Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 9410242" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I do want to take a step back, take a moment, and consider WHY spells instead of abilities, rather than just knee-jerking that this is a terrible atrocity against all that is good and sacred. Because I think there is a good reason for it, even if I don't necessarily always agree with it. Let us take the Forest Gnomes. In 2014, we had this: "Speak with Small Beasts: Through sounds and gestures, you can communicate simple ideas with Small or smaller beasts. Forest gnomes love animals and often keep squirrels, badgers, rabbits, moles, woodpeckers, and other creatures as beloved pets." The bolded is the ONLY rules text here. Now, let us look at Speak with Animals from 2014: "You gain the ability to comprehend and verbally communicate with beasts for the duration. The knowledge and awareness of many beasts is limited by their intelligence, but at minimum, beasts can give you information about nearby locations and monsters, including whatever they can perceive or have perceived within the past day. You might be able to persuade a beast to perform a small favor for you, at the DM's discretion." By making this "all things are spells!!!" change.... you actually get a LOT more stuff. Forest Gnomes before could not understand animals, or at the least it was very vague if they could, because you can communicate simple ideas with them, but that doesn't mean they can communicate simple ideas with you. Also, this ability just got a lot stronger, because before you were limited to small or tiny beasts, now you can speak with any beast of any size. Additionally, you have more guidance on what the beast can say to you, how long their memory might last, and ect. Now, would I like this to be a permanent, always on ability.... actually no, because then the player would ask what the dogs are saying when I say they hear dogs barking. Constantly. But making it an at-will, non-spell ability would be fine for me... but even if I do that, I would keep the reference to this spell because it tells me a lot more about how this ability works than the previous version. Looking to the issue between Misty Step and Astral Step, there are a few details we don't know that can change things. Specifically, we know that the rules on spellcasting have been altered, but we don't know how. How does this comparison look if you can cast spells with an action and a bonus action? How would the comparison look if you only can't spend two spell slots in the same turn, meaning a non-spell slot use of a spell would allow you to double cast? And even if they change nothing about it... it is rather trivial to say "when you use this ability, it does not count as casting a spell" and be done with it.</blockquote>

Verification