Un-Prepared Casting
Paladins have spells? Next thing you’re going to tell me is that rangers have spells too.
ಠ_ಠ
Look, I understand that martial characters with a limited spell list have more exciting things to do than prepping for utility. A 5e paladin is going to be feeding slots to divine smite. Ranger is going to lock down that hunter’s mark. These are your bread and butter abilities, and there’s nothing wrong with relying on them. I would encourage you not to rely on them exclusively though.
The common wisdom is to pick up the spells that you can use reliably every day. That’s why you’ll see more aura of vitality than daylight. It’s why Ranger probably preps conjure barrage over water walk. But like any good Batman wizard, I think it pays to keep all your options open, even if you’re a lowly half-caster. If you know that drow are coming up, that daylight spell is suddenly huge. If you’re in a pirate game, water walk is suddenly worth another look.
I’ve seen too many players turn their brains off and sit on the old reliable spells, even when they know the adventure might call for specific solutions for specific problems. I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve fallen into that trap myself, dragging a demon-possessed ally three days back to town because I forgot my own spell list. By the same token, some of the most fun I’ve had as a paladin lay in my “unexciting” oath spells. After all, there’s no better way to stop a runaway carriage than to ask the horses to be reasonable.
So for today’s discussion, what do you say we talk about those “suboptimal” spell selections that came in clutch? What’s your favorite not-very-good spell that you like to keep on hand anyway? Sound off with your best uses of little-used magic down in the comments!
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Discussion (79) ¬
By the time this comment appears, “feather fall” likely will have been featured ~52 times, but I will preemptively agree that feather fall is very useful, and must be kept on hand at all times. Water breathing is very good when going into a dungeon, for if they have any water traps. Even if an issue isn’t water but simply breathing, there are still solutions from that spell; for instance, fill a bag of holding with water and jump in, since the bag’s air limit only applies to air. Although, this spell would only be prepped if going into a dungeon, or onto the sea. Lesser restoration is a good spell, but I’m still going to put it as a spell to always keep on hand. And finally, when it comes to daylight, I rather prefer to use keep a drift globe handy, rather than prep the spell, as an uncommon item with no attunement isn’t too difficult to get one’s hands on.
True. But I find that mess varies by table.
I like feather fall though. I feel like it’s one of those spells you pick up as an insurance policy. You’re happy to never use it.
Never? My good sir, with a feather fall prepared you no longer see a cliff as a deadly danger. Instead, it is an escape route. No better way to get out of a lopsided engagement than a good hop down 10d10 damage worth of falling distance.
The comic demonstrates something great about paladins: with divine smite, plus other smites that you get from your auto-known spell list, you don’t have to spell many spells known to get prepped for combat, leaving you with a large number of spells to spend on more niche, just-in-case effects. The same goes for rangers, to a lesser extent, and to warlocks, with their more spells known than spell slots.
While I my give my paladin niche spells, and in combat burn solely divine smites, I have a friend who instead spends his paladin spells of shield of faith and sanctuary, only a third of the time casting divine smite. This was at low levels, too, back when a single spell was a third of his daily allotment. While I myself am sticking to smites and utility, I couldn’t deny his effectiveness when boss fight came, and enemies were swinging and missing.
Exactly! You’re always going to have a combat trick, so why stock up on nothing but bless, shield of faith, etc.?
Has not happened yet so far, but both the Cowardly Rogue and the Imperial Spy (also Rogue levels… go figure) are holding on to a Hold Portal spell. You know just in case you need to run away from something and this door absolutely has to stay closed…
Light spells sure may come in handy for poor human’s night vision, but they are stealth-defeating, so not high on the list of priorities. As for Walter Walking, well, I do like to use my skill points to cover the basics of climbing and swimming. Even if D&D has that bad habit of making skills obsolete by drowning them in spells.
My technomancer just un-learned hold portal last night.
“I never use it!” she said.
She got unseen servant instead on account of the cache capacitor ability.
https://www.starjammersrd.com/classes/technomancer/
Fair ball on that one says I, but I’d still love to have seen that 1st level spell ace some kind of “you’re being sucked out into space” encounter.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t played any prepared casters. I once tried to make a wizard and my brain melted. I have played a Pathfinder Hunter from level 3 to 14. I tried to pick spells that would be helpful in and out of battle, though I honestly didn’t use them all that much.
If you’re still running Pathfinder 1e, I recommend Treanmonk. Dude gave me my start as a wizard:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xjPIOH8F8a0l74BdDF7Q23nCfZ-YX68Xr6JmmtznMw4/edit
I’ll take a look. I only have time for one game a week and my group recently switched to 5e. I stayed because the group is a good one and really funny, even though I prefer the character options of Pathfinder better. I’m still making characters for Pathfinder just because I enjoy it. I’m trying to figure out a Spider-Man type character.
Happily, the dude dipped into 5e as well:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IeOXWvbkmQ3nEyM2P3lS8TU4rsK6QJP0oH7HE_v67QY/edit
I started with a homebrew class called Arcane Knight, which is sort of like a melee sorcerer. But I kept getting knocked out or killed so the GM let me switch my Int and Cha around and play an Eldritch Knight. I lost 2/3 of my spells, but I can wear better armor and have higher HP so I don’t get knocked out in 2 hits anymore.
Yeah… I feel like “melee sorcerer” is something that works great if you start at high level. Grab your synergistic spell casting levels, then get in there with the big hit dice. Having to suffer through the early levels sounds rough.
It was a fun class though. I didn’t need a free hand to cast spells because I could cast them through my sword and could add 1d6 elemental damage to it for free. It also got a few extra spells. If I had better AC and HP, I could have stayed with it.
There’s subobtimal, and then there’s what the cleric did in the mytic Pathfinder campaign I ran.
By the end of it, she had more spell slots than she knew what to do with, so she just prepared everything. Every single cleric spell in the core book. Multiple times. Some weird ones that I’ve never seen before like Repel Vermin ended up being critical to the party’s victory.
lol. If you’re going to do that, just be an archmage and cast every spell spontaneously anyway. That was my plan, and it was great.
…
For about two sessions. After that having to know every arcane spell in the game got old in a hurry, even with the aid of the great god Google.
My experiences with 1/2 casters have been pretty short lived unfortunately. For a 5e paladin though, why not take /exclusively/ utility spells? It doesn’t matter what spells you prepare, you can always divine smite and it’s often the best combat option, so why not have everything else ready to be more relevant out of combat?
Because things like bless and shield of faith are good all the time, and often better than divine smite. Therefore it’s easy to ignore every other option and just stack up the combat abilities.
That was my experience anyway.
Paladins are casters, and if you don’t use your casting you’re playing in a deeply sub-optimal fashion. Bless, Command, Protection from Evil and Good, (Oath list, Devotion) Sanctuary, (Oath list, Devotion) Shield of Faith, and Wrathful Smite (Second most underrated spell in the game behind Freedom of Movement, which is on the Devo spell list) are some of my favorite 1st level standbys.
For out-of- combat utility 1st level spells are pretty sparse, since you’re definitely gonna wanna leave **Detect Magic to a fullcaster since they can ritual cast it. Detect Posion and Disease is only really useful if you’re in a plague scenario. Ceremony (Xanathar’s) is great fun though.
The problem arises when Paladins waste their precious finite preparations on spells like Cure Wounds.
Using DevoPal hurts your example since Channel Divinity: Sacred Weapon creates magical light, and isn’t a spell so it illuminates Darkness, and it won’t be dispelled by it.
Daylight can warrant a loose preparation since it’s non-concentration.
Why would you ever activate channel divinity when you could be attacking and smiting? Terribly suboptimal. Waste of an action. 😛
Because losing 1 action to use Channel Divinity: Sacred Weapon can increase your to-hit by as much as +5. If you would normally hit on a d20 roll of 10 then you have effectively doubled your damage since you now hit on a 5. Do I need to start talking aboot percentages and effective DPR again?
…And I see I failed to close some asterisks on Freedom of Movement in my OP making a ton of it unnecessarily bold’d. Curse the lack of an edit button, and my rigid dedication to bolding any spell or feature for easier searching.
I’m currently playing a 5th level cleric (well, Ranger4/Clr3/OrdainedChampion3… which evens out to cleric 5), and I recently got third level spells in time for a big boss fight. It’s a small party: a crowd control mage, a rogue, and me. We don’t really have a front-liner so most of my spells go towards buffing myself to be that role.
In a recent boss fight, the wizard cast Solid Fog in an attempt to give us extra rounds of prep. So I cast my sole prepared 3rd level spell “Holy Storm”, and we found that because a creature in the square takes damage with no save or spell resistance (so long as they’re evil), we accidentally created a really powerful combo that requires no saving throws.
Just as we were geeking out about the usability of the combo in the long run, the sorcerers used Dispel Magic and succeeded. BIG OOF.
But now we have a decent combo with an infrequently used 3rd level Cleric spell.
Last fun combo my group stumbled across was over in Starfiner. Life Bubble…
https://www.starjammersrd.com/magic-and-spells/spells/l/life-bubble/
…Plus the soldier’s smoke grenades…
https://www.starjammersrd.com/equipment/weapons/weapon-descriptions/grenades/grenade-smoke-grenade/
Is rock-solid at low level.
Yeah, I only cast Holy Storm because of the area overlapping at first and then while we were reading the text and saw the lack of a saving throw and spell resistance we realized we accidentally stumbled on something great.
The down side is the rogue is afraid that such combos will relegate him to full on dungeon clearing, but since he’s already rolling terribly on the macros in combat, it’s not too much a change of pace.
So there we were, in the middle of a dungeon forest getting our already weary and wounded butts handed to us by a pack of displacer beasts. To even the odds, my gnomish wizard cast one of the fog/mist spells.
The pack didn’t like this, so they quickly withdrew to the edges of the fog with plans to spring on us again once the fog dissipated. Our doom was but delayed.
However, it did give us an hour window. Looking through his book of spells, my wizard came up with a crazy idea. He decided to cast a ritual.
When the fog lifted an hour later, the beasts were very upset to realize their dinner had managed to safely tuck themselves into a gaudy glittery purple half dome… Leomund’s Tiny Hut.
lol. Last time I cast that spell was the Pf1e version:
https://www.d20pfsrd.com/magic/all-spells/t/tiny-hut/
And that one’s a combat spell. Putting yourself inside a one-way mirror and then casting through it is amazing. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with camping in style either.
There’s a magic item for the camping part AND is useable in combat. It’s perfect for downtime activities, particularly for a wizard or similar spellbook user, or simply someone themed around the Pathfinder society!
https://aonprd.com/MagicWondrousDisplay.aspx?FinalName=Field%20Scrivener%27s%20Desk
Yup. I love that a lot. Bummer that my buddy’s scrivener cleric retired from the megadungeon, or else I’d throw that in the pile for him.
I’ve found a spellbook containing Darkvision recently, and I intend to add it to my spell list as soon as I can get the materials necessary. Being able to sneak around without using a light is a pretty big deal honestly.
I also have Detect Good And Evil constantly prepared. I am playing in Curse of Strahd, so that felt like a given to me. So far it’s allowed me to completely bypass two encounters and be prepared for a third one.
Believe me, I heard ya on the darkvision front:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/sudden-onset-blindness
So funny story. I was DMing and one of the players was doing the dicemaster build: Halfling, Divination Wizard, Lucky feat. They also happened to have stealth from their background.
This player wasn’t very good at the whole teamwork thing, and wanted to do everything themselves. The party was up against a hivemind controlling a group of Goblinoids. The Wizard wanted to scout ahead under the cover of Invisibility. The problem is that Halflings don’t have Darkvision, but Goblinoids do. Their “solution” was to cast Light on a rock and carry it with them.
Bugbears snuck up on the glowing rock floating through the air, and killed him.
And that’s why dancing as a thing.
Paladins I use pillow armor while rangers I use arrow explosion.
Who doesn’t love the classics?
On my bard, as our parties only primary caster, our only other caster is our paladin, i am often expected to keep up a good amount of utility. 2 spells that i keep as known as they have been useful in the past are water breathing and leomunds tiny hut. Leomunds tiny hut has probably already saved our party a number of times, whether from mutated monstrocities, chaos fog, or cannibal clones of ourselves. Water breathing hasnt come up yet, but were about to do a bunch of sea quests, so i imagine thats about to change. Also keeping calm emotions on hand for the ability to make hostile guys merely indifferent, as well as suppressing fear or charms as needed, is so good when you have mutliple murderhobo members and sometimes need to just calm things down.
And let’s not forget the bargbarian angle on calm emotions. If you’re ever dealing with savages with anger-management issues, you’re friggin’ set.
Great idea for paladins, but (5E) rangers are ‘known spell’ casters, not prepared casters, and only get a handful of spells at that (eg: a total of 5 known spells at level 8). So if one picks niche utility spells that you’re basically keeping forever, expect that they will probably never actually be used, ever.
On the other hand, if there was ever a character I had who I wish had Feather Fall, it was my barbarian. To the point of actually being tempted to grab the Magic Initiate feat. He has needed it several times in a 2+ year campaign, and is also the only character in the campaign to have ever needed it. Of course, neither paladin nor ranger can get that spell, either.
I still contend that a little utility isn’t a bad idea, even on a caster as anemic as a 5e ranger. You’re going to drop hunter’s mark et al regardless. Why not pick up something like “speak with animals” or “animal messenger” to round out the character? That’s not quite the same category as “protection from poison,” which is reactive magic.
Our group’s ranger has Pass Without Trace, which is really nice to have when people need to be sneaky. Our druid would often prepare it, too, just in case we needed to split up or the ranger was out of spells.
It was a hard transition going from a group of characters who have access to Pass Without Trace and are reasonably adept at Stealth to a group with two Clanky McStompyBoots in metal armor and no Pass Without Trace. Fortunately, they just rescued their first characters, so they might still stand a chance at sneaking out of the stronghold before reinforcements show up.
Hey, there’s nothing wrong with “the direct approach.” Pass Without Trace don’t matter when there’s no one alive to spot you!
Too right. My shadow monk in Adventurer’s League has rolled through ENTIRE ADVENTURES (4 hour mods, with real combat) without the DM getting to make a single attack roll because of Pass Without Trace.
I never thought I could live the “go full ninja” dream in organized play… but getting the wizard AND the Sharpshooter a surprise round is devastating.
Knock, knock.
Who is it?
The Knock spell 😛
(Inset Chirping Crickets sound)
…
Em, uh…
…
Good new year everybody 🙂
Should auld acquaintance be forgot? Possibly. That joke? Definitely. 😛
Don’t worry i have got worse ones 😀
Happy new year to everyone, best wishes to all of you 🙂
Most of my builds that use paladin only go for 2 (divine grace) or 4 (oath of vengeance = lay on hands -> more smite) levels
Dabbling in do-gooding? Why is there such a high dropout rate a paladin school?
Because it’s a good seqway into prestige classes like shadowdancer or dragon disciple, and because all the mono-paladins from the forums were raised by fey.
As is tradition!
I wonder if the creation of these powerful rules has an effect on Golarion? Like, the Paizo authors write the rules, and at the same time all the fey of the setting decide the stylish thing to do is to kidnap temple acolytes. I wonder which one comes first in the Neverending-Story-esque order of things?
On the subject of the actual comic, I appreciate that your male Drow dress like they live in a matriarchy, matching the lack of attire on standard fantasy art female Drow.
I should point out that while Drow can innately cast the Darkness spell, they can’t see through magical darkness, so in this case it’s not too advantageous. Also Pal can just step out and Oracle can see them with her Blindsense.
Having See Invisibility prepared and winding up actually using it is the best feeling ever.
You know that crushing feeling of hopelessness when the enemy spots you, even though you’re invisible? That’s what you’re looking to inflict on the enemy.
My biggest disappointment with 5e is that Wizards don’t get a set of always-prepared spells for their school of specialty the way Clerics get domain spells.
It’d really mean something if your abjurers always had a couple of standard abjuration spells of each level prepared, your evokers and your conjurers, and it would make a lot of thematic sense.
I dunno. I think it’s kind of flavorful that clerics have a rigid list of spells that they ritualistically know, while the bad boys of arcane academia all do it their own way.
I’ve told this story before, but our Swashbuckler PC died at one point and was set to return as a villain. And return they did, as a wrathful Moon Wraith!
Unfortunately for it, we had access to spells like Dancing Light (specifically, our Kitsune witch had), Light, and other sources of light in a dark dungeon – all of which triggered the Moon Wraith’s weakness to bright light (which forces it to turn ethereal). So it ended up being whisked away into the ethereal plane… From where our fighter with a ghost-touch enchanted blade kept whacking it under guidance of our Witch (who could see into the ethereal plane with a trait). Needless to say, the ghost was forced to retreat after this bullying, and was destined to return later… With a template that didn’t have a crippling weakness.
Seems that moon wraiths and paladins have at least one thing in common: they need to prep for the standard contingencies.
Summon Monster 1 is a very hand spell to have when you’re in a trap-filled dungeon. Just summon a horsey or several animals to trigger the traps you find, then waltz through before they reset! As we’ve seen in a certain comic.
Telekinesis is also pretty handy in that regard – we used it to kill a BBEG by disabling a thingy that kept him alive (that we’d otherwise have to fight through some golems and the caster himself to reach manually).
Broseidon, king of the brocean! I summon you!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/evil-summons
I really love Skywrite. It’s useful for sending messages to entire armies that might be quite far away from you. And also useful for anonymously telling everyone in a city the Lord Chancellor has an inappropriate relationship with his pegasus mount. Or just annoying everyone by every day spelling out CLOUDS in clouds at noon.
Or demanding any number of target Dorothies surrender.
The hobo wizard I made had a bunch of utility spells like Darkvision, Protection from Evil and Good, Alarm, and Tenser’s Floating Disk. Of course, since it was a one-shot, I didn’t really get to use any of said spells (well, I did cast Alarm once, but nothing came close enough to the camp to set it off), but they were there in case I needed them.
I did get to feel very smug for having Mending after the Barbarian accidentally cracked a gemstone while trying to pry it out of an arcane console.
If I get the chance to play him again at higher levels, I plan to have more utility spells, like Water Breathing and Leomund’s Tiny Hut.
I’ve toyed with the idea of rolling a “luck-themed sorcerer” who straight up rolls for all of his spell selections.
“The universe will provide!”
Could be fun… Unless of course I get multiple copies of “feather fall” and nothing else.
But think of all the things you could climb and jump off!
I may have mentioned this before, but I think the luck-themed prepared caster would be more playable in 5e, where you don’t prepare the same spell multiple times. Luck-themed sorcerer has the benefit of never choosing a spell more than once too, but with the risk of your selection never changing.
Scribe Scroll is your friend for spells that don’t get used often.
Especially for spells that are on your list but usually not your type.
For example: Teleport is usually an arcane spell, unless you get it from the Travel domain as a Cleric, then its a devine spell for clerics with the travel domain.
You’re talking about the Batman Wizard, and I’ve got no problem with a stacked utility belt full of scrolls. What I’m more against is ignoring the spell-casting part of your dude entirely, or else just setting it to “fire and forget” with the same basic spells session after session. Scribe Scroll is the opposite of that, where you care deeply about your casting options. So in a word: I agree. Carrying magic paper is a good idea.
5e, playing a Warlock. Stumbled into a Shambling Mound as very low-level adventurers because Ravenloft be like that, and of course immediately haul out of there as you do in such situations. We drop a portcullis to buy us a few seconds, and me being the resourceful Warlock I was in that game, I decide to maybe add an extra couple seconds: I cast Unseen Servant and set it to holding down the gate. GM thought it was clever, gave the SM Disadvantage on its check to get through. Didn’t stick around to find out if it actually worked though.
Meanwhile in PF1e, I tend to go out of my way to put Prestidigitation on casters, ESPECIALLY casters with backgrounds in Nobility or Entertainment, to the point where twice now I have burned a Trait to add it to Oracles. The spell is purpose-written to be basically useless, but from a flavor standpoint there’s just something that seems right about being able to magically clean yourself at a moment’s notice when appearance is a large part of your position. I also once had one of my oracles use it to cook a homemade meal for her lover while the two chatted. Maybe stretching the actual action economy of the spell a bit far, but it was RP anyways so the GM let me get away with it.
Keep an eye out for a prestidigitation comic. We’ve got on in the queue at the moment. I believe the title is “Prestidigi-Dry-Cleaning.”
😀
I once had a Raptoran Air Shugenja in a 3.5 game who made good use of Defenestrating Sphere, a spell that functions a lot like Flaming Sphere, except instead of burning folks, it tosses them upwards whereupon they unceremoniously fall back to the ground, taking a frankly unimpressive amount of falling damage. Unless, of course, there’s a window nearby. Then, your hapless targets are flung in the direction of the aperture, usually taking far greater amounts of falling damage and being removed from combat for at least a few rounds.
Well that spell is hilarious and awesome. Kind of makes me want to have a mage’s duel on a tower top.
Daylight does not do anything to drow. It produces bright light, not Sunlight.
You need Dawn.
Oh I dunno. I counters their racial spell-like ability Darkness pretty good.
Is this a 5e thing? Because in 3.x, Light Blindness only requires bright light, which Daylight provides.
Character optimization articles for DnD 5e’s classes. … Druid. Druid Handbook · Circle of Spores Druid Handbook · Practical Guide to Wildshape. Fighter. unearthedarcana
I’m afraid I need some explanation for this one.
Curse of Strahd is an adventure book for the 5th edition of the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.
My biggest disappointment with 5e is that Wizards don’t get a set of always-prepared spells for their school of specialty the way Clerics get domain spells.
It’d really mean something if your abjurers always had a couple of standard abjuration spells of each level prepared, your evokers and your conjurers, and it would make a lot of thematic sense. Study Material
I assume that the syllabus in Hindi supports this design choice.
Wait, why does Oracle care? She’s blind anyway.
Oracle is a dedicated Band-Aid. If her dumb allies can’t hit the baddies, she’s screwed too.