Spell Selection
Anyone who’s ever held a spellbook can empathize with Wizard. The magic chapter taunts you with an infinitude of choice, but you’re bound to choose a meager handful of spells to slot into your repertoire. It’s even worse for the sorcerers of the world, who must make do with workhorse options like invisibility and lightning bolt rather than fun niche options like creation or grave words. Sure you can rely on spell scrolls for that sort of thing, but your day-to-day combat actions are going to be restricted to a handful of go-to options. While magic missile is never a wasted action, it rarely feels like a rewarding one to me. Weirdly, I think this has something to do with the old trope of “I got stuck playing the healer.”
When magic-users cast, they want to feel like masters of the goddamn universe.They want to shape the fabric of reality, set off a few fireworks, and laugh maniacally as the enemies turn themselves inside out like the puny muggles they are. Making the health bars go up or down rarely gives that feeling. A well-placed heal or meteor swarm can swing a battle, but that never seems quite as satisfying as finding the perfect tool for the job. For my money, the best part of playing a caster is paging through your options, realizing you’ve got the optimal solution to deadly encounter du jour, and then breaking that encounter in half.
Case in point: I once played in a mythic Pathfinder game with an archmage wizard. The dude had a ridiculous power called “wild surge,” which basically says “cast any spell in the book.” That may be too much of a good thing, but I’ve never felt like more of a badass than the time I pulled out a wall of light to wreck face against a homebrew shadow demon. Both I and my archmage felt like a couple of geniuses.
All of the above is to say that I think there’s a reason why Wizard has a book full of fun RP spells. He’s waiting for that time when he can raise his hands, mutter his incantations, and somehow foil a BBEG’s machinations with a well-placed guise of the yak-man.
Question of the day then: Have you ever had the perfect spell for the job? What was it? Did it wreck face, or did it flop in practice? Let’s hear your tales of impeccable spell selection in the comments!
THIS COMIC SUCKS! IT NEEDS MORE [INSERT OPINION HERE] Is your favorite class missing from the Handbook of Heroes? Maybe you want to see more dragonborn or aarakocra? Then check out the “Quest Giver” reward level over on the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. You’ll become part of the monthly vote to see which elements get featured in the comic next!
I’ve had a lot of spells that ended up having exceedingly useful, but most of the time I expect them to be really good from the offset and they just end up being good in a typical expected way. Two spells that have ended up really helping situations that had grown quite and dangerous however, were animate objects and polymorph on my bard Elliot the unlucky. I will never forget when my bard was all on his own in a big city, having to fight multiple red dragons to protect people, and then managed to win the the fight by smashing them with kitchen utensils and loafs of bread. I will never forget when the group got tricked into getting trapped in a building slowly filling up with poisonous gas, so my bard simply ordered the building to get up and attack the trickster. My memories of casting polymorph on our parties dying barbarian to turn him into a giant ape to distract and punch up enemies saved our lives will never leave me. Similarly, I will always cherish the memories of throwing our unconscious wizard into a noxious lake that a evil green dragon was hiding and casting polymorph on him to turn him into a rampaging megalodon to chase him out. Also, I guess I should add find greater steed to this list, as I absolutely love the spell, even though I have only cast it once, since having a permanent pegasus to fly you and others around in a edition where fly requires concentration and lasts only a minute is not surprisingly amazing. It has allowed me to do a number of things that I’m pretty sure the creators of the tomb of annihilation module had never intended, and has just been so useful, despite my dms and fellow players dismay. I have loved many other spells as well, such as spiritual weapon, counter spell, healing word, the find greater steed spell which makes everyone else groan, but those will always be among my favorites.
Ima need some stats for that megalodon. My Google-fu is failing me.
Spells like polymorph are particularly cool since they give you so many options. One of them is bound to be useufl. They’re also amazing humor spells, since infiltration missions can easily turn into “oops there’s a triceratops in the throne room.” Well done you.
Upon looking it up, what i had actually turned him into was just the still fairly impressive giant shark. https://roll20.net/compendium/dnd5e/Giant%20Shark#content
Another good transformation was the dire mole or badger or somethjng the dm let me turn into to rescue our barbarian frln the sand, that nearly got mauled to death by said barbarian. I dont think there were actually stats for such a thing in 5e, but since stuff like that used to exist the dm let me make up reasonable ones. On the fly for a decently strong burrowing creature and just call it a dire mole or something.
We had an interesting interaction the other day where my charlatan warlock was under the effects of disguise self. He got hit with the giant ape polymorph mid-battle. We ruled that the illusion held, and so it just looked like a portly old wizard was going apeshit with telekinesis, picking up dudes and tossing them aside with his mind while running around on all fours like a monkey. It was good times.
That sounds hilarious:). One of my favorite things about the giant ape transformation is that unlike the others, you still have 6 int, and thus are still capable of understanding others and acting fairly intelligently, basically being somewhat smarter then an ogre. That and throwing rocks is always nice. All the fun of being an animal without all the penalties, and still being the second strongest one in combat.
Guise of the yak-man might work for Wizard if yak-men inspired revulsion rather than spite.
Then maybe the monster would throw Fighter away in disgust, giving him a chance to return to the attack. Plus Wizard would get to turn Fighter into a yak-man, which is always a welcome bonus.
I’m thinking that disguising your rival as a yak-man at a fancy dinner party could be a good time.
Do it BEFORE the dinner so nobody sees you casting, and then accuse them of having been a glamoured yak-man the whole time!
Better yet, combo that with something that renders them unable to communicate. https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/a/aphasia/ or… suchlike.
Effective? Meh. Hilarious? Very.
I’m currently playing a diviner wizard, and I’ve just been giving him really, really niche spells like jump, feather fall, locate object, grease, and arcane lock. On my very first session, we were inside of a prison. We’d managed to take out the guards, but our NPC buddies had gotten knocked out in the process. We didn’t have enough healing spell to get them all up, and we were worried that reinforcements would arrive before we could drag them out. Fortunately, I had arcane lock, so I simply shut the door and let everyone rest. After everyone was back up, we thunder waved the guard reinforcements outside the door, then my grease spell helped everyone sneak out to safety.
And that’s how arcane lock, fog cloud and thunder wave saved our buddies
I’ve always wanted to try out a “bad spells” wizard and see how far I could get on creativity and shenanigans. You have given hope to my dream. 😛
I enjoy the sorceror’s limited spell selection, because I prefer creating plausible uses on the spur of the moment than preparing in advance.
Magic Missile. Is there anything it can’t do?
Yeah. Cut a rope in half. The bow-ranger can keep her day job!
Just give me time. There must be a way…
(“It does force damage right? So if I carefully line up this throwing knife, and apply magic missile to the back, the force will transfer to the knife and propel it through the rope.” I bet I can get that one past a confused DM. And I took “Confuse DM” as a real world perk)
My party’s Divination Wizard is really insecure aboot pulling his weight in combat since he took a bunch of Divinations and Utility spells, and the only big damage spell he has is Fireball. He fails to understand that his Divination is the reason we’re not stumbling dick-first into things. I think he needs to read this:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IeOXWvbkmQ3nEyM2P3lS8TU4rsK6QJP0oH7HE_v67QY/edit
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZHzEjiHvtDItZE2ixfoYwqi7brTO-ag8uBJndE5saro/edit
Hey, as long as he’s got that one spell that can actually contribute hp damage in a pinch, that’s all you really need. Clever play pays for itself, and divination is all about clever play.
You know for this reason whenever I played an vancian arcane spellcaster in the past, I always made sure that chose the following spells known at the earliest opportunities: Prestidigitation, Shadow Conjuration, Shadow Evocation, Greater Shadow Conjuration, Greater Shadow Evocation, and Shades. Just by ensuring that you had one of these spells available meant that you effectively had a toolbox of options.
Ofcourse, that was back when I used vancian spellcasting, now with Spheres of Power I no longer need to look through a huge list of spells each day. Ofcourse, I suppose similar issues could still arise with SoP, if you have a spiritualism hedgewitch in the party.
You know how I said “wild surge” was too much of a good thing? I’ve got similar feelings about the shadow spells. They’re crazy powerful, but as a matter of taste they’re not my thing. Gaming with the Sorcerer/Wizard Spells page open on the SRD got old after the first few times.
I’ve recently started playing a Druid in 5th edition and I’m already struggling to decide what cantrips to learn and what spells to prepare each day.
“If I prepare more combat spells so we do better in a fight that means less utility which might have helped us avoid the fight in the first place but what if we run into another thing that’s immune to fire again so I need two of these 3rd levels but then I can’t have that escape spells I wanted and I need to replace it with this but then I lose my spell-slot for the OTHER thing….” etc etc etc
We did have an encounter with a hostile fey a few sessions back (she wasn’t hostile at the start, but you know how these things go) who was confined to water, and a well-placed Wind-Wall managed to back up the creek running through her estate, buying time for us to make our cunning escape (fled for our lives) I’m not sure if that’s explicitly in the spells description, but I appreciate the GM throwing me a bone.
Hey man, that kind of spell usage is exactly why you have a GM.
“You want to use wind wall to… Yeah. Yeah OK. Badass dude! So here’s what happens….”
Try doing that in Skyrim.
If you’re stuck, I’d say think about what kind of spells you can imagine your character casting. It won’t make you any more effective, but at least you’ll feel justified that it’s thematic.
(I just took pilfering hand as my first 2nd level sorcerer spell for this reason, so probably don’t listen to me).
Oh yeah, I had the perfect spell once.
I was playing a Pathfinder campaign. My character was a Witch – I chose this class because I like optimizing my character, unlike the other players, so I figured by playing a support caster I could avoid taking the spotlight too much, I’d just throw a debuff here and there and let the other have the glory of the kill.
Anyway, turns out Witches are strong, and I could make encounters very easy with a well placed spell like Glitterdust. At one point, we fought an assassin, which was supposed to be a bossfight – the DM fully expected one or two of us to go down, as the dude had four attacks and quite good stats. One Ray of Exhaustion and Limp Lash later, and the dude was done, with only the extremely squishy rogue having lost about half her HP.
The next session, the DM proudly told me “I doubt you’ll be able to make my next boss completely useless”. The next boss turned out to be a homebrew mage that used blood magic – every time we dealt enough damage to him, the blood he lost would animate and turn into a slime-type monster. The boss itself used spells and, for some reason, bite attacks.
When the DM mentionned the bite attacks, I almost laughed. I happened to have Lipstich (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/l/lipstitch/) prepared. I cast it, he failed his save, and he proceeded to be useless, since his mouth was stitched shut, so he couldn’t use vocal components or bite. I was quite proud of myself on that one. The DM pouted for a bit, but eventually laughed about it too.
Hell yeah lipstitch! I’ve actually got a buddy that’s been itching to use that mess for half a campaign. Poor bastard still hasn’t found his moment. But when at last the day comes? It will be glorious.
I love that spell. It’s wonderfully “witchy”, almost all spells have verbal components, and it targets Fortitude. It’s the perfect anti caster spell at low levels.
Oh, I adore that one! It’s also one of the few spells without a vocal component (they are seriously few and far between). There are some fun Witch spells. What about that magic beanstalk one? It made me laugh so hard when my friend pulled that out and wanted to use it as a boarding ladder in a pirate campaign. (“No, see, I’ll grow it sideways, from this ship to that one…. Of course it can root in our ship! Plants are always growing on dead trees and a ship is a bunch of dead trees in the age of sail!”)
Your use of lipstitch there is brilliant. I can picture it clearly.
I just love that it simultaneously references Beetlejuice and Hocus Pocus.
Not a moment that has happened yet…
In a campaign that’s on hold right now, I just got to a new 3rd party spell for my Machinesmith called “Master Key” (literally a shaped charge in a spell, complete with “if the object is destroyed, then the remaining damage is dealt to anything in a cone on the other side”). Through some Creepy Pasta happenings, my character has an extra level in Cleric now that gave him the Travel domain with the ability to see through any solid object after a minute of focusing with physical contact.
I CAN’T WAIT for this combo to pay off! XD
Nice! It sounds like the arcane version of the Kool-Aid Man feat:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/feats/combat-feats/stunning-irruption-combat/
I believe they have a four turn timer built in with a remote trigger, so I can set four and then blow them all at once.
It’s a big investment though because they are level 3 spells, but keeping one or two on you is good insurance that you won’t get stuck along the way…
Not a moment that has happened yet? How about when you had exactly one Shatter spell prepared to get you out of the petrified grip of the fire elemental you spell-crit(and thus petrified)?
Yeah… That seems like it would qualify. 😀
I forgot about that!
Fire Elemental had grappled my character and I used Shocking Grasp and rolled a crit. The crit generator rolled Petrified and BAM Fire Elemental Statue… with me still in it’s grasp.
When I had prepared spells that day, I knew we were going into a dungeon (yes in-character) and had prepared a single use of Shatter, just in case I ran into “X” random situation, because “Why not?”…
Fast-forward to present and the DM says:
“What do you do?”
“I place my hand on it and cast Shatter.”
“Wait, you have that prepared?”
SMUG! “Yes.”
Later, we run into a Fire Elemental, missing one arm, and much more angry than before…
^This Comic up there! This is exactly the Reason i only play One-Trick-Pony Spellcasters if at all, aka Blasters.
The Perfect Spell for the Situation? Hmmm. Funnily Enough i had one Situation where i had exactly the right Spell on hand. As a Fighter. You see my Fighter got his hands on some Magical Plate Armour, which gave some nice bonuses and a couple of daily limited low Lvl Spells.
So our Party gets engoulfed by a Darkness Spell of some Kind, and we are all Blind. The GMs Face when i announced that i was Casting the 0 Lvl Cantrip Light was priceless. The Monk then proceeded to Kick the Snake Monsters Butt.
You Know whats even better? The two Spellcasters in our Party didn’t know the Light Cantrip!
I don’t know what system or edition you were playing but I know that atleast with D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, the light cantrip wouldn’t do shit against a [darkness] spell unless it was also a cantrip because of this little line in the spell description: “Light can be used to counter or dispel any darkness spell of equal or lower spell level.”
It didn’t Dispel it. If you want the Exact Crunch, you can read the Light Conditionm Rules. We were in an Area of Dim Light. The Spell “Deeper Darkness” was cast. This decreases the Light Level to “Supernaturally Dark”, which means even Darkvision won’t work. The “Light” Cantrip increases the Light Lvl by 1 Step meaning we are Back to normal Darkness again.
Now since we all had Dakrvision. And we did play Pathfinder.
Whelp just re read the Darkness Spell, whoops so any lower Lvled Spell wouldn’t work. Well, i didn’t know. Neither did the DM, and it certainly makes for a good Story. 😛
You ever read the light/darkness FAQ? That mess is nuts! See the “illuminating darkness” section over here:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/vision-and-light/
I’m glad you got your cool cantrip moment though. In a weird way, I think that games can be more fun when you’re less familiar with the rules.
Well once i try to kill the big bad with a knock spell, i doesn’t work, but not for the reasons you think. Any way with Vancian magic involved i just stick for the moar dakka spells or shadow spells like Grovestrider said. In any case why Wizard don’t just cast the universal usefulness spell aka fireball? It has been already proved it is the universal solution for all the problems on your life. For more usefulness Wizard can cast empowered fireball or even maximized fireball for maximized usefulness. “Fireball” fun-for-all-the-party-in-a-spell.
Cast fireball? Like that demonic cad Sorcerer? The indignity!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/i-cast-maslows-hammer
YES!!! Exactly like that, Wizard will need to cast aside his pride to save the party… or he can be a prideful elf and just pay for the resurrection of, in his mind, minions and girlfriend.
Ooooooh man, this is perfect for the legend of Kharnor, my Half-Orc Bard.
My crew was collaborating with an ancient race of spirit robots trying to figure out a way to stop an evil wizard’s undead army. They were far too powerful in both skill and numbers against the nation they were attacking, but we had a trump card: it was basically a nuke. The robots were going to drop the nukes into the undead army, but time was against us; there was no time to evacuate the three cities that were going to be attacked, and the undead were already besieging them. The party was reluctantly willing to nuke these three cities to stop the zombies, except me.
For reasons I thought would be pretty obvious, I was not agreeing to wiping out three full cities (which had approximately 300,000 people in each city) even if it would ensure the destruction of all of the undead. I had arguments and debates between my teammates and the robot spirits, and eventually we devised a plan: in our world there are these giant magic crystals that cause wild magic surges if people use magic near them. However shards of these crystals can also be used as powerful magical focuses. So, using the technology of the ancient robot spirits, I was goin to super size my Leomund’s Tiny Hut to be able to cover an entire city and protect it from the nuclear blast, wiping out the zombies outside of the city but saving everyone inside (and then we can rally the miles to deal with any zeds who managed to break in anyways).
Easier said than done of course. By the time we got there most of the cities had just been breached. My team went to save one whole our allies went to the other two. They were merciless; before we even got to the crystal we felt the nuclear blasts from the other two cities as we were fighting through undead hordes. To make matters worse, while Leomund’s Tiny Hut doesn’t need to be cast as a ritual, it still takes a full minute to cast it. By the time we reach the crystal at the center of the city most of the milita has fled to protect the evacuating citizens. This meant that there were people outside of the city now, so the party had to make a choice: try to get the citizens back in, or start casting a Leomund’s Tiny Hut now and doom the ones trying to escape.
Of course I tried to convince them to split the party. I needed to stay to cast the spell, but no way was the party going to leave just a few of us behind as when more zeds inevitably get to us. It’s a decision that still haunts me to this day. But we stuck together as I started to cast the spell. Leomund’s Tiny Hut takes one minute even at hits fastest to cast, so I was disposed for that many rounds as more and more zombies arrived, including an undead green dragon.
We had no idea if this hair brain scheme of mine would work. The GM himself admitted that it would have been easier to simply drop the nukes somewhere hidden, set the timer, and run. But I couldn’t accept that. IC and OoC I wasn’t about to let so many people dying knowing that there was a chance to save them. But once my spell went off, my Tiny Hut grew large enough to cover the entire city, if only for a few seconds. It was then that my party member’s familiar (he was a warlock) activated the nuke to instantly vamporize everything outside of my barrier.
The damage done was far too great even with the giant crystal powering it, but my barrier held long enough that the city was saved after the initial explosion. Granted, I also ended up immediately taking like 20d10 psychic damage from the sheer feedback of having a world crystal powering my spell as well as taking a nuke, but it was worth. We defeated the zombies and evtbuslly the evil wizard and lived.
Well I died like seven days later. Turned out I also had a sever case of magic cancer that rotted my brain until I was a vegetable. But at least in my dying days I could take solace in the fact I saved an entire city from a magical nuke, using Leomund’s Tiny Hut. Since then my character was canonized as a Saint and the DM even made a spell for anyone who replicated my feat: Kharnor’s Safe City.
Kharnor’s Huge Hut
Kharnor’s Big Bunker
Kharnor’s Fat Fallout Shelter
Kharnor’s Bulky Bulwark
Kharnor’s Massive Metropolis
We actually went through quite a few names before we settled for this one. Highlights include Kharnor’s Clubhouse, Kharnor’s Bug Bubble, And Heaven’s Gate for some reason.
Kharnor’s Large List….
I think you made the right choice. 🙂
Which game was this? Starfinder or homebrew setting?
The dilemma of fun vs functional is why I like the Pathfinder Arcanist. Once you take the Quick Study exploit you can switch out spells as and when you need them. Similarly the Witch’s hexes can free up spells slots that would otherwise be used for utility or debuffing and so you get a bit more leeway in what spells you take.
The problem I’ve had at times with casting the perfect spell that solves an encounter is that GMs/DMs can become a little bit vindictive and contrived in response e.g. use Create Pit and Wall of Fire to wipe out a zombie encounter and in the next session we fought undead that could fly and were immune to fire; use Speak With Dead to find some clues in one session and then the next time the spell is used it fails “while you didn’t notice it at the time, you suddenly recall seeing <dead npc’s> soul being trapped in a dark crystal by . There have been times where I’ve felt ambivalent towards using the perfect spell for the situation for fear that the GM would arse-pull something to ensure the spell doesn’t quite work as it should.
Well that’s poor form on the GM’s part. Players get to solve problems and feel like geniuses. That’s what they do!
Sadly I don’t have a “I have the perfect thing for this!” tale.
So instead I’ll address an adjacent topic you sort of mentioned.
Which is simply that I really wish every last spellcaster had more known/prepared/whatever spells. Always feeling the pressure to choose between being able to cast niche/fun/weird spells or the reliable “kills things/wins at stuffs” spells drives me up the wall.
Largely because I don’t see any point to making things that way. It’s hardly classic fantasy to be so constrained or narrow in focus with magic. Sure a classic character might have one or two signature spells, but often as not they have a rather wide repertoire. And that’s really just looking at wizardy types. Anything closer in theme to a sorcerer, warlock, cleric, druid or whatever usually has even more range in what magical effects they can pull off.
I’m not saying I demand to be able to cast the entire spell list at any time (though that would probably make for a fun game too), but about twice as much as we’re typically given would probably be the ideal number.
Maybe the trope is sort of similar to the weird “arbitrarily fast monster” you’ll see in horror movies. One moment it’s chasing a car down the freeway, the next and it can’t catch a heroine as she sprints down a creepy hallway.
In the same vein, Gandalf can only turn on his Nazgûl-repelling flashlight every once in a while. Maybe that’s what they’re going for with the whole X times per day Vancian setup. “I’m out of mana!” becomes the trope, though I’m not sure it’s an especially fun one.
I wonder what a system would look like where the restrictions were based on another sorting type? Like, say, you can cast any spell you prepare any number of times, and the number of spells you can prepare are something like, ‘one per target type’ (ie; one a-o-e, one ‘you’, one ‘target monster’ one ‘target object’, etc). Or some other oddity of imposed-scarcity. I have no clue how that would play out; surely it’s been tried, though. Anyone know of a system with something like that? How’d it play?
I don’t know of a system like that, but it sounds like fun. Using a Pathfinder/D&D spell list you could even restrict by magic school – e.g. you can cast 10 enchantment spells, 6 abjuration spells and 3 evocation spells per day. Then you could choose to specialise in a particular school, which would naturally give you a balance towards utility or support or damage, but you could get the full spell list for each school if you could cast spells from it.
I’ve always thought that the magic schools could be used for some interesting designs. I think you’re on the way to some cool homebrew there.
I think you misunderstood me.
I’m not talking about limit about of spells you can cast per increment. I was talking about how many options you have for those castings.
Shoshana, that sounds really amusing. Not necessarily a good general system design for something meant to be as one size fits all as D&D, but it would certainly have some fun to it. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anything like it. Though in retrospect it seems like a really obvious model for some potentially serious fun.
I need to stop replying when I’m half-asleep….
Wizards can theoretically learn every spell, right? It’s just an issue of how many enemy spell books your DM allows you to capture. I know that Laurel is a little frustrated that her 5e Igor wizard hasn’t had time or gp to copy down spells. “I just feel like a worse sorcerer” was her complaint.
In other words, I think the solution to this issue might lie with GMs rather than systems.
No not really. Even as a wizard you can only prepare so many spells at a time. So those are still your options for the day. Which means you wind up behaving the same way everyone else does, picking the spells you assume are going to be useful more of the time than the niche/for fun spells. Unless for some reason you know ahead of time that “Mesorblathe’s Mediocre Cotton-candy Palm” is going to be of use. And that’s pretty unusual.
Well I do have a buddy that makes liberal use of the Pathfinder preparation rules:
He doesn’t have access in the heat of battle due to the “at least 15 minutes” thing, but he always leaves a slot open at every level for exploration and utility.
Ok, I owe you a thank you for pointing out that section of the Pathfinder preparation rules. My GF (who is our party cleric in our Zeitgeist game) can make good use of that!
No worries. That section of the rules is a bit dry. It’s crazy easy to skim it and say, “Why wouldn’t I just prepare all my spells? That’s dumb,” and never consider the implications. That’s definitely what I did until I saw the empty slots thing in action.
I’m cycling through the older stories now, though I’m finally generating new ones with our recently-restarted Buddy Cop game.
Best combo of not-necessarily-combat spells used in combat remains my Wall of Iron-Celerity-Fabricate doublecast, in 3.5 where Celerity still exists if they let you use it. A handful of gold and I put a metal wall on the side of the building who’s roof we were on, and then immediately I turn it into a lightning rod that’s touching the massive storm elemental who’s attacking this building. This discharges all its electricity damage for a couple of rounds, so it only does additional sonic damage, which is a significant decrease.
This decrease saves the life of my friend, who is the owner of the roof we are on and also a fighty boi who is all armored up. At level 11-12, we were rich enough to have him resurrected if he’d gotten smushed, but it’s still a big old level dropping hassle unless you want the kingdom to subsidize the extra 20k for a true resurrection. Best to just stay alive.
Good on you for thinkinbof that mess! But even more, good on your GM for allowing it to work. That is exactly the sort of clever play that you want to encourage and reward when you’re behind the screen.
I never felt mightier than when I overcame an encounter by utilising a spell in a different way to how it is usually intended.
I was once playing in a Hackmaster campaign, and we were dragging back from the dungeon on fumes (the fighter had single-digit hp, the cleric was out of healing, and the only spell I had left was called Firefinger – it was basically a fire-starter cantrip that fired a foot-long tongue of flame from my fingertip). Mid trip we got ambushed by bandits… a lot of bandits. We were outnumbered 3 to 1, and in no fit state to take on a single kobold. While the fighter traded threats with the bandit leader, I had an idea. The cleric still had a spell called Rigor Mortis which was a bit like Hold Person, but made the target seem like a corpse for the duration. My Wizard stood up, stared at the bandit leader and stated something to the effect of “I’ve had enough of this, anyone who stands in our way deserves their fate, by the power of the void and nine hells, I strike you dead!” and cast Firefinger, whilst at the same time, the Cleric cast Rigor Mortis on the bandit leader. One failed saving throw, and the bandit leader toppled over, seemingly dead, and at a passed skill check (cant remember if it was intimidation or perform), the rest of the bandits surrendered on the spot.
There is no spell more powerful than clever play. GJ my dude!
That sounds like an AMAZING bluff! And a pretty amazing game moment, too. (and it needed two of you to have just the right spell, as well, so your chances of pulling it off were even more astounding)
We did have a scene in our recent game where the Gm was very fond of Alchemists as boss baddies. Third one in, my Wizard has had enough. She uses her familiar to spy ahead, then hits the Alchemist with Shatter as the opening action of the fight. Rarely have I seen a GM with such a sad face.
I thought that shatter didn’t affect attended items…?
Shatter (according to D&D 3.5 or Pathfinder) has three options. The spell can affect either a single object (attended or not), a single crystaline creature, or a 5-ft radius spread of unattended objects.
I love the wonky words of power system, even with how uncomplete it is. It lets me always feel a lot more interacting and in control of whatever sitations and lets me feel like a genius puzzlesolver as a sorc in a way that i rarely do when i pick niche spells known as one.
I always heard that “wonky” was the right word for it. Is it worth digging through the complex subsystem for the experience?
Played a Pathfinder/3.5 game where I had a high level mage. Said mage was stuck on a space station solo facing a golem that had stupid kinds of SR and I was just not making a dent. Realized that we were on the inside of the outer hill. One Disintegrate later, the golem and my gnome are blasted out of a 15 ft wide breach into space. DM is gleefully checking rule books to see what happens to poor Grildri. I then point out that earlier I’d buffed myself with Winds of Vengeance… which specifically states it works in space and provides air and maneuvering. DMs face was priceless.
You ever see those “oddly satisfying perfect fit” videos?
Same feeling.
Yeah, I’m actually surprisingly practical with my spell selection. Mending (for my clothes, Produce Flame (for fires and scraps), and Goodbery (for food) are always musts, even if I have to take Magic Initiate for them. If you have a world where just about EVERYONE has some kind of magic, those are must for soldiers.
Then there’s the Warlock who pumped EVERYTHING into Eldritch Blast and can now pop heads from 1200 feet.
Now see, I’d argue that Eldritch Blast is never “the perfect spell for the job.” It’s a great default action, but it turn’s into Maslow’s Hammer pretty dang quick.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/i-cast-maslows-hammer
I was playing through Out of the Abyss and one of my party members had been stricken with madness, which after some failed attempts at talking the character down turned into a PvP. My cleric took the surprisingly pacifist option of not mincing the warlock but couldn’t find another way out. Until, that is, the warlock decided to storm off in a huff. Mid-combat. Being in melee, I had an Opp Attack and at that moment I knew I had the Hail Mary Play. Being a bit of a power gamer, I had picked up War Caster early on. Being a cleric, I also had access to (and had for some reason prepared) Greater Restoration. Ah, the look on my DM’s face!
Damn… That really is the perfect spell for the moment. Well done you!
It’s weird though… I feel like the “heal X condition” spells are best when they come in scroll form. I love having access to them, but I hate having to prepare them. It’s only fair that it should pay off every once in a while!
The one-shot I got to play a wizard in, we were exploring this ruin and found these pedestals with fairly valuable gemstones arranged in magically-significant patterns. As the resident wizard, I was interested in the magical apparatus, but the rest of the party (especially the dragonborn barbarian) were more interested in the shinies. The barbarian decided to try prying the gems out of their sockets, but thanks to a low roll, accidentally cracked several. Cue me stepping up with “I cast Mending.” We were able to yoink everything on those pedestals with no risk (which turned out to be a good thing, because said pedestals were part of an apparatus used to connect to the plane of ice and we ended up having to fight a summoned yeti).
It’ll be fun if we ever get a chance to continue with that group, since we are now proud owners of several valuable gemstones (the dragonborn took most of them because she likes her shinies, but I at least managed to call dibs on a diamond for Chromatic Orb). Plus, there’s always the chance I might figure out how the whole thing works and be able to turn the apparatus back on for plane-hopping shenanigans…
Nicely done! Just be careful of the casting time on that mending spell. In my experience, it’s mostly a campsite sort of spell for after you’re out of the danger zone.
Good luck with the planar shenanigans too. My guys just got back the plane of law. It was kooky. Nothing screams “crazy-ass-fantasy-adventure” more than a trip through the consmology!
So, final battle of the Rise of Tiamat campaign. We’re facing down a crazed cultist who plans to kill himself in a ritual to summon Tiamat to the material plane and kill everything. I’m having great fun playing a diviner wizard (Portent rocks. Seriously.)
So for this combat, I roll high on my initiative and use Misty Step to get in range, then cast Arcane Hand to grapple the cultist, leaving him helpless for the next few rounds. The next round, I use the spell to lift the cultist ten feet or so in the air, and pull out the Cubic Gate I got in a dragon’s loot a few sessions ago. Open a gate to the Abyss directly under the cultist, which means I stop concentrating on Arcane Hand… In case it’s not obvious, this DM operates very much on the Rule of Cool.
I guess the Blood War got a new combatant that day. Or five of them depending on how you’re doing the head count.
My group once had to accompany a Githyanki commander into a duel with another Githyanki commander. The opponent, obviously, played dirty and brought two knights and four mooks into the fight with him, pitting our five-group against his group of seven.
So our sorceress used a twin-spelled dominate person and voilá! Now it was us seven against their five. Being a squad of efficient killers, the moment the two dominated astral-elves turned to fight their kin, we went in and demolished them. Obviously, the villainous commander summoned four more to his aid, but we had already mopped up the first few so the new mooks were easy pickings.
The Shadowrun adage of “Geek the mage first” should always be followed in DnD as well.
It was a pathfinder 1E game. 10th-11th level characters.
We were exploring an uncharted island, had some hints of a dragon, and then the beast surprised us. All buffed up with minions etc pp
Luckily for us, the dragon decided to talk and threaten us into helping it do some evil stuff and we were all like “yeah.. well.. we actually dont want to fight now but…no…can´t do that” and then it struck me I had “Icy Prison” memorized…
The dragon failed its Reflex Save and down he goes. The Barbarian goes for the coup de grace with the greataxe, dragon is done for.
Perfect tool for the job(both the spell and the barbarian^^) but most anticlimatic moment ever.
You don´t want to kill a dragon like that..
I tend to not play many spellcasters as vancian means spending a lot of time deciding which spells to prepare and i am bad with it, but i have at least two more or less on topic examples, but unfortunately in both it happened like Decimus Drake wrote, and the DM focused on stopping them at all costs, to even focus on my PC till it died.
– One was the Vampire campaign i talked about before: It was my first PnPRPG campaign and my PC was a Gangrel with a good amount of ranks in ”call animal”.
– The DM, i suppose that to make things easier to both parts, placed the campaign on our own city and says it happens on autumn. I rise a brow here and begin to think.
– On the first session, we arrive at a encounter with two powerful vampires and the DM says that we are on park xx, which is the biggest on the city, to which i answer, really?
– Then i proceed to call thousands of birds and make the encounter a cakewalk. The reason i could is that on autumn we have a species of bird which have thousands already on a small area, and that park was the place where they gathered the most, meaning i had an non-exhaustible source of birds to peck them to death, and if they had a way to frighten them, i could still use them for many other things (they are also known to create ”rain” for a few minutes in a 10m radius area for example). So pretty much half the city became my lair.
From there on the DM prepared every encounter to counter my strengths, and as it did not work, prepare them to focus attack my weaknesses plus some twisting and hiding from us the rules, to finally kill my PC. I think the DM wanted to bully the newbie and it worked against, making the DM even more buthurt.
Sorry, double post.
On the second, with someone new in DMing and many years after (last week) and with another group, i could bypass a one-shot campaign with two-three cantrips (Prestidigitation, Mage hand, and optional Phantom sound, from PF2), but did not use the spells, for some reasons, so i bypassed it with things anyone IRL could have done plus a kinetic blast, but i still feel the DM did not like it and uncounsciously tried everything and modified things on the go so we HAD to all go through his special homebrew snowflake the same as the other PCs, but i noticed all of that when i was already half out of it.
The session was a introduction to PF2 one-shot as the DM and the rest of the players was new to PF2 or to PnPRPG in general, which he modified to have no combats to avoid having to search for and explain rules. So, he replaced a sentient mushroom with feet enemy that could be cut and killed as normal with a whole strange collective as one being magical mushrooms turning sentient that spread over the area of three encounters on the floor blocking any doors forward and that could interact with us in our dreams and anything that happened there happened in the reality when the illusion ended. Later the spores gained the ability to take root anywhere and grow fast to counter my efforts.
The trigger to get into the illusion was to touch the mushrooms, or to get the spores touch our skin (and we were all shoe-less) which happened all the time if we approached them or tried to move them. The way to get out of the illusion was getting through a few FORT saves or making a dangerous deal (one of the PCs lost half of its lifespan), and falling again into it meant doing it again. Using fire was the last option to consider because we did not have any water source and the whole purpose of the campaign was to find valuables on those rooms.
– With spells would be easier by using the Mage hand to carry the mushrooms safely to another room and then use Prestidigitation to clean the remaining spores, and when out of nowhere he later made the spores move to counter my efforts, use Phantom sound to call for help (he said other members of our tribe usually passed through near the entrance (even if he later tried to retcon it) and tell them to pull a rope tied to the entrance, so even if we were to get caught in the illusion we could get out.
– With less spells, which i did to show the new guys ways to roleplay, i Kinetic blasted the mushrooms by shooting while laying on the floor to make it act as a big broom (we all thought the spell was a small wave of energy, not throwing a object) aiming to get them all inside a room which was at most at 10-15 feet from the mushrooms, but the DM ruled the spores would spread to every corner of the area of the three encounters in an instant, including the other PCs, and they went again through the deal. I retreated to the farthest room from the entrance, closed the door and sealed it as much as possible. My next idea was to make a short tunnel to near the entrance of the campaign from the room i was safely in (with Mage hand if i used spells) but the DM countered it with that by the time the tunnel was made (he wanted to make the tunnel cave in on me at first but gave up soon when i reminded him it was just 10-feet long and we were Kobolds), the spores had rooted and grown everywhere telling me to make a REF save as soon as i opened the slightest hole (which i passed, but i would have avoided if i was using spells ). I then took boxes from the safe room and threw them to make a way over the floor (it was just a 20-25-feet path so i could have used Mage Hand again and place them softly to avoid the spores flying).
As i knew he would throw another change on me i bundled my feet in clothes (could have used Prestidigitation here to clean the spores on top of the boxes), did the trick with the rope previously explained (could have used Mage Hand) and shouted aloud (instead of using Phantom Sound) to call for other tribesmen to have plan B, C and D, but he wanted me to make a DC15 Acrobatics check to just walk over them to the exit and tried to retcon the people passing around part. After a brief talk he gave up as the other players were waiting and let me step out and the session finished.
As it was a introduction one-shoot to familiarize with the rules we played it goofily and even fell at first, on purpose and out of character, on the illusion, but later i forgot about it and focused on showing how different PnPRP is from videogames and clearing the special snowflake, which i admit wasn’t the best idea here.
Now i am left thinking if i should face directly the special snowflakes the DM is going to throw at us in the actual campaign as he is all happy and expectant about filling the actual campaign with his own homebrew content, or like last time try to roleplay it and act more in character but ending up against the DM and his special snowflakes instead of playing with him. I will probably balance both, but knowing me and my IRL 8CHA and hardheadedness, its not going to work half of the time.