D&D 5E Cantrip nerf (house rule brainstorm)

[auburn2]

Why are you assuming that if the fighter has a magic weapon that the casters haven’t picked up a wand or a few scrolls?

A few scrolls will only help in a few battles and only 1 turn for each scroll. I think magic weapons are more common than magic wands and they are in general more powerful and can be used more often.

Neither of these are going to replace a fighters +2 sword.

 

[nevin]

Cantrips do 1/3 to 1/2 the damage of martial attacks, and the wizards need something due to how much they got nerfed. Are you going to get rid of Concentration and bring back spells increasing damage with caster level?

If you're going to do this without breaking things, the resource is going to need to be plentiful enough that there's no practical consequences in-game, because realistically, wizards use their cantrips no more than about a dozen times in a day.

If they only use them a dozen times a day then wands and magic items can easily fill the gap

 

[embee]

Why are you assuming that if the fighter has a magic weapon that the casters haven’t picked up a wand or a few scrolls?

As stated, a scroll is single-use. And the wand is good for about 2 or 3 charges per encounter because most recharge at sunrise, not on short rest. And at the last charge, it has a 5% chance of breaking.

Of course, the caster could also use a magic staff as a melee weapon, bopping enemies for 1d6 damage.

 

[Stormonu]

A few scrolls will only help in a few battles and only 1 turn for each scroll. I think magic weapons are more common than magic wands and they are in general more powerful and can be used more often.

Neither of these are going to replace a fighters +2 sword.

Yes, but the original post was discussing using the magic weapon specifically to overcome some form of damage reduction. Scroll or wand use could be used for spellcasters in those cases when a mundane weapon wouldn’t do or have its damage reduced. If the target doesn’t have some sort of damage mitigation, there’s no need for magic weapons in the first place, and the mundane crossbow would do the same damage in a fighter or a wizard’s hands.

Also, that scroll or wand probably isn’t loaded with a cantrip anyway, and a single use would likely be worth several rounds worth of the fighter’s attacks.

Overall, spellcasters cantrips attacks should lag behind a martial’ s damage output. The martialist can’t pump their attack up - spellcaster s can, throwing out the occasional spell that does a heap more all at once. If spellcasters could/can match a fighter’s per round damage every round, that’s unfair - because the spellcaster can add to that with but a single fireball or such and leave the fighter in the dust.

”My firebolt does a measly 1d10 fire damage! You’re attacking twice doing 1d8+4 damage with each hit. That’s not fair!”

”Yeah, well you can fireball, so shaddup.”

 

[Li Shenron]

If you allow/require a short rest to refresh your cantrips, every encounter will be followed by a short rest.

So an even better solution is not to have them refresh on a short rest.

 

[Disgruntled Hobbit]

Hello all,

A bugbear about 5e (for me at least) was the idea of unlimited spammable cantrips for casters. To us 'get off my lawn' grognards, this seems a touch excessive.

I had an idea for a nerf I wanted to brainstorm - Each cantrip can only be cast a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus. Recover all uses upon short rest.

And discuss...

Is this an actual problem where you have seen your players use cantrips too many times in you game and is disruptive? Or a theoretical problem where you read the rules and it seems odd?

First thing ya should do is ban the warlock. It replies entirely on eldritch blast. It's a magical archer. Just not an Arcane Archer. Two uses an that player will sit around and be bored the other five rounds before the short rest.

Another consideration should be making encounters easier. Cause one or two of the party will be less useful. The cleric will break out their mace and attack (with a -1 or -2 to hit compared to sacred flame) and take more damage cause there base-to-base with the monsters. And the wizard will break out their sad crossbow and attack (again, with a -1 or -2 to hit) and pop off a few ineffectual shots.

Remember that spellcaster spells have been adjusted from older editions. They get fewer high level spells and low level spells aren't as effective. The tenth level wizard casting fireball won't find it as effective as they did five levels prior. Despite having at-will cantrips, spellcasters are less magical than previous..

 

[Li Shenron]

Hello all,

A bugbear about 5e (for me at least) was the idea of unlimited spammable cantrips for casters. To us 'get off my lawn' grognards, this seems a touch excessive.

I had an idea for a nerf I wanted to brainstorm - Each cantrip can only be cast a number of times equal to your proficiency bonus. Recover all uses upon short rest.

And discuss...

Do all cantrips bother you or just some?

I think attack cantrips are mainly meant to work as weapons so they are ok unlimited, from a balance point of view, but you may still dislike the narrative of cheap magic.

Utility cantrips are different. They can create a balance issue but it depends on the campaign. In other campaigns they get used very rarely.

Just to say that if your motivation is balance, you might want to make different rules for the two categories. If you just want to remove the narrative of unlimited magic, your house rule is ok, but I would consider even a harder limit to see some difference.

 

[tetrasodium]

Except for Warlocks with Agonising Blast. And don't forget that cantrips are magic, so not subject to the same resistances. And some cantrips (e.g. Chill Touch) have secondary effects.

Why are you assuming that if the fighter has a magic weapon that the casters haven’t picked up a wand or a few scrolls?

There are a few issues there & one of them is a red herring bordering on white room fallacy that gets thrown out as if it should get serious weight.

• I'm assuming that the fighter has magic weapon because wotc has repeatedly told us not only that it should be generously provided as well as available at a low price.
  
  Spoiler: This can't be ignored

  
  WotC as gone out of their way to repeatedly point out that the goal to obtaining magic weapons is intended to be very low if present at all & GMs are encouraged to "be generous with magic weapons". You need only look at the ALPG making +1 weapons & shields available like a level 5 door prize while he first mention of a scroll being available is tier4 (level 17-20) to see that something is bonkers in the valuation wotc is using.
  
  Yes a caster can get a +1 wand at level 5 too & even with their damage counting as magical the whole time there is a much greater problem in the form of their nondamage (buff/debuff/control/etc) spells are pegged to a power level that assumes the martials are still doing half damage. Wotc has bent over backwards to make clear should be "generously" available at the piddling cost of a price tag trivially placed somewhere between a 400gp breastplate & 750gp halfplate or about 10 levels worth of spells scribed to a wizard's spellbook at most and as soon as the weapon users accumulate that lofty sum of coin they can shed their weighted clothing to dramatic effect. There is no way to apply that to all of the spells pegged to the powerscale of a campaign with no magic weapons that goes against WotC's own advice to such an extreme degree.
  
  Even if you assume for the sake of argument that those buff/debuff/control/etc spells are properly pegged to a power scale where martials are assumed to have magic weapons there is still the fact that only the highlighted stuff appears in fights decked out like this
  
  
  With all of that on the table "but it's magic damage" is little more than a distraction from a very real & pervasive problem deeply rooted in 5e.
  The secondary effects could maybe be justified by reduced damage alone, but when the martials get a +1 weapon the justification is rendered bonkers with the reduced bar that those cantrips & leveled spells are pegged to no longer exists & that is likely the case for the rest of the game while the caster will forever be dealing with magic resistance energy resistance energy immune & legendary resists

• Second is Agonizing eldritch blast. That actually creates a huge problem for correcting the problems above are massively complicated by the fact that agonizing eldritch blast is a cantrip provided to a class with huge amounts of spell list overlap with those classes with normal cantrips. Any fix needs to target both groups differently & the GM is already on shaky favoritism footing because WotC makes it look like 5e is already deep in this nonsense with how many layers of safeguards they weave into the system to protect against it.
• Third "a wand or a few scrolls"... Do you not know how those things work?

DMG139 explains it

Spoiler: Sit down, it's a doozy

Plus if you look up above wotc has made it clear that those thing should probably trail a +1 weapon by thirteen levels & not be available till tier4/level 17

As to wands, those have a very limited number of uses while rules for item decay & breakage do not even exist for campaigns where the GM wants them and wotc "intentionally" created a second problem if the gm decides to shrug & make those have even greater availability with more charges.

 

[fearsomepirate]

To put it another, very simple way, 5e brought the caster power ceiling down a lot, but also raised the floor. By getting rid of damage cantrips, you're dropping the floor basically back to what it used to be, but the ceiling is still lower.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

My personal solution to this that I'm considering is actually to give each implement it's own basic "melee spell attack" and/or "ranged spell attack", and each individual implement a number of charges of cantrip casting, with the caster able to cast cantrips without an implement a number of times per short rest equal to their casting mod.

It isn't a change that is felt too much mechanically, but the knowledge of it changes how people think and talk about their implement and their casting.