What solution for "Cantrips don't feel magical"?

[5ekyu]

Once again, too many people are pulling the focus away from the OP and the "debate" is getting pointless.

If you read this thread and already feel the game is magical, with or without cantrips being at-will, then fine, say your piece and either please move on or contribute to the goal of the thread as intended the OP.



Some posters have emphasized dramatic flare to help and if that works, wonderful, problem solved. But for those of us (myself included, obviously), that isn't the problem. For me, like others, it is lack of variety (especially in combat), that makes magic feel mundane. To be fair, I find the same problem with melee at times, but have my NPC do different things like leaving his engagement with three foes to rush to the aid of a comrade, accepting opportunity attacks if I must, and so forth, to create a greater sense of action.

Yet I digress. Here are some mechanical ideas that I came up with this morning which might make your game feel more "magical":

1. Allow classes (not Archetypes) with cantrips (not Cantrips learned from a Feat, etc.) to change their Cantrips Knowns during a Long Rest. Reason: cantrips are by nature low-power and already enjoy constant at-will use. Increasing the variety or options might help (then again, maybe it won't for you...).

2. Make "Cantrips Known" into "Cantrip Slots". Caster can use any cantrip from their spell list (again, variety is key for me anyway), expending a Cantrip Slot when casting it. All Cantrip Slots are regained after a Short Rest or Long Rest.

3. Let caster classes choose any cantrip from their spell list instead of only knowing a limited number (yep, there is that variety again) when they cast a cantrip (see new Feat below if you want a cost associated with this feature).

New Feat: Cantrip Caster

Prerequisite: the ability to cast at least one spell.

You know all the cantrips from your class spell list and can cast them at-will.

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If the focus is lack of options in combat, create new cantrips for casters to influence combat in other ways, such as these examples (these are just drafts, and not checked for balance yet):

Quick Ward

Abjuration
Level: Cantrip
Casting time: 1 Action
Range: 30 feet
Components: V, S, M (a tiny square sheet of metal)
Duration: Instantaneous

You wave your hand across your front towards a target within range, you grant the target a +1 bonus to Armor Class and Saving Throws until the beginning of your next turn.

Repel Attacker

Conjuration
Level: Cantrip
Casting time: 1 Bonus Action
Range: Touch
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous

You touch your target and push away with your hand. The target rolls a Constitution save. If it fails, it is moved 5 feet backwards. If the space is occupied, the spell fails.

Summoning Snap

Conjuration
Level: Cantrip
Casting time: 1 Action
Range: 10 feet (maybe 30 feet?)
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous

You snap your fingers and extend your hand to summon a small object, two pounds or less and no longer than 1 foot, that you can see within range into your hand. If this object is being held by an unwilling creature, the target makes a Dexterity save to retain control of the item.

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Those are just a few examples. Having cantrips that can affect combat beyond dealing damage might help. I know I enjoy using other combat options for melee, such as shoves, disarms, etc. Personally, I will talk to my players but probably employ one of the options I listed above and encourage my players to make their own cantrips for group approval.

This is hilarious...

At the same time you are telling folks to move on if they dont want to keep the focus of the OP in mind... even quoting it...

**So how do we combine the contradictory ideas that (a) at-will magic makes magic feel mundane that several people have stated, and (b) have that casters can contribute meaningfully in a magical way without having to resort to mundane actions? I don't think a direct compromise works, so what solutions orthogonal to mundane=mundane and at-will=mundane can we find?**

You yourself for your own (presumably acceptable on target posting) add a different reason for not being magical enough... "For me, like others, it is lack of variety (especially in combat), that makes magic feel mundane. "

"lack of variety" and "at-will" are of course not the same thing at all and it was specifically the at-will brought to the fore by the Op.

Are you sure you are posting in the right thread by the standard you just put to others or should you be "say your piece and either please move on or contribute to the goal of the thread as intended the OP."

Finally, what if after looking and seeking and optimizing for the campaign four different classes and four different players each show up with at-will feated firebolts and light spells - how is the extra bookkeeping that it took them to get right where they chose to be originally preventing this from being just as "not magical enough" as it was before the "problem" resulted in new homebrew cantrips et al? is it "magical enough" now that they spent a feat and only chose the cantrips that morning, not at various levels?

 

[Blue]

I gave XP to your post - I think you did a great job of expressing the points in a constructive manner, even if I am more of the opposite opinion.

1. For me, the primary objection to the extensive availability of at-will magic is that I cannot (or at least to this point have not been able to conceive of a way to) make it coherent with a setting that is not high-magic.

To this I simply agree. Normally I'm a big fan of adjusting options available in order to support the feel of the setting.

But I'm unsure what will fill the design space if a low magic campaign simply took them out. Plunking away at mid levels with a light crossbow with a mid-range-at-best DEX doesn't fulfill the design requirements of characters should be able to contribute in combat.

2. The fact that it (for me) debases magic by making it ordinary is somewhat a secondary concern until someone says, "Oh, but we must have cantrips so that we can do something magical every round." Accepting for a moment that casting a spell every round is necessary to 'feel magical', claiming that pew-pewing Firebolt every round satisfies that need just feels farcical to me because you have now reduced the label 'magical' to a very superficial bit of fluff.

From my side it's more of flipping this around - it's about avoiding doing large amounts of non-magical.

A caster who casts their three spells over five encounters and spends the rest of the time doing mundane things doesn't feel very magical.

A character who won't cast a utility spell because they need to save the slot for combat (VERY common back in earlier editions) so that they can hold up their end of the combat contribution doesn't feel very magical.

And the little bits. I almost always take cantrips like Prestidigitation, Mage Hand, Thamaturgy, Druidcraft - ones that let me represent my character as magical during other scenes even if there is only occasionally any magical use to it.

3. As much as I would like to constructively contribute to a thread spawned (in part) in response to my own bit whining, for me it is simply not the case that my PC must be able to cast a spell every round in order to 'feel magical', and, unfortunately, I don't think I can get into that mind set sufficiently to even guess what might be a satisfactory solution for those who do feel that that is necessary. I just don't see the problem with a mage having to use a crossbow (or, god forbid, use that INT to find something else clever to do) some of the time. So @Blue - are you really sure that your (b) is necessary in the strict way that you have stated it for enough players that it is worth expending energy on the discussion under that stricture? (I guess the consequence of that being true which seems surprising to me is that not only would such folk prefer 5e to 1e, they would find 1e [or at least 1e casters] unplayable.)

The issue is that it isn't just "some of the time". It's the majority of the time, as shown by the numbers int he original post. If you need to hit double digits just to be able to cast a spell half the time, and that assumes rare usage of spells for anything except combat, that's a big deal. It's especially noticeable at the lower levels where a lot of campaigns spend much time.

It goes back to what I said above - if you have three spells a day total, expect five or so encounters, you are doing magic very little and often won't do any magic in any of the other pillars to keep those slots for life-and-death of combat.

This is something I experienced for decades playing AD&D 2nd and 3.x.

4. Ironically, I actually agree that it's more fun for casters to be significantly more 'magically active' than they were in 1e. And in fact several years ago when I started my first 5e campaign (which is also my current and only one) I failed (utterly) to appreciate the magnitude and consequences of the differences in casters between 1e and 5e (it all looked so .... familiar ... lol) and so I buffed them by (a) using spell points instead of slots; and (b) giving them (2*level) more spell points even than the DMG variant calls for. In retrospect, I still think this was ok for the first few levels (especially since we chose not to zip through them as fast as most do). However, by 5th level, my misapprehension had become much clearer, so (not wanting to take anything away) I capped the bonus at 10 (or maybe 12 - I don't remember which). But I digress.

Thanks, I see you can appreciate the issue even if it's not your primary push

As a side note, our own playtesting with spells slots showed it wasn't for our table. We tried at a few different levels and at high levels it lead toward a a lot more casting of high level spells (to pack a lot into few actions) and then casters pushing for 15 minute adventuring days. But at low levels it worked fairly well.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

When I want to make a low-magic-feel fullcaster, I know I use a lot of ''blade'' cantrip (booming blade, green flame etc) with my staff: its still magical, but comes from a mostly mundane action. I think a DM that would like to force the caster do be a little more mundane when out of spell slots could create some more of those ''enchant a normal strike cantrip'' to force the caster into mundane territory without forcing them to use completely non-magical actions.

EDIT: some ideas:

Staff to Snake: Make a melee attack, on a hit target take poison damage and is poisoned until start of next turn.

Dazzling Sunray: Make a ranged attack, on a hit target cant see beyond 15/10/5 feet of him.

Betraying Shadow: Make a melee attack as if you were behind a target within 15'. Deal extra necrotic or psychic damage on a hit.

 

[Quartz]

So how do we combine the contradictory ideas that (a) at-will magic makes magic feel mundane that several people have stated, and (b) have that casters can contribute meaningfully in a magical way without having to resort to mundane actions? I don't think a direct compromise works, so what solutions orthogonal to mundane=mundane and at-will=mundane can we find?

What if you were to remove the damage-dealing cantrips like Firebolt and Eldritch Blast but leave the utilitarian ones lie Guidance and Presdigitation?

 

[Blue]

My bent as above is that a good variety helps things feel new and fresh, and hopefully "magical".

If everyone is picking fireball at 5th level it kinda kills it for me. I've played enough spellcasters in 5e that I'm gimping myself now just because I'm bored of the same old spells

We've got three full casters @ 6th level in one game I play. No one has fireball. With a bard, a warlock (not fiend who does get FB) and a life cleric we have almost no overlap in spells. Fireball in particular I don't see a lot of duplication because it's only on two standard lists - usually I don't see a sorcerer and a wizard in the same party (much less two wizards or two sorcerers).

 

[Blue]

That is what happened in 1e, and to a lesser extent in 2e. I didn't experience it in 3e, because between specialization, domain spells and stat bonus spells, you had enough spells to make it through combats. Maaaybe at level 1 and 2 you had to skimp. By level 3 when you suddenly added 3 more spells, you were pretty good. By level 5 you could start branching out into utility spells and make it through combat. 5e regressed things in this regard and added cantrips. However, unlimited cantrips is overkill.

3ed still had the linear fighter / quadratic wizard issue. Part of the fix for that is 5e encourages more encounters per day. So actual spell slots need to stretch further, and at-will attacks from martial characters do more than cantrips so sometimes a caster is casting one of their higher level spells and doing more than the martial characters, and sometimes they aren't are are doing less than the martial characters, to average out about the same over a long enough period of time. (Since individual situations can and should favor different types and provide variety.)

 

[TwoSix]

Some possibilities to fill the "action gap" with magical activities that aren't necessarily at-will spells.

1) Turn "cantrips" into the ability to craft "cantrip wands". A cantrip wand has 10 charges, and regains its charges after a long rest. (Possible tuning would be to lower the number of charges, or regain 1d6+X number of charges per long rest, to keep that old-school randomness). If you lose a cantrip wand, you can craft a new one in eight hours and with 25 gp of materials. Cantrip wands are attuned specifically to their creator and can only be used by their creator.

2) Buff up spells that allow magical actions, like Witch Bolt, Flame Blade, and the various Investiture spells. Rather than "one spell slot = one action", this allows one spell slot to support multiple turns in combat.

 

[Umbran]

As one of the "cantrip skeptics" whom I think [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] is referencing, I'd like to chime in here with a few points.

1. For me, the primary objection to the extensive availability of at-will magic is that I cannot (or at least to this point have not been able to conceive of a way to) make it coherent with a setting that is not high-magic.

Let me ask a question - how many PC-type spellcasters do you have in a given village? A town? A city?

Having *player characters* be able to use at-will magic does not mean that this magic is common in the world at large. Maybe there's a difficulty in getting the setting characteristics across when the PCs are really special people within it? As a matter of course, PCs are dealing with very special situations that most people in the fictional world do not experience. It is kind of like John McClane in "Die Hard" has very violent experiences, when most folks in the US will never experience a gunshot or explosion.

 

[Immoralkickass]

If you think cantrips are not magical enough, you aren't using your imagination right.

 

[WhosDaDungeonMaster]

To answer your point, 5ekyu, look at the two issues of the OP:

A) at-will magic makes magic feel mundane that several people have stated
B) have that casters can contribute meaningfully in a magical way without having to resort to mundane actions

My post addresses issue A in that at-will magic feels mundane for many because the caster has to resort to the same cantrip repeatedly, such as Fire Bolt. Having variety will help stop it from feeling mundane because the caster is not doing the same action over and over and has more options.

My post addresses issue B in that by offering a variety of cantrips that can affect combat (at least in that situation), the caster has other options without having to resort to mundane (non-magical) actions such as attacking with a ranged or melee weapon.

Those were my points to help the OP and others who feel at-well magic makes it feel less magical. I address one possible reason why at-will magic feels mundane, but in fairness, part of the issue for some is they simply don't want a caster using cantrips every round because they run out of slots. As others have presented, to obvious options are:

• increase the number of spell slots available for 1-9,
• use a recharge or drain system, or
• grant other magical abilities

Anything else is possible of course, but those are the easy ones. Implementing any of them, like the options I posted, require discussion in the group with keeping balance in mind.

EDITED: to remove snarkiness, it has been a rough morning, my apologies.