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

[tetrasodium]

Don’t lie about me, please.

I never said or implied any such thing. Hell, what I said directly precludes such a thing, as I mentioned apprenticeships and the like.

you might want to doublecheck your post here.

On the other hand, it very much is the case in Eberron that magewrights are not unskilled laborers. You can run it however you want, but in the actual canon Eberron, a magewright is someone who has attained professional rank in a magical trade skill. They are not entry level workers.

It's not saying that magewrights are unskilled laborers to say that magewright includes lower skilled trades. A farmer doesn't need to be "unskilled" to to have a lower skill barrier of entry into the job of being a farmer than transplant surgeon rocket scientist or even a nuclear power technician.

More relevant to your original claim about training someone to "operate" a cannon in a couple weeks compared to not being able to do the same with a siege staff or similar because "Those are vastly more expensive, and becoming a magewright takes years of training." (yes those are both things you said and by saying them in the context you said them responding to other posts you implied things). You are comparing two wildly different levels of skill to make room for gunpowder cannons in advanced worlds like eberron. A soldier doesn't need to be a fully fledged bombardier magewright with years of training to smash a globe on a plate & do the things you spent a couple weeks learning to fire a siege staff in the right general direction any more than it's required for a similar level of proficiency with cannon operation.... both are likely to be a bad shot & maybe even maim the wrong people, but both are similarly skilled. A soldier might not even need a couple weeks to simply fire one of those if they've seen it done up close & feel like the risk of blowing themselves up is justified.

It's not reasonable to justify the existence of a cannon alongside things like siege staffs by comparing someone who can load it point it in the general direction & light the fuse after a couple weeks of training with a person who spends years of highly specialized training to operate arcane artillery with reliable precision. That's like comparing someone who completes a CPR course in a couple weeks to a lung transplant surgeon.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

A soldier doesn't need to be a fully fledged bombardier magewright with years of training to smash a globe on a plate & do the things you spent a couple weeks learning to fire a siege staff in the right general direction any more than it's required for a similar level of proficiency with cannon operation.... both are likely to be a bad shot & maybe even maim the wrong people, but both are similarly skilled.

Unless Keith made an enormously transformative departure from official lore in Exploring Eberron, yes they do. Because they literally cannot activate the weapon, regardless of whether the weapon is charged or not, or how, without being a spellcaster.

So, the item used to charge a weapon is useful because it allows a magewright, who is a spellcaster with few if any spell slots and mastery of a couple useful rituals and maybe a cantrip, all of which took years to learn like any trade skill, to recharge the weapon without a more powerful spellcaster around.

The guy operating the siege weapon is a professional. Training someone how to use the weapon is useless if they don’t also have training in how magic works and how to direct magical energy to activate these types of magic items.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

you might want to doublecheck your post here.

I know exactly what I said. It implies nothing like what you claim.

It's not saying that magewrights are unskilled laborers to say that magewright includes lower skilled trades. A farmer doesn't need to be "unskilled" to to have a lower skill barrier of entry into the job of being a farmer than transplant surgeon rocket scientist or even a nuclear power technician.

Stop making disingenuous comparisons unrelated to what I’ve actually said. I compared farmers to trades professionals, and successful farming very much does require a similar level of skill and knowledge. I’m still blown away by your laughable earlier inclusion of seamstresses as low skill workers.

perhaps more importantly, even “lower skilled” trades take years to master, and in official lore and from Keith’s words Lamplighters take years to learn their trade well enough to do it professionally. Because most people who can learn magic need that sort of time do so. I personally dislike this vision of PC exceptionalism, but it’s the official take in Eberron.

More relevant to your original claim about training someone to "operate" a cannon in a couple weeks compared to not being able to do the same with a siege staff or similar because "Those are vastly more expensive, and becoming a magewright takes years of training." (yes those are both things you said and by saying them in the context you said them responding to other posts you implied things). You are comparing two wildly different levels of skill to make room for gunpowder cannons in advanced worlds like eberron.

Nothing I said implies what you claim. And no, again you’re ignoring that becoming a magewright is required to be able to activate arcane siege engines. This is exactly the point. A weapon that requires specialized training equivalent to a trade skill is inherently not directly equivalent to a basic cannon, which does not require anything like that to operate.

It's not reasonable to justify the existence of a cannon alongside things like siege staffs by comparing someone who can load it point it in the general direction & light the fuse after a couple weeks of training with a person who spends years of highly specialized training to operate arcane artillery with reliable precision.

Yes, it is. Anyone can be trained to do one. The other, very much not so.

That's like comparing someone who completes a CPR course in a couple weeks to a lung transplant surgeon.

No, it isn’t. A trades professional is not comparable to a surgeon. You’re inventing absurd comparisons and then pretending I made them, when I didn’t.

 

[tetrasodium]

Unless Keith made an enormously transformative departure from official lore in Exploring Eberron, yes they do. Because they literally cannot activate the weapon, regardless of whether the weapon is charged or not, or how, without being a spellcaster.

So, the item used to charge a weapon is useful because it allows a magewright, who is a spellcaster with few if any spell slots and mastery of a couple useful rituals and maybe a cantrip, all of which took years to learn like any trade skill, to recharge the weapon without a more powerful spellcaster around.

The guy operating the siege weapon is a professional. Training someone how to use the weapon is useless if they don’t also have training in how magic works and how to direct magical energy to activate these types of magic items.

I've talked about the "small globes" known as breath of siberys that an operator crushes against a brass plate repeatedly & even included screencaps on relevant sections from EE in this thred. You have absolutely no excuse to continue denying that it says they charge the weapon without a spell slot.
Comparing a "master" bombadier with some guy who got "a couple of weeks" in order to claim that it takes years to operate a siege staff at all is an extremely unreasonable position that you are trying to use as a justification for cannons having a role in a setting like eberron alongside siege staffs.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I've talked about the "small globes" known as breath of siberys that an operator crushes against a brass plate repeatedly & even included screencaps on relevant sections from EE in this thred. You have absolutely no excuse to continue denying that it says they charge the weapon without a spell slot.

I can’t tell if you’re skimming my posts and missing it, or intentionally misrepresenting my arguments. Either way, please stop.

I never commented on the charging of the weapon, other than in passing in my last post. I am talking about the fact that the weapon requires a spellcaster to activate it. Unless Keith made a huge departure from previous lore, in which case EE contradicts official lore, and we need to disclaim the distinction before making EE part of a discussion about how things work in Eberron.

Comparing a "master" bombadier with some guy who got "a couple of weeks" in order to claim that it takes years to operate a siege staff at all is an extremely unreasonable position that you are trying to use as a justification for cannons having a role in a setting like eberron alongside siege staffs.

No. You don’t get it. These weapons require a spellcaster to activate. Not to recharge, to activate. That means that the operators of a siege weapon in Eberron are equivalent to trades professionals.

I really don’t know how to make it clearer.

Edit: Read the siege staff again. It requires attunement by a spellcaster. Someday it may not, and maybe mundane weapons will be fully obsolete in Eberron’s future, but for now powerful magical weapons require skill and training to operate, whether they are magical versions of normal weapons, or siege weapons and wands andthe like, which only work for spellcasters. They get to be more common in Eberron because you can go to trade school and basically get the Ritual Caster or Magic Initiate feat by the time you’re a journeyman, but every wandslinger and artillerist in Eberron has some manner of spellcasting, and if they aren’t someone special, that took years to gain. Period. That is factually the canon take in Eberron.

 

[not-so-newguy]

So...how ’bout them cantrips? Pretty nutty, eh?

 

[CleverNickName]

So...how ’bout them cantrips? Pretty nutty, eh?

I almost forgot what we were talking about here. Anyway, @Esbee has a pretty good idea, I think.

I'm going to do an exercise on Friday's game. Our party of adventurers consists of a Bard, a Cleric, and a Wizard, and we're all 9th level adventurers in the World of Eberron. I'm going to keep track of the number of cantrips that each of them casts through the course of our 5-hour gaming session, and report back.

I decided not to let the other players know that I'm counting the number of times they use cantrips. I feel like I'd get better results if they didn't know I was watching.

 

[tetrasodium]

I can’t tell if you’re skimming my posts and missing it, or intentionally misrepresenting my arguments. Either way, please stop.

I never commented on the charging of the weapon, other than in passing in my last post. I am talking about the fact that the weapon requires a spellcaster to activate it. Unless Keith made a huge departure from previous lore, in which case EE contradicts official lore, and we need to disclaim the distinction before making EE part of a discussion about how things work in Eberron.

No. You don’t get it. These weapons require a spellcaster to activate. Not to recharge, to activate. That means that the operators of a siege weapon in Eberron are equivalent to trades professionals.

I really don’t know how to make it clearer.

It also takes a specially trained baker to bake a cake, said training can often be summarized as reading the recipe on the box & basic familiarity with kitchen tools. That level of familiarity with the arcane equivalent of kitchen tools is common in Eberron, Sigil, possibly pre-cleansing war Athas, parts of Thay, much of silverymoon based entirely on the high % of elves, & many others making it perfectly reasonable that a period as long as "a couple weeks" could train someone up to metaphorically push the button. At your table you are welcome to declare that the level of "specially trained" needed is more like grandmaster cakewars champion, but the setting & RAW for the artillery weapons themselves do not require that

Your arguments depend on conflating two wildly different levels of training with the weapon as being equivalent.

You also seem to be confusing the section on players activating them

with the section about npcs doing so immediately before that

Casting cantrips as an action or ritually including the racial cantrips makes one "a spellcaster". Adding "specially trained" from there only requires some amount of special training not X level artificer. Despite your claims otherwise nothing about the level of training or the required time investment is detailed. When talking about a setting where a lamplighter, seamstress, launderer, chef, & possibly even the farmer you talked up earlier are spellcasters there is not a very high barrier in place by needing a "spellcaster" to operate a siege staff with the same "couple of weeks" you put forward as good for operating a gunpowder cannon for the "specially trained" part to be met.

 

[not-so-newguy]

I almost forgot what we were talking about here. Anyway, @Esbee has a pretty good idea, I think.


I decided not to let the other players know that I'm counting the number of times they use cantrips. I feel like I'd get better results if they didn't know I was watching.

Just thought it was a little bit humorous how far off topic this heated tangent has gone and felt a need to comment

It does bug me that PCs get unlimited cantrips (the verisimilitude thing), but limiting them seems to create more problems than it solves. So I just leave it as is. Unlimited cantrips aren’t unbalanced or OP, although there are cantrips that need to be policed (e.g. Guidance... maybe others?) in order to avoid spammination.

 

[cbwjm]

The only cantrip that I think is, maybe, problematic is eldritch blast. It makes many people playing a warlock feel shoe-horned into taking it. I can't recall if I mentioned this on ENworld or Reddit, but I'm thinking of making it scale like other cantrips, and therefore remove the extra attacks, and allow the warlock invocations that formerly affected only eldritch blast to instead affect all warlock cantrips.