D&D 5E Chill touch vs Troll regeneration

[Celtavian]

That's an over-reaction, as not every party will actually have a character with chill touch, even if your group happens to decide to always include such a character because they specifically want to spend literally every round making sure no enemies get to regain any hit points.

No. It is not an over-reaction. I often wonder why I have to explain this. Here is the sequence:

1. Regenerating or healing creature.

2. Focus fire. Chill touch. Dead.

3. Next creature.

4. Focus fire, Chill Touch. Dead.

Doesn't matter if its a troll, Strahd, Juiblex, or the like. A cantrip makes regeneration, healing, and the like completely useless to parties that know what it does and ensure they have, basically nearly every party that understands the rules. It makes regeneration useless because as soon as they know a creature has some means of regaining hit points, chill touch will be used to shut it down.

The only resistance to this spell is immunity to spells of at least cantrip level. Otherwise anything that regains hit points in any way can be shut down long enough to kill it even to the point of waiting for it to be close to death.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

It sure would be nice if the Internet transmitted emotion/connotation as well as text/denotation.

That, or if more people faced with the thought "Maybe they meant that rudely, or maybe they didn't" chose to give the other person the benefit of the doubt and assume no rudeness (or other ill intent) behind the words they are reading in acknowledgement that the Internet doesn't transmit emotion/connotation along with text in its current state of existence.

 

[Celtavian]

Two trolls?

How does that work? Because you can only concentrate on one at a time which is likely what will be happening anyway? Troll regeneration is as weak as it has ever been. Fire, acid, or chill touch cantrip can shut them down. Your choice. Why did they even bother spending the space to write the ability? Nostalgia? I often wonder.

Regeneration is useless in this game against PC parties that optimize even moderately. I would like to see regeneration become a scary ability again as it was in the past where you had to make sure to find every piece of the troll (or other regenerating creature) to ensure it was dead.

 

[Croesus]

Regeneration is useless in this game against PC parties that optimize even moderately. I would like to see regeneration become a scary ability again as it was in the past where you had to make sure to find every piece of the troll (or other regenerating creature) to ensure it was dead.

Then change it in your game, if that's how you feel.

Except for 4E, I've played every version of D&D since white box and there has always been something that counters regeneration. I happen to like that because it rewards players for being smart. I remember one battle where fire was not stopping the creature's regeneration (I think it was a half-red dragon ogre mage). Instead we grappled it and pushed its head underwater - 3E regeneration didn't work against drowning. It was a creative solution to a creature with ramped up regeneration. But I would personally find it rather tedious to have to do something similar to every creature with regeneration. YMMV

In the current edition, I've run a number of battles with regenerating creatures. Sometimes the characters take them out quickly, sometimes not. Even with firebolt and acid splash, such battles were sometimes extremely dangerous for the party. In my experience, allowing chill touch and other spells to block regeneration for a single turn hardly makes the ability useless.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

No. It is not an over-reaction.

Yes, it is, and you've just demonstrated that very thing by pointing out exactly how small the benefit you are reacting to is, as I will illustrate shortly.

I often wonder why I have to explain this.

It's probably because it only makes sense to you. That could mean you are having a thought that other people just haven't arrive at yet, but it could also mean that everyone else has had the thought and moved past it to understand some other thought.

Here is the sequence:

The sequence is forgetting a certain detail: creatures with regeneration either don't get to regenerate if they don't start their turn with at least 1 hp, so any attack that deals at least as much damage as chill touch is just as effective at killing the creature, or the creature only dies if they start their turn at 0 hit points and don't regenerate and have their regeneration shut off should anyone shove a torch in their face.

With other means of healing, the kinds that don't happen automatically and instead require a spent action of some kind, all that is happening is chill touch changing the though process from "Maybe I should heal? Nah, this action is better spent doing X (where X is likely trying to prevent further hit point loss, rather than recover those already lost)" to "I can't heal, which I probably wasn't going to do anyway so I will do X (where X is the very same thing decided upon doing in the prior case too).

And, most important of all, if you aren't doing like I said earlier and using chill touch to shut down the regeneration every round (that you hit), the practical effect is that the fight ends about 1 round sooner than it otherwise would because if the creature has so few hit points that it will die if it's regeneration isn't allowed to work this round, then another 10 or 20 hit points probably isn't going to keep it alive much longer.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

Regeneration is useless in this game against PC parties that optimize even moderately.

Sounds like something to add to the list titled "reasons not to bother optimizing even moderately."

I would like to see regeneration become a scary ability again as it was in the past where you had to make sure to find every piece of the troll (or other regenerating creature) to ensure it was dead.

Regeneration in D&D has never been "a scary ability." In AD&D it was the same small amount of HP per round, but it actually had a 3 round delay from "first blood" so it was even more likely to not even apply any regained hp (at a break-neck pace of 3 per round, woo-hoo /sarcasm) before the troll had been subdued with any means of violence and then burned so it would stay down.

And you never had to "find every piece", you just had to find the biggest piece because the rest would die off in 24 hours if they couldn't rejoin that piece.

So really, it sounds like you are wanting a return to a house-rule - the answer to which is to go ahead and house-rule now.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

No. It is not an over-reaction. I often wonder why I have to explain this. Here is the sequence:

1. Regenerating or healing creature.

2. Focus fire. Chill touch. Dead.

3. Next creature.

4. Focus fire, Chill Touch. Dead.

Doesn't matter if its a troll, Strahd, Juiblex, or the like. A cantrip makes regeneration, healing, and the like completely useless to parties that know what it does and ensure they have, basically nearly every party that understands the rules. It makes regeneration useless because as soon as they know a creature has some means of regaining hit points, chill touch will be used to shut it down.

The only resistance to this spell is immunity to spells of at least cantrip level. Otherwise anything that regains hit points in any way can be shut down long enough to kill it even to the point of waiting for it to be close to death.

Or teleportation magic, total cover, or a high enough AC to make Chill Touch unreliable.

In-combat regeneration has never been regen's strongest point, anyway. Regen is primarily for hit-and-run tactics, which vampires excel at BTW.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Regeneration in D&D has never been "a scary ability." In AD&D it was the same small amount of HP per round, but it actually had a 3 round delay from "first blood" so it was even more likely to not even apply any regained hp (at a break-neck pace of 3 per round, woo-hoo /sarcasm) before the troll had been subdued with any means of violence and then burned so it would stay down.

And you never had to "find every piece", you just had to find the biggest piece because the rest would die off in 24 hours if they couldn't rejoin that piece.

So really, it sounds like you are wanting a return to a house-rule - the answer to which is to go ahead and house-rule now.

Maybe or maybe not.

However, it was pretty scary in the original troll context: Three Hearts and Three Lions, by Poul Anderson. That troll just wouldn't die until they burned its whole body. If D&D never managed to bring trolls up to that level of scariness (debatable) it's a failure to adapt the source material.

 

[jaelis]

No. It is not an over-reaction. I often wonder why I have to explain this. Here is the sequence:

1. Regenerating or healing creature.

2. Focus fire. Chill touch. Dead.

3. Next creature.

4. Focus fire, Chill Touch. Dead.

Doesn't matter if its a troll, Strahd, Juiblex, or the like. A cantrip makes regeneration, healing, and the like completely useless to parties that know what it does and ensure they have, basically nearly every party that understands the rules. It makes regeneration useless because as soon as they know a creature has some means of regaining hit points, chill touch will be used to shut it down.

The only resistance to this spell is immunity to spells of at least cantrip level. Otherwise anything that regains hit points in any way can be shut down long enough to kill it even to the point of waiting for it to be close to death.

So one of your party members is basically spending his turn shutting down one ability of one of your opponents. Is that so bad? Is it broken that a wizard could ready an action every turn to cast counterspell? Or that a grappler can keep an opponent prone?

Put it this way: even when your tactic is 100% successful, it doesn't mean regeneration is useless. It forces the wizard to cast chill touch every turn instead of disintegrate or something.

I'll give you this... if the PCs hired a cohort of level 1 wizards to follow along and cast chill touch on everything, that would be kind of messed up. But there are plenty of other solutions to that problem

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

If D&D never managed to bring trolls up to that level of scariness (debatable) it's a failure to adapt the source material.

I agree.

That's also basically par for the course though - D&D doesn't really do a great job in emulating any of its source materials. At least not any of them that didn't provoke action from the estate of a deceased author and result in intentional changes to emulate the source material in question less well than originally done. Though I should note I don't necessarily count the general failure to adapt the source material as a negative, since the resulting game is enjoyable regardless of that failure.