Cantrips

4E Cantrips for Wizards can add great spice to your character. Playing a wizard in the past, I would typically conserve all spells at all times, thus lowly 0th level spells often went unused for fear of wasting them. With 4E and at will cantrips, your imagination is the only limiting factor to the interesting twist you can provide your character.

Some ideas (please feel free to add your own)

Ghost Sound

• Never speak, communicate only with this power
• Communicate with the nearby wildlife, the cool thing is those squirrels always agree with you (if you are really tricky, give the DM some notes about what you want the squirrel to say ahead of time)
• Squirrels not cool enough, make an illusion of a mouth on a stone wall and talk with it
• Allow the steak the drunk patron next to you is eating to start pleading for it's freedom
• Embarrass rivals with all manor of sounds (I thought Lord Bathen had better manners)

Mage Hand

• Hold your orb implement hovering in front of you, grasp and wield only when needed
• Never hold your utensils, always animate them to feed you
• Embarrass rivals by shifting the food on their plate as they try to eat it

Prestidigitation

• Make your hair smoke, blaze with fire, change color, or any other visual effect you can think of
• Make your eyes crackle with energy, become totally black, make them look like cat eyes, or any other visual effect you can dream up
• Always be presentable, clean your cloths and give yourself nice smell. This can really set you apart from the crowd when your friends are covered with gore and muck
• Have your footsteps behind you glow, smoke, burn, or have the plant life beneath them burst into life / wither into decay
• Always light the camp fire
• Fall in a lake, dry yourself off
• Always enjoy a cup of hot tea or coffee

Great post, I hadn't thought about the possibilities before

Back in the days of 1st edition, I read through the cantrips and decided that none of them were breakable (1st edition cantrips were amazingly weak), and so in my 14 year old wisdom I declared that cantrips could be cast as at will effects.

The results of that looked very very much like the list you just postulated.

And the results of putting up with that sort of showboating convinced me just how foolish I'd been.

Celebrim said:

Back in the days of 1st edition, I read through the cantrips and decided that none of them were breakable (1st edition cantrips were amazingly weak), and so in my 14 year old wisdom I declared that cantrips could be cast as at will effects.

The results of that looked very very much like the list you just postulated.

And the results of putting up with that sort of showboating convinced me just how foolish I'd been.

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What were the results? For a high-magic game, the OP's list of ideas look like a lot of fun...

How much do you want to bet that the other 14 year olds spent a lot of time having their PCs playing pranks on each other and NPCs?

Dannyalcatraz said:

How much do you want to bet that the other 14 year olds spent a lot of time having their PCs playing pranks on each other and NPCs?

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Sounds like just about any game ful of 14 year olds... no matetr whatt eh system or houserule.

Hell, sounds like some of my games full of late twenties...

Celebrim said:

Back in the days of 1st edition, I read through the cantrips and decided that none of them were breakable (1st edition cantrips were amazingly weak), and so in my 14 year old wisdom I declared that cantrips could be cast as at will effects.

The results of that looked very very much like the list you just postulated.

And the results of putting up with that sort of showboating convinced me just how foolish I'd been.

Click to expand...

Luckily, I'm not 14 any more.

The post was to simply point out fun ways to fill out your character with the four cantrips and to encourage others to share their thoughts and creative ideas (not to bring up the DnD game you played when you were 14 and killed all the gods , yeap, I played that game too when I was 14 ). I very much enjoy creative uses of mundane items and common spells.

Want a wizard who is slightly off his rocker, have him chat with squirrels (and the squirrel's chat back). Want to play up the fire element of your wizard, have your hair smoke sometimes, especially when he gets angry. Want to play dirty to gain a social advantage at the ball, make Lord Zerrik smell like he needs a bath and dance with the Lady yourself.

How about this:

Light

Attack: Int vs. Fort
Hit: Target takes a -2 to attacks until the end of your next turn.
Increase to dazed until the end of your next turn at level 3.
Increase to blinded until the end of your next turn at level 13.

Ambush Bug said:

What were the results? For a high-magic game, the OP's list of ideas look like a lot of fun...

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After about 5 minutes, they stop being quite so fun. After about 5 hours, they get really annoying.

It's one thing if a player uses a little bit of color to magically warm his cup of tea at the end of a long cold march. And I've got nothing against the player deciding to heighten a dramatic moment with a little bit of magical flair, or tidying himself up with a bit of magical fastidiousness.

It's the pervasiveness of it that gets annoying such as when it isn't used at a dramatic moment. That combined with the cheap childish thrill seeking definately has a pre-teen quality to it. I mean look at that list again:

"Never speak, communicate only with this power"

After the first time you do this, is it cool? What about the fifth time you remind everyone that you are speaking in a ghostly sound sound that comes from somewhere else? If you met this person in real life, what would you think?

"Communicate with the nearby wildlife, the cool thing is those squirrels always agree with you"

Would this be even fun to play out the first time? How cool do you think the DM and the rest of the players would think this the fifth time?

"Squirrels not cool enough, make an illusion of a mouth on a stone wall and talk with it"

Fine, you talk to yourself... I mean, 'the wall'. Do you have something to contribute to the game or are you going to spend the whole time holding conversations with yourself?

"Allow the steak the drunk patron next to you is eating to start pleading for it's freedom"

While this sort of thing could concievably be funny with the right NPC in the right circumstance ('You don't want to do death sticks.'), the problem is that this sort of thing would only be appropriate once and at least in my experience the newly empowered mage player doesn't wait for the proper comic timing and tries to run the schtick into the ground.

"Embarrass rivals with all manor of sounds"

This is one of the first things my fellow 14 year old players tried.

'I try to make Lord Barvol fart!' *snicker* 'Now I want to make Lady Barvol fart'.

Is this really funny? Yes, there is probably a point in a story that calls for this sort of thing, but generally speaking you have to wait for it. It's not a humorous or interesting thing to do by default. Moreover, its the sort of juvenile thing that makes you look like an obnoxious git if you are caught, and frankly if you are living in a magical world and strange unexplainable things start happening, the first thing people are going to do is find the nearest wizard.

"Never hold your utensils, always animate them to feed you"

Could anything possibly scream 'obnoxious arrogant wizard geek' more clearly than that? If you met this person in real life, what would you think?

"Embarrass rivals by shifting the food on their plate as they try to eat it"

Ok, forget I asked.

The point is, most of the times when such actions would actually add to the story rather than detract from it are pretty rare, and as such when the time glaringly calls for it having limited resources is fine. It's not like you are going to miss out on the oppurtunity if all it costs is a cantrip and it actually advances the story and provides you with some tangible benefit.

But when the magic costs you nothing, then the temptation is to go around showing off even though it doesn't advance the story. And that is just annoying.

Celebrim said:

After about 5 minutes, they stop being quite so fun. After about 5 hours, they get really annoying.

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Spoilsport.

I really like using Mage Hand to hold a torch for the party, and move it into darkened areas before we go in to make sure it's safe. Prestidigitation's ability to snuff out torches has come in useful a few times, since our party all have low-light vision and can do without light much of the time.

I find the cantrips really useful for hewing to my character concept. He's like a cross between Harry Dresden, Monk, and Nightcrawler: a teleporting, obsessive-compulsive, eladrin wizard detective. He always uses Mage Hand to touch anything filthy, he immediately cleans himself up whenever he gets dirty, and he teleports around mud bogs and other nasty things he'd rather not step in. He makes little gusts of wind with Prestidigitation to blow dust off of ancient carvings to examine them.