The D&D thread

The Problem With Critical Role’s Latest Campaign

This article pisses me off to the nth degree. It perpetuates its own core thesis of 'Orientalism' by portraying northern africa and southwest asia as exotic, but its written in English by someone in Maryland for fuck's sake. The author is themselves treating the culture of northern africa and south-west asia as 'exotic' and profiteering off it.

Furthermore this perpetuates the idea of 'stay in your own lane' while simultaneously lumping all of Europe into an "inoffensive" monoculture. I'm damn near as liberal as they come, but shit like this does more damage than good.

So a while back I got a gargantuan tiamat. It came broken and the paint job was really bad. Like it was just maroon. Long story short. Got a replacement. The paint job on this one is great. It's like night and day. And the pieces actually fit together. Still not worth the price tag though even at $299

Pure magic-users (like Wizards), in the right hands, are a tremendous headache for DMs because they can literally do almost anything, BUT they require the player to use their brains.

As an example - I had a campaign many years ago where one of my players, playing an Illusion/Divination specialized Wizard was dunking on my campaign by completely subverting and trivializing key elements. It was great for him, but it sucked for me because I had narrative beats that were designed to play out over the course of 2-4 sessions, but they were rendered completely moot with a couple of his spells.

I didn't respond to it well and in my follow-up campaign I installed a powerful organization that effectively banned Divination magic. It didn't take long for me to realize that 'punishing' my players creativity was 100% wrong. Anyway, I'm losing the script here.

Point being - it may just be you. Magic-users are objectively the most powerful archetype in the game. Many of the 'guides' recommending spells are just regurgitating commonly held beliefs garnered from a simple mathematical calculation between spells, but they rarely take in to consideration the innumerable uses that many spells have.

In your example - Mage Hand is a fantastic cantrip that noone would question, but in my opinion the best cantrip is Thaumaturgy.

Eldritch Blast is a stupid, unbalanced spell that should have been a Warlock class feature instead of a Cantrip.

Fireball is one of the most overrated spells in the entirety of D&D. It's certainly a good spell, but it's not the omgwtfbbq! spell that it's perceived by many to be. When I see players Fireball a single creature, it tells me they don't grasp the some of the game's fundamental mechanics.

*Edit* Just to be clear, Eldritch Blast is only dumb when built around by Warlocks. It's 'fine' in a vacuum.

Building a caster around a theme is fun. It gives a bit more focus to spell selection, like choosing a favorite element or signature spell school.

As for understanding a spell caster. Each spell is a tool. Some tools are specialized and do one thing, some are very open ended and multipurpose. Illusion spells are the most open ended, evocation is the most limited, generally.

When picking a caster and spells you have to think about your role in the party. Damage? Crowd control? Skill monkey? Party face ect.

With proper spell selection you can of course fill multiple rolls.

As for what class:

Wizards have the biggest magical tool box and the most versatility with their potential spell list only limited by gold and access to scrolls. They also take the most forethought in selecting each days spells.

Sorcerers have a much more limited spell selection and therfore need to focus on their party roll more. But what they do have they can really make the most of with meta magic shenanigans.

Warlocks are the most limited caster but operate with lots of supplemental mechanics that can make them work well with limited rests. But damage basically boils down the eldritch blast/ other less optimized cantrip or blade lock. Those can be really fun.

Bards are extremely flexible in how much they want to be caster focused or more martial focused.

To a lesser extent the same can be said for clerics and druids.

Druids are probably the most self sufficient class. A party of pure druids is completely broken.

Basic spell selection starts with a damaging cantrip or two for elemental diversity, some kind of mobility enhancement preferably a teleport, at least one good aoe/Crowd control spell, and if available something for some oh shit healing in case someone drops. Fellow party members only need 1 hp to contribute to the fight.

After that it comes down to campaign setting and dm style to determine spell usefulness.

Dungeon crawls do well with anything that aids with combat and scouting.

Campaigns with lots of puzzles make divination shine.

Open world stuff benefits from long distance communication and out of combat logistics spells.

One other thing to consider is action economy.

You get 1 action,
1 bonus action
And 1 reaction per round unless you have other abilities like haste.

When casting spells you can only cast a single spell per turn even if it only has a casting time of one bonus action.

So you can cast healing word and then a cantrip.. you can not cast healing word and then fireball.

Reaction spells don't happen on your turn so they don't contribute to that rule.

You can also only concentrate on a single spell at a time. So pay attention to what spells you think you would like to have running in your concentration slot.

This makes non concentration spells with long durations more potent than they might first appear.

Finally there is ritual casting. If your class allows ritual casting, or you took the ritual caster feat, and the spell has the ritual tag, you can take 10 min to cast a single action spell without expending a spell slot. This is very useful for out of combat utility spells.

Pact of the tome warlocks with the book of ancient secrets invocation can get a bunch of cantrips and ritual spells to maximize their casting ability despite their limited spell slots.

Also find familiar is broken. It gives huge utility for a single ritual cast.

Grabbit Allworth said:

Fireball is one of the most overrated spells in the entirety of D&D. It's certainly a good spell, but it's not the omgwtfbbq! spell that it's perceived by many to be. When I see players Fireball a single creature, it tells me they don't grasp the some of the game's fundamental mechanics.

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Fuck you that bugbear had it coming, goddamn abominations.

Arbitrary said:

Fuck you that bugbear had it coming, goddamn abominations.

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Grasping the game's mechanics and giving a shit about them are two different things. Am I right?

Aaron said:

I agree with some here that D&D is getting a bit stale (speaking as someone who has been playing 5e since it was launched). However, the big "problem" with it is just how accessible it is, especially if you use D&D Beyond. Everything is at your fingertips. If other systems were to become more online focused I bet some of my friends would like to try them, but til then they just love opening their laptops and having everything ready. Even more so for the DM.

Anyway, for something else. I have never been able to "get" magic in D&D. Don't know why. I love playing monks, barbarians, rogues and such, but whenever I try and break out of my comfort zone and roll a caster I just feel a bit lost. Currently I'm playing a sorcerer and I don't really get it. If you watch or read guides people talk about the flexibility of casters, yet it's always the same spells you're told to take (hello Mage Hand, Eldritch Blast and Fireball!). Anyone have the same issues or recommendations?

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Control spells are usually better than damage spells because dividing and hampering an enemy that usually outnumbers your party is a huge boon.

A line of archers on a balcony supporting melee minions? Cool, just cast wall of fire to break line of sight and take out the melee while the archers spend a couple rounds moving. Party of 5 and bust in a room filled with 20 orcs? Something like entangle or Evard's black tentacles: about half will fail the save, so you're dealing with two groups of 10 instead.

Yeah, if you want to play a caster, the first thing you should do is figure out WHY you want to play a caster. That should inform you on what role you'll be filling in the group, and that will inform you on what spells you should take.

Also, outside of a couple spells being completely worthless (like true strike), they all generally have their moments. Some are a bit more situational and may only come into play a handful of times, but it's GREAT when you finally get to use one of those spells, especially because a lot of DM's don't usually plan for some of the more obscure spells.

And as far as eldritch blast goes, it's really only OP for warlocks and that's if they build their entire character around it, which makes for a pretty boring character that basically just does the same thing every round. For any other class, eldritch blast and firebolt are mostly the same (mechanically, eldritch blast will do more consistent damage due to each ray being its own roll, as well as being a damage type that is much less likely to be resisted). I think a lot of people get blinded by how well warlocks function with eldritch blast and end up wasting feats on getting eldritch blast on a non-warlock, without realizing that it's the invocations that REALLY make eldritch blast shine.

But I digress. Figure out what you want to do and build your spellbook towards that. If you want to be a blaster and just nuke people, sorcerer's can do well at since their metamagic allows them to break the rules of spellcasting (quicken or twin spell let's them cast more than one spell per turn, empower let's them reroll damage dice if you get a bunch of 1's and 2's, etc) as well as flexible casting letting them regain spells lots with a bonus action. BUT they have limited known spells so they aren't very flexible in what they can do in any given moment.

Thing about damage though, is that basically everyone can do damage and unless you're fighting a large group, most other classes can do reliable, high single target damage. Casters really shine with AoE (just take fireball and move on lol) and controlling the battlefield.

But really, don't worry about what the internet says on spells unless you are playing some ruthless min/max meat grinder game. People spend A LOT of time with spreadsheets and sims and preach the results like gospel, but that doesn't really allow for personal creativity and role playing. My current game I'm playing a triton storm sorcerer and while on paper, storm sorcs are one of the weaker subclasses, I'm having a blast finding good uses for lame spells like gust of wind (I've pushed SO MANY creatures off cliffs, I love it)

j00t said:

If you want to be a blaster and just nuke people, sorcerer's can do well at since their metamagic allows them to break the rules of spellcasting (quicken or twin spell let's them cast more than one spell per turn, empower let's them reroll damage dice if you get a bunch of 1's and 2's, etc) as well as flexible casting letting them regain spells lots with a bonus action. BUT they have limited known spells so they aren't very flexible in what they can do in any given moment.

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Just want to clarify this one bit.

You can still only cast one spell and one cantrip even with quicken spell.

So no double fireballs or anything like that.

Twin spell is great for spells that are single target only. Twin spell on healing word is pretty nuts if more than one party member is down, especially if you also have a non-spell healing ability to use as your action for a third heal.

The only way around the spell casting limitation that I know of is to multiclass fighter and action surge for a second spell.

I'm guessing you guys are playing 5e casters. I've been playing my 4e artifice for like 10 or 12yrs. Wands tons of wands for anything I want to do.

The only things that stand out are eldritch blast and haste.

Unless you are going to take two levels of warlock to get the agonizing blast invocation, eldritch blast isn't really superior to firebolt. As was mentioned earlier it gets separate hit rolls for each shot which evens out the damage and does force damage which is rarely resisted, but that's it.

Minor illusion is a great centrip to replace it with.

For haste, you need a good target for the spell and you need to be very careful not to lose concentration on it. Since when the haste spell ends, the character effected by it ends up losing a whole round of combat to "a wave of lethargy".

Haste is amazing in certain situations, but more for its movement increase instead of the single extra action.

Haste on a druid that shape shifted into a giant eagle is incredibly funny though.

Especially if that druid cast spikey growth and proceeded to grapple and drag a whole group of bandits through said growth over and over again until all that was left was ribbons of flesh...

That was a good day.

You could also talk to your dm about taking a regular spell and changing the element to something that better fits your idea of a character. I had a cold focused dragon sorcerer and my dm let me change fireball into a cold spell that I called flash freeze. On my current storm sorcerer, he let me change firebolt into lightning damage (jolt).

I'd also try to fit ice knife in there somewhere, it's a pretty great spell and its cold damage