ritual with other components.
As for the limitations of Speak with Dead, one only has to play Ace Attorney: Spirit of Justice to see the limitations. In that game, the core of the "justice" system of Kura'in is spirit channeling: the victims final memories are summoned into a scrying pool, and it is then accepted as evidence. However, before the arrival of our hero Phoenix, this sent thousands of innocents to the gallows because they exterminated their lawyers, and nobody was there to cross-examine them. A lot of the time the victim's memories were unreliable, or straight-up misinterpreted. (And of course if you're running a murder mystery and a player has Speak with Dead, just make sure that the victim was poisoned or stabbed in the back.)
Glad I wasn't the only one to think of SoJ for Speak With Dead's limitations.
But Ace Attorney has done that since the first game. A spirit medium was consulted on a case because the police were desperate and had no leads. The victim was wrong about who killed him. This ruined several people's lives, including the medium's and her family.
Comprehend languages can also be limited by how it translates, perhaps it translates a language to you but because of the sentence structure and word choice it rings like poetry that’s all out of order making it incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t understand it.
@@AtelierGod Yes, I could have gone the Tamarian way. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. But I specifically said that in the lore of this setting those spells and abilities (Eye of the Rune Keeper, for example) piggyback on the collective subconscious of living people and outsource the translation to their brains, so they need at least a dozen or so native speakers of the given language to work. (It also has some additional restrictions brought about by it, e.g. if you're psychically isolated from others such as being in a demiplane or a time loop, the spell will stop working unless there are others in that dimension with you. And it doesn't work across planes either, so if you're on, e.g., the Plane of Air, the spell might fail to translate Dwarvish unless there's a Dwarven diplomatic delegation visiting the Djinns.)
In a similar way to Taliesin's tongue-in-cheek interpretation of his role as "the hacker" in Honey Heist by physically hacking at things, it's fun to interpret Remove Curse as magical censorship of naughty words
I remember when silvery barbs came bursting onto the scene I also remember the immediate backlash and hatred that it got. Frankly speaking Mike, I think your way of handling it is the best. Don't outright ban it but give it a cost and make it difficult to acquire
One way I could see counter spell being limited in its uses would be to make it so that yes you do interrupt the casting of a spell but the afflicted retains its action so it can cast another leveled spell since it didn’t cast a spell with its first spell due to counter spell but due to the lose in time you must cast a spell of a lower level than the spell slot you tried to use.
I didn't ask about taking Silvery Barbs because I felt I would be getting away with something. I asked because there's controversy about the spell. My DM knows that I'm not one to abuse game mechanics, so we decided to see how it goes. I offered that if either of us is feeling that the spell is problematic or disruptive, that we'd either adjust the spell, or exclude it from the game. We're all working together to have fun playing a game. Epic moments for the characters is fun, be they epic moments of triumph, or epic moments of struggle.
Haven't gotten all the way through the video, you may touch on this later but I wanted to get it written out while I was thinking about it. As a DM, I make a couple of assumptions with my players in session 0. First, when it comes to the world they live in, the characters are smarter than the players. So I would allow things like some over the table talk about situations where an experienced adventurer might know something that the player would not, or that they'd know the basics of tracking, forest craft, singing, conversation with nobles, etc. BUT there are many situations where the players are smarter than the characters, so at the same time I would prevent the character from acting on information the PLAYER knows. Things like "I botched that roll, I need one of the others to take over something I specialize in". This applies to spells like guidance because they often try to use it as a REACTION when something is currently happening, rather than beforehand. The other thing I do is remind characters of the way the spell is written, especially if they try to abuse it. Comprehend languages: you must touch the surface the writing is on, so you can't read the archway above a door if you can't reach it (or have someone give you a boost) and it takes a minute to cast. Silvery Barbs is a great example of this: RAW, the spell belongs to the Silverquill school of Strixhaven, and if you aren't a student there, you have no way to know the spell. If the spell has a verbal component, they can't cast it in the middle of a social scenario without being noticed, questioned, and potentially stopped.
All that said, I also bend every one of the above rules if the rule of cool wins out, or if I see the player is demoralized by the action (not the character) and is genuinely not enjoying the game. Because this is a game first and foremost, and if everyone isn't having fun, what is the point.
The only rule I enforce 100% of the time is this: COMMUNICATE with me. Tell me what you are wanting out of the game, what you are planning and need some compromise or help on, and how we as a group can make this a fun environment for everyone. Sometimes that means reflavoring a game mechanic, and sometimes that means outright ignoring certain rules. Cause it's our game, in that moment. And the game is made up, and the rules don't matter. :)
Something I enjoy doing with Comprehend Languages is having it work just like you said, like a translation app. And the programmers of it (an ancient morally dubious empire that are responsible for many of the artifacts in the world) wouldn’t have every single language in it. Most are in there, but there are three groups of exceptions. 1. Ancient languages that were forgotten before that empire came into power 2. A language from beyond the normal bounds of the setting 3. The language of the nobles of that particular empire, since they didn’t want the lower class to listen in on them. The spell is still useful at all times, because even if it doesn’t give them what the language is, it tells them it is either massively ancient or from beyond the stars. It always gives information of some kind.
26:00 Remove Curse. I literally had this as a plot point in the game I was running today. Being an "investigation" mod, they were specifically told "Sure, we can cast Remove Curse, but it will only permanently work if it was a spell we can reverse. The girl's curse appears to be part of a ritual or pact and will re-appear until you can find the source and deal with it."
The party is only 3rd level with no spellcasters, so it wasn't a specific ban.
You know what, it's funny - I never ban silvery barbs and I've played in multiple games (including Strixhaven) where players have it. The reroll often DOESN'T change a hit to a miss, maybe 40% or less of the time, so it often gets used mostly to cancel crits (not unlike the Grave cleric) or just give advantage. It gets spammed early on and then that stops and it gets used more tactically, and NOT everyone takes it. Maybe I play with unusual groups of people?
My solution for the Resurrection spells is pretty simple, you can only get brought back once. I've toyed with exceptions to that, the one I've settled on is you can only be brought back once by the standard Resurrection spells, and once by Reincarnation. This applies to using Wish to recreate any of the Resurrection spells, however if you use the version of Wish that can risk you losing the ability to cast Wish ever again, that one can work on you as many times as you want, because the price for that is risking losing the spell, and let's be honest, Wish should usually just work.
And yes I've really thought through the logistics of this. "Oh why would you ever use the higher level, more expensive spells if your revivify takes the one do-over anyways?" Simple, the advantage of the higher level spells is that since you don't have to use them immediately, you don't need to keep them always prepared like Revivify, thus you can have another combat or utility spell to hopefully prevent death in the first place. And as you use the even higher spells you can over come more difficult situations, like disintegration, it's all already built in.
As for flavor/in game reasoning for this? Well you know that diamond all the standard Res spells use? Yeah well the somatic component for casting those spells is cutting out the heart and replacing it with the diamond a-la the Briarhearts from Skyrim. And no amount of healing will ever fully repair the wound. Boom, you can't be Res'd again because you only had the one heart, and it's a permanent reminder of what happened. Even if you later use your one use of Reincarnation, your body still has the wound and the diamond for the heart.
For easy mode version of these rules, each level of Res spell can be used once each. So you get one Revivify, one Raise Dead, one Resurrection, etc. The higher level spells can be used in place of the lower level ones, but not the other way around. (i.e. you could theoretically be True Res'd 4 times, and then never be able to be Res'd again with any spell, but you'd only ever get one Revivify)
Anyone interested in finding ways to make mysteries that work around Speak with Dead in their games should check out the show "Pushing Daisies." That's basically the main character's whole deal; he can touch something dead and bring it to life, and then touch them again to return them to rest. He uses that power to make pies with eternally fresh fruit, but another main character convinces him to use that ability to interview the recently deceased to help solve their own murders.
Man, I need to watch Pushing Daisies again.
A rarer occurrence is Countering a Counterspell with Counterspell as a set reaction from your reaction or another spellcaster in the party's reaction. It's hilarious but shocking to see the party/gamemaster's reactions.
24:41 The advice to have Conjure Animals conjure a mix of different animal types would tune down the spell’s power but keep in mind that also means there are even more creature stat blocks in play! Probably better to keep all conjured animals the same type but add a random element to what animals get conjured.
We had two new players join our group, and one of their characters' entire reason for adventuring was to get the cures on her removed. My character was a druid, and the other original player was a claric...
Personally I think counterspell should only work on the spell level or lower. It is always a bummer when a villain uses his only 9th level spell to be thwarted by a lucky 3rd level roll
I think a good way of dealing with the larger groups of conjured creatures and avoiding forever turns is to just let all the players pilot 1 or 2 of the conjured creatures. The rest of the party is generally a lot less annoyed when the spell gives them an extra wolf they get to deal damage with in addition to their own character than when the druid and their critters basically get 6 turns on a row.
I've changed Silvery Barbs to be 2nd level. It still gets used, but not as much. I also don't tell people more information when hit, other than "you are hit". I started this a long time ago due to the Shield spell. When I give damage I'll inform them if it was a crit with the description of the damage but it is too late to use a "when hit" reaction. They could still use a "when taking damage" reaction of course.
This way these reactions are not only used when most effective. I also like the narrative, especially with Shield of the attack sometimes blowing through their hasty defense.
There are enough abilities that are used in responses to crits like the Grave Cleric's Sentinel at Death's Door, so I'd at least let them know the crit. I agree on the not telling them the number rolled though (unless it's comically high, I have to keep up the DM meme of "does a 28 hit?" against someone with like 17 or less AC) as it adds to the making an important choice factor. But yeah my typical levels of info are "welp that was a nat 1" "that'll miss" "that'll hit" and "oooh ok nat 20" when enemies are rolling to hit.
Granted, I guess if no one has abilities where the crit is actually important, a simple hit/miss is fine, but idk. I personally think it just feels bad to be like "it hit" "ok no reactions" "alright well that was a crit so."
@@gameraven13 Yeah if there is a mechanical reason to tell them I will, but I view reactions are reflexes, they don't have time to carefully analyze cost/benefits. So they get the minimum information. Of course for the example you gave, since I do inform there is a crit when damage is relayed, it would work fine. I've never had a player play a Grave Cleric though, so no experience there. ;)
I also combine everything together if there is no reason to keep them separate. Depends on the party. I'm not trying to penalize people, I'm trying to immerse them and help them stop treating everything like a wargame
Funnily enough thats explicitly how the Shield spell is suppose to work...which works great inperson behind a DM screen but a lot of online DMs roll in the open to show they're being fair/its just their playstyle. The DM rolls, tells you that your character has been hit, you say you use shield and announce your new AC, DM checks the roll and says whether it still hits or not is how the shield spell is MEANT to be used.
Good video. Always interesting to listen to takes about House Rules.
On a different note: One thing I've noticed being done A LOT in these videos and I've begun noticing and really pay attention after your PHB covers reviews.
You use the crutch "We''ll talk about this later/We'll get there soon/We'll get back to this" constantly. In the PHB review it was a funny bit. But it did lampshade how frequently this literary device is used in general.
I like how the understand langauge spell has the perfect answer baked in "Just make important documents a Cyhper or half of the words" 😂
So i tend to run Remove Curse in a very similar way to how i see a lot of people run revival spells; it requires input from the players and is not just a "spell slot spent, consquences of my actions gone." Usually this is in the form of "welp i got lycanthropy, ill probably need something involved with werewolves to remove said curse as a compnent of my spell."
I will likely be adding the "Remove Curse tells you how to remove it" thing to this formula, as its actually had soemtimes to give the players information on what kinds of things would help remove curses that are less simple than lycnsthropy or vampirism.
I would rule that for Speak with Dead, the creature's mouth must be intact enough to physically produce words. That means no casting it on a skeleton, they gotta have lips and a tongue.
So if you have a killer that's worthy of a mystery, they may well know to cut out the tongues of their victims.
I have a couple thoughts about Curses. One is that curses like Lycanthropy and Vampirism could be considered a Greater Curse that can't be cured by Remove Curse. Maybe Remove Curse could ameliorate the effects of the curse until the character takes a long rest.
The other is that Lycanthropy, Vampirism, and other self-perpetuating curses might be one, giant curse that cannot be cured with Remove Curse, because you're only affecting a tiny part of the curse as a whole. In this framework, each curse is unique, tailored to the will of the caster and the magical strength of the curse itself, so each curse would naturally have varying requirements to remove. Even saying "May their souls rot for eternity," might constitute a Curse, though a very weak one, given the number of targets, intended duration, and lack of strength invested in the curse.
Identify is very useful, but most people don't think about it because they only think about using the spell on magic items they pick up.
The actual use is to cast it on people who might be under a spell effect, or casting it on items you can't pick up, like a strange statue or a suspicious wall.
I like the in-character investigation created by banning short rest identifying and the identify spell.
I have a ring that has four abilities that trigger based on random words so the player is incentivised to talk in character more.
I had an axe that could be charged up by killing monsters so my player had two options keep charging it up and suffer the consequences or stop charging it up. Simple choice, but big impact.
I have an amulet that was used by an npc so the player knew some of what it could already do before testing it out. You would be surprised how creative players can be when testing magic items.
The bit about Counterspell reminded me of a campaign that had been one of the best I was ever in, until the GM decided to make the boss of the campaign and all of the monsters backing him up totally immune to magic. I was playing a character whose offensive abilities were all based on spellcasting, so while the other players were getting moments of being absolute badasses, I was barely making a dent on anything. I spent most of the fight mentally checked out, and doing 2-20 hit points of damage to monsters that had hundreds of hp.
It went from being one of the best campaigns to one of the absolute worst in a single session.
My fix for comprehend languages, Identify, and other divination spells is that I make comprehend languages be direct literal translations (this works bc I'm a language nerd, so I know how to phrase something in a way that makes it less useful without cultural context or language knowledge), and for Identify I have it draw on a "database" stored in the weave, giving casters access to written entries based on tags. This allows disruption, but also for the spell to grant far more limited info should it be used to identify an unregistered item or spell. It still tells you some vague info, like rarity, bonuses to numbers, charges and options, but details are missing.
I allow casting summoning spells anytime but at a cost. Needing ingredients to cast certain spells isn't new, so my summons cost a special potion prepared in a ritual which only works for the caster who prepared it. Since you can't meditate, chant or dance for hours while in combat, the preparation takes place in camp before sleep. It also costs ingredients like a bottle, a handful of matter from the home plane of the beings to be summoned, a fluid (oil, holy water, brandy, …) and powdered money-sinks like pearls or lesser gems, the more and bigger creatures in the summon, the greater the quantity.
This makes for a number of effects: a) the DM doesn't get each and every encounter trampled by raptors while b) summons stay a viable option, but c) the casters now have to manage their sleep. d) High-level characters who already have everything find a use for all their money outside of inns - their livers will be happy.
Weighing whether to lose half a night's sleep and be unfocused and grumpy the next day, or preparing only a little goop every night and saving it up becomes a tactical mini-game for the players. A character relying on summons will quickly burn a hole in the party's purse, crave coffee, be irritable and may even fumble spells. Someone powdering and meditating just a little every night may fill up their bottle only slowly but be well rested and able to unleash a powerful summon when the need is dire.
I actually have a story about something similar: I was planning a one shot with modified 5e rules. Told the players, “don’t use a character you care a lot about, that’s a bad idea for this one” because I am secretly planning to kill them. (We haven’t had a PC die in years, so I’m doing a one shot to get them used to the idea of PC not being immortal). Ran out of time to add special items for the bosses to use, which are a huge part of the game. Had them suggest stuff, and to my surprise, they suggested the most OP things they could think of. Honestly, instead of breaking the campaign, it made it a fun challenge to finish it, while balancing the combats. Made the bosses not have one item for more than a turn, so they can’t use one item to its fullest potential. Gave the players the ability to use whatever item the boss was holding, when it died, once, then it’s gone forever. And fleshed out the death system, to make it more clear that “this is basically a fancy death timer, but you can control when and how you die, and what kills you”.
I tend to distill my thoughts on Guidance to one simple phrase: "Guidance is not a Reaction spell". Falling off a cliff? No you can't use Guidance because the Athletics check to catch yourself is a Reaction, you literally don't have time. Checking to see if you know something? No you can't use Guidance, because checks like that are just things I have you roll outside of the normal turn structure. Beyond stuff like that I don't worry about it that much.
A half-formed idea has just occurred to me: Treat Remove Curse like Matt Mercer treats resurrections - with a challenge. You need the spell to attempt the cursebreaking, but you'll also need other components (material or specific actions) based on what the curse's effects are (for lycanthropy, maybe the blood of the werewolf that turned you adds to your bonus, maybe a curse that afflicted a tomb robber can be resisted by surrendering worldly possessions of their own) I'd maybe allow Remove Curse to break attunement to a cursed item, once the rest of the party figures out why the confederate player is so defensive over their new weapon.
I've run a lot of murder mysteries in 5e, both of the "the cops cant interfere, theres a murderer among you, try to survive while you investigate" and of the "you work for the cops and run homicide, do an investigation" variety.
My suggestion for the first kind would be to just set the player level at around level 3- this limits magic chicanery a fair bit, and also helps keeps tension up- a level 15 character is basically never gonna feel threatened by a classic murderer anyway, they're too big a pile of hitpoints and class features- but allows some variety in builds.
For the second, i make a point of having speak eith dead and zone of truth be things the players colleagues already tried- you dont need to do a multi day investigation if you can ask the corpse who killed them and then confirm with a zone of truth, so every mystery starts with one of three results: the deceased's soul cant give an answer (it didnt see the person who did it, or it was obliterated, indicating a professional assassin of some kind), the deceased gave unvarifiable information (either the person they named cannot be found, or they have claimed something like an alien creature did it) or the zone of truth questioning has revealed contradictory information. Theres always some room for more thorough use of those spells and better wuestioning to get more info, but i find it useful as a place for them to start.
I think some spells would benefit from the add-on of saying “this spell can only be cast using a scroll or similar consumable magic item” to allow DMs the ability to control how often they get used. This would change a potential character’s motivation from “get to be a high enough level to cast true resurrection and bring my love back to life” to “I must venture out to seek the mystic staff of true resurrection, and one day learn to wield its unfathomable power”
Suggestion: There is a religious order that detests the unwanted spells. Any casting involving them is immediately detected by the order who will send their agents to eliminate you. At first you'll only face bounty hunters that happen to be in the area but with each day more powerful members of the order will reach your position up to a small army. Casting the spell basically puts a timer on the group to finish the quest before GTA 5-star mode kicks in.
The problem with curses is exactly the same problem I have with disease.
The 2014PHB has some really cool and flavorful diseases in it with incubation periods, symptoms, mechanical effects and cures. The problem is, like most disease, they begin shoeing symptoms long before they start harming you, and every class and their dog gets access to lesser restoration which solves the problem immediately, making that rare flower you have 4 days to find before you go blind irrelevant to the disease.
Treantmonk has a great couple videos highlighting spells he loves as a DM but hates as a player and vice versa. Great advice and good observations.
Remember that the polymorphed players don't do magic damage. So good chance it will get halved on that level.
And at that point, it's just making somebody give up their class abilities, to get some extra hitpoints.
It's a fine way to give a player something to do if they were going to die soon anyway.
Having just gone through the situations where four of the 5th level characters in our party were Cursed by a Rakshasa, and none of the Priests in the city we were in knew how to remove the curse and we were tapped out of healing potions, it took 2 long rests and our Cleric burning through both of his 3rd level spell slots to "cure" all of us, and entering into the next combat encounter without two of us or the Cleric being able to take their next long rest, it would have really been bad if Remove Curse had also been banned.
I like a middle ground for remove curse is that you have to understand the nature of the curse for it to work so the party has to put in some work to discovering the story behind the curse. Powerful curses could then also require specific components to remove as you mentioned. Maybe it straight up works on weaker curses though so you can still shoot your monk occasionally.
I will often talk to the cursed player to see if they are having fun with the curse before I decide how difficult it is to remove as well. I don't want to destroy their fun just because I thought I came up with an interesting story.
One thing I think people, at least the players on critical role, seem to forget is that guidance is concentration. Which means if you have, say, pass without trace up, casting guidance would break your concentration on it. So sometimes you have to be judicious with casting it.
On the topic of curses, one option is to say that a curse can only be removed with a special material component, or at a specific place.
The other thing is to consider curses as spell slot costs, it costs a player a 3rd level spell slot, so they can either deal with the curse for a day or expend a spell slot. That is minus one fireball or dispel magic or aura of vitality for the party.
A third thing is to have the curse only be removed if cast at a certain level, "this curse can be removed only if remove curse is cast using a 7th level spell slot"". And you can mix and match material component and timing/spacing. A curse that can only be removed if the remove curse spell is cast using a 6th level spell slot while under a full moon on the top the highest boulder in a druid grove when an awakened tree is present? That's a lot of circumstance.
Remove curse , one way to potentially deal with it, is limit it to only curse below the level of the caster can be removed. Also by giving a curse instance a "level" giving it a difficulty level to it's removal.
For Bestow Curse: For more permanent curses that should have a more effective impact, you suppress the curse temporarily, but not long.
Personally, I love the revive spells. I treat them essentially like regular healing but with higher costs. They still cost spell slots and components, so you can't revivify willy-nilly, and that leads to great tension when characters die but the healer doesn't have the right spell slot, or no one has enough diamonds. I know some people want to treat character death as seriously as in any non-fantasy world, but I think it's more interesting coming at it from the pov of a world with this established magic like when playing a jrpg. Deaths aren't always final, but when they are it's all the more impactful because you had ways to stop it.
About Comprehend Languages, it is RAW that it gives a literal translation. But thing is not everything we speak or write literally means what we are trying to convey. Like "raining cats and dogs" doesn't mean that cats and dogs are falling from the sky. So DM can prepare a "literal" translation full of baffling idioms, references to obscure(for players) events, metaphors and so on - so players can try to decipher what it means or find someone who actually knows the language.
7:08 My campaign has a lot of languages that my players wouldn't have any way to speak, so Comprehend Languages is very useful to them, in addition to magic items(?) that give them extra languages.
For Goodberry I think the 3.5 version can be an alternative. It gives 2d4 enchanted berries instead of 10, so it's a bit harder to know how many spell slots to save. It also limits the healing the spell can do to 8 points per person per day, which, meh, that just adds paperwork. But the important one is: the spell requires freshly picked berries to enchant. So if you're traveling through the wilderness with no towns in sight and your rations were eaten by an owlbear Goodberry now gives you an extra option for how to obtain your meal for today, as well as good in-combat healing, but you shouldn't treat it as your only option. If you pass a river you're going to go fishing rather than marching on confident there will surely be a berry patch ahead.
For Conjure Animals my DM decided based on I think a sage advice somewhere to create a random animal table. I can ask the spirits for 8 wolves (or yaks, or giant bats, or giant frogs, or...), but I'm going to get 8 of one random creature of CR 1/4 or lower. Could be yakals, could be camels, could be fish. It does not solve the action imbalance. In fact I'm making extra rolls now. But it does solve me abusing this spell all the time coming from the philosophy that every problem has a solution that starts with "I summon 8 ..."
The other summoning spells do let the caster pick their summons, because those are only used by NPCs so far.
In AD&D (2nd edition) Identify was a MUCH more costly and difficult spell to cast.
It took 8 uninterrupted hours to cast.
For each property or feature of an item the wizard had to roll a % which scaled with their level to a maximum of 90%, with a 5% chance of them getting false information. They could also only do this for a number of properties equal to their wizard level.
On a failed check, the wizard could not try again until they had leveled up at least once.
The actual information given with a successful check was usually vague. For example, "the sword gives a bonus to attack and damage" rather than, "It's a +2 sword", or "the wand has only a faint amount of magical charge" rather than, "the wand has 4 charges left".
And then on top of all of that, the wizard would lose 8 points of Constitution (which might knock him unconscious), and would require 24 hours of rest to recover.
The material costs were pretty cool though. They didn't just list a 100gp pearl and an owl feather. Instead they described how you had to steep the feather in wine with the pearl added, and that the wine had to be drunk by the caster. And if you used a luckstone instead of a pearl, then the properties of the item could be learned exactly. (It's unclear if the pearl or luckstone were consumed by the spell, but it would appear so).
This is not to say that DM's should adopt this version of the spell in its entirety, but it could inspire some ideas for how you might modify it if you wanted to rebalance it.
One simple idea I've used is to say that the 1st level version of the spell only identifies the properties of Common and Uncommon rarity items. For rarer items you need to use a higher level slot, 3rd for rare, 5th for very rare, 7th for legendary, and 9th for artifacts. This means that the spell still is useful, but also that if the party finds some powerful item that you want to retain some mystery, they might not have the level to cast it, and might need to just experiment with it or try to convince a high level wizard to identify it for them.
Increasing the casting time and/or inflicting exhaustion could also be applied if you want to restrict the spell to a downtime activity, rather than the sort of thing the players cast immediately on every item they find, removing any mystery or opportunity to experiment.
A good bandaid for identify is adding a caster level requirement. The wizard can learn what most loot does but cant figure out what a special item does
also works for remove curse. You got cursed by being slashed by some undead and failing a saving throw by rolling 3? the cleric got you covered. You have been cursed because you released some great evil back into the world? F maybe a high priest can do it? or perhaps getting a god to help? or maybe just alleviating the symptoms using the flower that grows once a year at the top of a mountain inhabited by mysterious creatures from beyond the stars
If I need to maintain a mystery behind another language in my games, I have come up with a cool antimagic effect on the writing. Basically anytime anyone tries to use magic directly on the writing, it counterspells it automatically. I don't do this unless the mystery RELIES on the writing being unable to be read, I always have multiple ways to decode it through other means, and if they really can't crack it, I have a special artifact that turns out to have been hidden somewhere in the world that will allow them to deactivate the counterspell effect.
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
It is indeed a good channel. We do like Mike.
I wanna add what I do for the resurrection spells in my homebrew world!
So firstly, I use material components. And those spells cost diamonds.
In my homebrew world, diamonds are rare because the rich upper class horde them to keep themselves and their interests alive.
So it's already a big deal when they get a diamond.
But! I also have this lore that each time you die, your soul costs 100g more and thus the diamond they use needs to reflect that.
It's also great for npc's.
In my world there are these things called "Parlor debates" where rich lords settle disputes with fights to the death with their (uhh) "forced servants" and the loser just gets resurrected until their lord decides they have lost too much and their soul isn't worth it.
It has been amazing so far for my world!
The thing about Charm Monster, is that it really doesn't a creature out of commission. Unless your 1v1 with them. Because the charmed condition only makes the caster immune to attacks and friendly with, not the party. So they can attack the rest of the party until the cows come home. And as soon as the rest of the party to anything to retaliate, the spell ends. It's basically useless for combat. That is why Dominate Monster exists.
I'm reminded of a DM who would whine about our party casting Dissonant Whispers on his monsters when they were in melee range of our fighters and rogues. He hated that it gave us Attacks of Opportunity. His argument was, "I don't want to have to use that same spell on you."
My response was, "Then don't use it. I've never seen that spell on a monster stat block, so you are never obligated to use it."
This is a video that not only I got useful insigth to improve myself as DM from what Mike said, but from useful tips that people shared in the comments. Great topic and I should save this video apart and come back from time to time if needed.
Guidance - target must be faithful matching cleric.
Silvery barbs - made by a-holes for asshats. That's harsh, but I stand by it
I think cursed in D&D are meant to be more of a ‘common’ affliction than they are in conventional media. Similar to how being poisoned in the game can be easily cured by swigging an antitoxin or via a simple casting of Lesser Resoration (a 2nd-tier spell), curses are meant to be common enough that most can be remedied by a casting of Remove Curse. I imagine curses as a sort of “status” that can be inflicted by certain monsters, or by magical traps, kinda like in video games. These kinds of curses aren’t necessarily crippling or wholly life-changing, they just tend to be temporary debuffs and minor/major inconveniences. Like being cursed with Blindness/Deafness, reduced Intelligence, etc.
But then, there are also extremely powerful curses that go well beyond simple debuffs and can’t be magically removed by a wave of the Cleric’s hand. THESE are cursed like lycanthropy, a banshee’s lament, a haunted house, etc.
I've never DM'd for remove curse players, but my plan for it was always scaling levels. It works as written for Bestow Curse curses, but for "custom" or complicated curses, you'd need to cast it at a higher level and maybe some more interesting components. Think of the downtime enchanting rules.
I had a similar solution to identify, that you needed more powerful identify to decipher more intricate magics. It led to a really funny moment with my players. I had a nonmagical amulet that was on clearance, and the player botched hidden insight check as to why it was so cheap. Of the various possible reasons I gave to my player, the one that stuck with him the most was that it might be cursed. He went to a wizard to get it identified, and the wizard said it was mundane, or that it had a spell which was beyond his ability to identify. The entire campaign my barbarian went from wizard to wizard, convinced that the next wizard would reveal something which would justify the hundreds of gp he spent on this thing that cost 5gp.
I tend to nerf spells rather than ban them - a prime example would be when I was designing a campaign around Ancient Egypt, I had a whole homebrew mechanic built up around learning bits and pieces of hieroglyphic symbols, using down time to study ancient texts and improve one's rolls when trying to translate the writing in ancient tombs... and I remembered the spell "Comprehend Languages" exists. But one of my players had already taken it as part of her repertoire as a wizard who studied ancient languages - so I had to have a conversation with her about the potential of this spell to entirely handwave both the mechanic I'd been crafting and the vibe of an Egyptologist trying to translate a dead language. She agreed she'd rather have the experience of struggling to translate the mysteries of an unknown language rather than just handwaving it with a spell, so we agreed that the Comprehend Languages spell only works 100% when used on languages people in the modern day speak, while if you use it on ancient glyphic, it only gives you a vague emotional concept because there's no direct translation in the modern day anymore, thus it aids your research slightly without just handing you the answer.
I think a reason people ban Polymorph is players using it to make a big scary threat into something harmless, fly up really far, then drop it for a 4th level power word kill.
Charm creature spells and abilities does have limitations, for example you could give your boss advantage on charm effects letting your enchantment focused players realize it won’t be easy to deal with them, and if they do succeed they simply won’t be targeted as the charmed creature believes everything you do to the other party is to benefit it.
One of my GMs gave our Paladin a Wish in game, he decided to wish away his god's main rival god... and now Umberlee is after our party directly because in game the god that was destroyed by the wish was her husband... So fun!
If a player in a game I was running Conjured a pack of wolves, I'd hand out cards with wolf stats to all the other players and do a shared turn where everybody gets to roll some dice.
In Mage the Ascension/Awakening players effectively start with Wish as an unlimited spell and it is never a problem. The world just needs to be internally consistent.
Like in our world we have smartphones and they are normally either not allowed when sitting in a exam or exams are setup so they require a smartphone.
I’ve temporarily banned any spells that I would consider associated with either the Feywild or the Shadowfell, simply because those planes don’t exist in my world until the end of my first campaign.
Personally I think remove curse only fully works on “conjured” curses, like bestow curse. For anything “permanent” or “narratively important”, (or cursed items?) the spell only suppresses the symptoms. It might not even stop the progression of the curse so when it comes back it’s more severe. That way the characters have a window where they can act without being crippled but also without minimizing the consequences and time crunch.
What if remove curse worked to give you leads / rules for breaking it, and maybe it helps with one ingredient so the players get 1 agency (they get to choose which ingredient they dont want to get), 2 the spell helps clear the curse (it provides the clear conditions and 1 ingredient of the players choice) and 3 the dm still get to make removing the curse harder and more interesting.
I really think that with a lot of these, the GM can figure out ways to make these spells sometimes not work, if they break a mystery or something, for example.. like with the Comprehend Languages to understand a letter, you can simply suggest that the letter is enchanted with a protection spell for exactly such instance or that the content is written in code and they still need to go to a certain NPC to decipher it. It might be a lot of work to think of those scenarios and plan ahead for them, but I would prefer a party that can outsmart me with things I overlooked, then just ban stuff outright because I'm too lazy to think about all the ways they can break my intended way
All the Ryan George fans just became the Leonardo DeCaprio pointing meme.
Silvery barbs, I always ban silvery barbs.
Same, and I do it because I once used it as a player and the battle was just... Over.
It was boring and I don't want my optimizing players to subject themselves to boredom in order to be effective.
@@manuelmialdea5127
Honestly, it'd be much better to ask them and see if they'd want that, because there's a fundamental difference between the way you play and the way an optimising individual would, and both aren't wrong.
Part of the fun to a "power-gamer" would be absolutely smashing combat, especially doing it well. It was boring to you when you were a player, but it might not be to your group. Especially considering that's something they wouldn't find boring (based on their expectations of being good at combat)
It's sounds to me more like a fundamental difference in your expectations and theirs rather than the spell itself, even if it is kinda broken.
(I personally think you should just fudge/tweak the HP of the monster in cases where silvery barbs is used or just use alternate rules for SB. Not a lot that the spell would be a waste, but enough so that the pacing of the fight is still fine, but if that's not your style that's fair).
Of course, they're probably fine with it being banned but it's worth checking if the ban itself stops them from doing what they want to do with their character/narrative or hampers their fun.
I just rule that Silvery barbs on exits in Strixhaven.
@@sortehuseI let all my players use powerful spells, feats and other character options from recent dnd books. Silvery barbs is just too powerful even taking all of that into account.
@@manuelmialdea5127i just watched it get used in CR and D20 actual plays and immediately realized how much it deflated encounters. ESPECIALLY when more than one character has it.
:0 My dm uses Counterspell as a strategic puzzle element to make combat more cerebral. If we need to cast spells to win, and someone or something is countering them, the goal becomes to incapacitate that caster. We end up doing that in a pretty creative way, usually. And then we cast spells without getting countered and feel awesome cuz we earned it >:]
Noone talks about this but the DM needs to be one of the smartest people in the room and when hes not, spells start getting banned
Regarding resurrection, I just give resurrected characters one permanent negative death saving throw each time. So three resurrections is the maximum and the characters die more easily each time.
In my game I don’t have any spells banned, but there are some magics that have been forgotten over time (that can be discovered) and spells that are illegal to cast (so you better pay attention to who is around before you cast it). My players are 100% aware of this when picking spells.
In terms of indentify versus short rest, I allow the players to figure out functions that are figure out-able during a short rest, but just because you know the function doesn't mean you know the name, the side-effects, secondary magical characteristics, or all possible outcomes for a magic item. For example if my players found a ring and attempted to identify it, I might tell them that wearing the ring will turn them invisible. Meanwhile identify would magically identify that it is a powerful artifact of a dark lord, and linked to his power, as well as describe its magical properties and side effects.
I don't generally assume every character is psychic or experts in magical items, so them recognizing a magic item with no foreknowledge seems a bit silly.
The way I do Comprehend languages is sometimes the language pre-dates the spells effect and doesn't work properly, or in the case of my players trying to translate a HORRIBLY cursed tomb to try and figure some things out, they take psychic and necrotic damage when the spell ends and they gain a level of exhaustion from using it because the strain was so great on their body it actually hurt them.
Back in some 3rd party 3E or 3.5E book we had a guy who wanted to add a whole subset of blood and bone themed spells, and the DM said thats fine, but it means I also get to use whatever is in the book. So the player got to basically snap his fingera and boil the blood out of creatures at something like 100ft, and the DM added some kind of black magic cancer tumour to the world. He got to cripple enemies before the melee guys (like my paladin) could reach them, and the DM could make peasants explode 3 days after catching the plague turning their remains into undead and their souls into shadows creatures or something I think. It was part of my Paladins fall because we found a town where everyone had been infected and we were told there was no way to cure them all. There wasnt enough time to use enough spells, it was already super resistant to that anyway, and the one time we had attempted a surgical removal it had taken half a day for one patient. The only option to stop it spreading was to slaughter the whole town.
As a player my DMs never banned any spell. Sometimes they have changed something to the effects. (Revive are often more complicated than using a spell slot, consume some shiny rocks and nothing more.)
As a DM I never ban any spells.
After the first change in the UA, I’ve tried Guidance as a reaction fore a one shot and, at my table, the change of the casting time solved some problems (and created some others, lol). And for counterspell my rules are “not in every combat” and “the same amount of caster that can counterspells the party have” (+1 if the encounter is very hard and make sense to have this bunch of spellcasters).