D&D (2024) Down Leveling spells, from the Expert Classes playtest.

[darjr]

From the playtest.

I haven’t seen this discussed much. Has anyone tried this in play yet? I wonder if this would mean spells level ranges might get rearranged.

Was anyone doing this as a house rule?

edit to add a link to the point in the video where they say it's something they are experimenting with.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Was anyone doing this as a house rule?

I never actually tried it out, but I played around with the idea for quite a while.

 

[cbwjm]

It was one of those things I thought about, though I think spells like fireball would have needed a bit of adjustment. Some spells I lowered to a lower level because the horrid wilting at level 8 felt like wasted potential so I downgraded it to level 4 (could probably be level 3) by reducing it by 1 die per level

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

fireball would have needed a bit of adjustment

If I were to "downlevel" Fireball, I would have it be something like this:

At Lower Levels. When you cast this spell using a spell slot of 2nd level or lower, the damage decreases by 3d6 and the radius shrinks by 5 feet for each slot level below 3rd.

That would make it so 1st level fireball would be a 10-foot radius sphere that deals 2d6 damage and 2nd level fireball has a radius of 15 feet and deals 5d6. That's still pretty powerful for those levels, but not super game-breaking.

 

[overgeeked]

It seems like bad design. Better to build a lower-level version and upcast it.

 

[darjr]

If I were to "downlevel" Fireball, I would have it be something like this:

That would make it so 1st level fireball would be a 10-foot radius sphere that deals 2d6 damage and 2nd level fireball has a radius of 15 feet and deals 5d6. That's still pretty powerful for those levels, but not super game-breaking.

I really like this!

 

[darjr]

It seems like bad design. Better to build a lower-level version and upcast it.

It’s part of the playtest, make sure you note it on the survey then.

I think the idea was to gatekeep spells out of lower level but let casters soak up lower level slots.

Note I’m not yet disagreeing.

I dunno what to think yet.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I haven’t seen this discussed much. Has anyone tried this in play yet? I wonder if this would mean spells level ranges might get rearranged.

Was anyone doing this as a house rule?

It's a good idea but it bumps into a couple of problems:

1) The simple thing to do is just lower the damage dice or the like, but some spells gain their main benefits and reasons for being higher level from stuff like vast AOEs, and it's not always clear now to reduce those.

2) A few spells in 5E are intentionally "favoured" and overpowered. This is not an accident and WotC devs have discussed this. Fireball is the most obvious example - a downlevelled Fireball would be even more overpowered than Fireball already is!

So I think they'd need to get rid of OP spells (which they really should anyway, it's a very 3E kind of approach), and also really very carefully consider the level-based elements of spells in a way they haven't previously in 5E.

 

[W'rkncacnter]

wait, what? where was this???

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

wait, what? where was this???

The Hunter Ranger Subclass. Its level 10 ability lets them cast Conjure Barrage with 1st and 2nd level spell slots.