D&D 5E Overchanneling and Cantrips

[stevelabny]

Page 78, "Casting a Spell at a Higher Level."

And just like that, this "problem" goes away. Casting a cantrip in a higher slot makes it a higher level spell which makes you take necrotic damage. Cantrips are only free to overchannel as 0 levels.

 

[Nikosandros]

And just like that, this "problem" goes away. Casting a cantrip in a higher slot makes it a higher level spell which makes you take necrotic damage. Cantrips are only free to overchannel as 0 levels.

Cantrips are never cast in higher slots. Contrary to all other spells, they just automatically scale with the level of the caster.

 

[stevelabny]

Cantrips are never cast in higher slots. Contrary to all other spells, they just automatically scale with the level of the caster.

Yay new editions and missing things.

Ok, well reading each cantrip the 40 points from firebolt past 17th level seems like highest number (or 30 when you get overchannel). And that's still a ranged attack. I don't know if its as broken as people fear by that high of a level. But I guess some sort of limit on it might be desirable.

 

[Particle_Man]

Speaking of overchannel, does the necrotic damage kick in if you switch up spells? If you maximize fireball in round one and the maximize lightning bolt (for the first time that day, wrt lightning bolt) in round two, do you suffer necrotic damage because you overchannelled twice or do you avoid necrotic damage because you only overchannelled lightning bolt once?

Thinking about the cantrips, I think now I would not go 1/2 of a 1st level spell directly because then you get 1/2 of 3d12 the third time you cast it. Instead, I would switch the die type so that cantrips that are overchannel the second time would do 2d6, then 3d6, 4d6, etc. But that is a house rule, of course. As written, it is no damage and you could overchannel ray of frost all day long without fear of necrotic damage. But maybe that is to counter the likely lesser power of evokers vis-a-vis other types of mages (at least in 3.x, evokers were a weak specialization, as damage was not where it was at - don't know about 5e though).

 

[Iosue]

Speaking of overchannel, does the necrotic damage kick in if you switch up spells? If you maximize fireball in round one and the maximize lightning bolt (for the first time that day, wrt lightning bolt) in round two, do you suffer necrotic damage because you overchannelled twice or do you avoid necrotic damage because you only overchannelled lightning bolt once?

The text says, "If you use this feature again..." so I think it's safe to read it as kicking in even if you switch spells.

 

[Particle_Man]

The text says, "If you use this feature again..." so I think it's safe to read it as kicking in even if you switch spells.

In that case, it would be a foolish evoker indeed that overchannelled evocation cantrips in a spammy way, if they had any higher level evocation spells left that they might want to overchannel before their long rest. So maximizing cantrip damage would likely come into play only after all (or at least most) of their better evocation spells had run out of spell slots to be cast in, which is likely quite the box of matches to go through for high level evokers, even in 5e.

 

[Thaumaturge]

And we have this update from twitter:

Overchannel questions: Not intended to work with cantrips, but it works out if you increase the damage by 1d12 per cantrip

Thaumaturge.