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Message: <blockquote data-quote="auburn2" data-source="post: 7043690" data-attributes="member: 6855259">Not totally redicuous but brilliant!  And quite frankly a lot more likely for the parties enemies.  First on parties:  Carrying around animals on adventure would be a pain in the arse but doable if your low level characters know they are going to battle with a wizard, it might give them one round up on the bad guy although more than likely he will choose a new spell.  I would reward such ingenuity as it is not really exploiting the rules, it is how it is designed to work.  No different than bringing some caltrops to slow the guards in the halway before you grab the princess and slide down the bedsheets from the tower window while rescuing her from the evil Duke .... or arranging ahead of time to have an "innocent shephard" with a herd of goats crossing the road to slow the guards chasing your getaway carriage. In this case it just uses a game mechanic based on the "scientific properties" of the fantasy world instead of a "real world" mechanic.  Carrying spare animals around as normal gear "just in case" would get rather burdensome.  Especially since I can count on one hand the number of times the party has been slapped (either as DM or player).  A AOE spell or trap that kills my spare chickens is far more likely.The enemy: Foes at a guard station could and would use it to prevent being "murdered in their sleep",  Again in the real world we have dogs and such with security guards.  This is because of their heightened senses, and we have canaries in mines to detect gas leaks by taking the hit and dying before the miners. This is because there are occasionally poision gas leaks in mines.  If mages with sleep spells were a real thing I guarantee we would have sacrificial mice with the secret service agents guarding Trump.  Also even if you think it is campy to have animals just to take the sleep hit, it is very likely that your orcs brought a couple squirels with them to guard duty at the cave entrance to cook for lunch.  Also anywhere in the bandit hideout where there is contraband there is probably livestock (chickens and such) they stole from the victims as well ... not to mention the livestock they have to eat for themselves.The main problem with your rewrite is almost no one will ever actually go to sleep, especially in a battle. How many rounds on average will it take an enemy to fail a save with advantage 4 times?  Most battles are over in 4 rounds so even enemies with really bad saves will still die before they fall asleep.  If it was a big battle with a lot of packed enemies maybe but even then you would be casting a spell in round 1 with a big payoff that happens only in rounds 4, 5 and 6 (any monster that makes it to round 7 will have made 3 saves) and only then to really unlucky monsters.  I would suggest a different name for your rewrite - change the name to "drowsy" as that is really the main effect with the sleep being a bonus affect essentially.  To be clear it is a good spell.  I think it is well balanced and is actually better than the original against high-level monsters but it isn't doing what the original spell of the namesake was intended to do.</blockquote>

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