D&D 5E Levitate on an unwilling creature

[jasper]

Ok it Oscar orc can still use his missile weapons. And even if he 200 feet up he floats to the ground when the spell ends.

 

[Celebrim]

whereas magic missile is a "no save and die" spell for many-low level creatures

Errr... unless I'm greatly mistaken magic missile does hit point damage. The whole point of 'save or die' or 'save or suck' effects is that they bypass the normal ablative protection of hit points, winning the fight without having to erode hit points or making the ability to deal and avoid damage trivial. That is to say, 'save or die' effects are win buttons that make the entire combat trivial.

Or to put it technically, 'save or die' or 'save or suck' spells are powerful because they dominate the action economy.

Any effect that involves trading an action for a limit amount of hit point damage is not comparable to 'save or die' by definition. To bring up magic missile in this context baffles me, given the trivial amount of damage that it inflicts and the fact that it acts as straight forward combat that just abrades hit points from the target. I mean, you are aware right that the whole deal with hit points is that until they are depleted you suffer no penalties for their depletion and in general remain just as potent and dangerous after receiving the wound as before it. Effects like 'magic missile' are essentially magical replacements for swinging a sword or shooting a bow, and are balanced with that. If the sum total of D&D magic was just attack replacers that dealt damage, then D&D combat would be a more or less predictable damage race. But it's not. You can't compare direct damage to battlefield control. One works within the normal framework of draining the opponent's hit points, and the other subverts that framework and renders it largely meaningless.

As for "save or be sidelined", if "sidelining" in this case means that you are incapable of replying to attacks for the duration of combat, then it is "save or die" in the same way that any "save or suck" that steals all your remaining actions through some means is basically "save or die". Sure, I still have to make the to hit rolls and inflict the damage, but the fight is now over and inflicting that damage over the duration of the effect is trivial for average PC parties.

The OP is correct that levitate when used offensively does not have the normal limits we'd expect with 4e or later battlefield control. It allows only one save, and if that save is failed since its duration is not extremely limited against a sizable percentage of foes it steals every meaningful action remaining in the combat. It's probably more narrow than 3e era Hold Person, but conceptually it's very similar.

Indeed, the main limitation of Levitation as written seems to be that isn't scalable. If you could boost the weight limit or the number of targets by using a higher level spell slot, it would indeed be highly competitive with telekinesis for battlefield control. And it is also important to call out that this represents one of the few spells that is more powerful battlefield control than it was in older editions, since for example in 3e levitation only effected willing targets. I think the OP is making a good call out, and thinking about it, I'm a bit surprised to see Levitation bucking the general highly conservative trend with respect to "save or suck" because by now we understand the game enough to know how powerful dominating the action economy actually is.

 

[jaelis]

Errr... unless I'm greatly mistaken magic missile does hit point damage. ...

Hmm, if I translate that into phrasing that makes more sense to me, I think what you're saying is that levitation is not so much problem for low-level creatures (who anyway have low hp and are easily killed), but rather for smallish, high-hp creatures who lack flight or any ranged options. It makes them much easier to defeat than otherwise, particularly in solo fights.

I see the point, but can't say I've run into it in practice. Perhaps because I don't run a lot of encounters that fit those criteria. But I guess one approach for such a situation is to have the creature dodge and call for help (or just cry in alarm). It will take a little while to kill the creature, and in that time help, or at least other curious creatures, might show up.

 

[snickersnax]

So can a flying creature change its altitude by flying while under the influence of a levitate cast by somemone else or do they only have horizontal movement?

 

[Celebrim]

Hmm, if I translate that into phrasing that makes more sense to me, I think what you're saying is that levitation is not so much problem for low-level creatures (who anyway have low hp and are easily killed), but rather for smallish, high-hp creatures who lack flight or any ranged options. It makes them much easier to defeat than otherwise, particularly in solo fights.

I'm saying that one of the modern theories of D&D design is that combat shouldn't come down to a single saving throw or dice roll. That is to say, most people agree now that, "Save or Die" isn't particularly fun. Applied against monsters it makes fights trivial rather than exciting, and applied against PC's it leads to frustration because if the whole fight turns on what you threw on a single die, then your choices matter relatively less.

Let's look at either scenario. Suppose you have a "Black Knight" or "Beserker" or "Orc Chieftain" that you intend to be a particular sort of challenge. That foe has no effective missile attack and no ability to fly. For a party without Levitate, the challenge represented by that foe might be adequately described as say "Challenge Rating 9". But if the party has Levitate, then they have a "win button" that they can use to win the fight outright in whatever percentage of cases the foe fails a single saving throw. If the saving throw is failed, they dangle helplessly in the air some number of feet off the ground, and the party can dispatch them with leisurely missile attacks with either no risk or negligible risk for a supposed CR 9 challenge.

Similarly, a PC with similar characteristics can find themselves dangling ineffectually for all or most of the fight just because they failed a single saving throw.

Now, that isn't necessarily bad per se but it is a problem that 5e on the whole seemed to be trying to get away from. Aside from the problems of balancing spellcasters with noncasters what it creates is design constraints that DM's have to be aware of if they want to create interesting challenges. We already had this sort of problem to an extent, in that if the whole party can fly then any monster that lacks flight or effective melee attacks can be trivially defeated, and as such above a certain CR all monsters have to have ability to deal with that or else they are badly designed. (The Tarrasque is a classic case in point, and please note the 4e attempts to deal with the limitations of the design.) What this does is lower the point to which that becomes a major constraint.

In general, prior editions usually also had save or suck spells with various narrow limitations. But aside from the problem this creates in balancing an encounter that meets the scenario the spell is effective in (is it CR 9, or should the very existence of the spell lower the CR of such creatures), what you tend to discover is that if you allow too many of these things into the game (as 3e did, especially as the game was expanded in supplements) you end up with spellcasters with a tool for every occasion always able to attack the weak point in whatever monster they face.

But in any event, the ability to use levitate as an offensive spell - and a potent one at that - vastly increases the power of the spell compared to prior editions and consequently, one wonders why it remained a 2nd level spell. For example, the ability to dual purpose the spell as both effective offense (removing a monster from the combat) or defense (removing yourself from melee) reminds me most closely of 3e's 'Resilient Sphere', but this is in some ways more abusable than 'Resilient Sphere' in that you can with 5e Levitate still attack the creature you've removed from combat. Resiliant Sphere was a 4th level spell. The question people are focusing on is the irrelevant question of which is better, 5th level Telekinesis or 2nd level Levitate. The important point is that this is a vastly better spell than it was in prior editions with unchanged level in an edition of the game that much more greatly limits access to high level spells.

 

[Celebrim]

So can a flying creature change its altitude by flying while under the influence of a levitate cast by somemone else or do they only have horizontal movement?

I would say that if you can fly, you can overcome levitate completely, whether in horizontal or vertical movement. At most, it forces you to spend an action adjusting your position. But that's just a ruling. Strictly speaking, whether it is intuitive or not, the RAW of the spell says, "The target can move only by pushing or pulling against a fixed object or surface within reach (such as a wall or a ceiling), which allows it to move as if it were climbing.", which means you can't fly out of it at all.

 

[Bardbarian]

The utility of a spell matters. Yesterday's game included an athletics challenge for the group to move objects. Our wizard used TK to contribute his share.

 

[JacktheRabbit]

I would say that if you can fly, you can overcome levitate completely, whether in horizontal or vertical movement. At most, it forces you to spend an action adjusting your position. But that's just a ruling. Strictly speaking, whether it is intuitive or not, the RAW of the spell says, "The target can move only by pushing or pulling against a fixed object or surface within reach (such as a wall or a ceiling), which allows it to move as if it were climbing.", which means you can't fly out of it at all.

Please note that the spell also says "if you are the target you can move up or down as part of your movement" so you levitate me up 20 ft, on my turn I levitate down 20 feet and use my remaining movement to advance on you or move out of spell range which will end the spell. So you never have to worry about being levitated hundreds of feet into the air by this spell if you dont want to be.

 

[Satyrn]

I would say you ought to switch it to a save every round to negate if you find it too good in play as written

But you're left with figuring out what happens when that orc saves and is hanging 60 feet up in the air . . .

 

[Satyrn]

Please note that the spell also says "if you are the target you can move up or down as part of your movement" so you levitate me up 20 ft, on my turn I levitate down 20 feet and use my remaining movement to advance on you or move out of spell range which will end the spell. So you never have to worry about being levitated hundreds of feet into the air by this spell if you dont want to be.

I think what you quoted only applies to the caster.

That is, I read what I bolded as saying "If you cast this spell on yourself you can move up or down as part of your movement."