D&D 5E How many spells can be upcast?
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
This list has all of them, including XGtE and TCoE spells. I counted 109 from the PHB, although I'm sure I mixed up a few between the 3 books.
www.flutesloot.com
The Ultimate Guide to Upcasting All Spells to 9th Level: D&D 5e – Flutes Loot
Every upcast-able spell and what it does with a ninth-level spell slot. Find out which spells scale the best for your spellcaster in D&D 5e!
www.flutesloot.com
General rules for upcasting are:
Increases Damage (Fireball, Magic Missile)
Increases Duration (Hex, Planar Binding)
Increases Strength of Monster (Infernal Calling, Summon Aberration)
Increase Target Cap (Animal Friendship, Animate Objects)
But for some stuff that's just not really useful or important. Like Mordenkainen's Mansion. You could make it bigger, I suppose, but the typical party isn't going to need a bigger mansion. Add more servants, but it's got enough. Make it last longer but honestly if you're in there for more than a Day you can just cast it again and have another 24 hours to get a long rest in.
And stuff like Plant Growth instead increases the Casting Time to ritual levels for the purposes of improving it's effects 'cause it is more thematic, what with the whole 8 hours to enrich the soil.
It's less a matter of no internal design rules and more a function of magics that are sometimes designed with a narrow purpose that really doesn't need or benefit from expansion.
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
To be fair, a game heavily influenced by crowd voting on design decisions probably doesn't have strict internal design cohesion as a really high priority.
But yea, 5e spells are varied enough in design that putting "one size fits all" increase rules would either be non-applicable for a bunch of spells or could lead to unintended breakage of the spell.
Auramancer
Explorer
General upcasting could likely also heavily overlap with metamagic stuff and intrude on the sorcerer.
My comment was more that it is obvious there is no "effects based math" happening in the background during the design process. It is arbitrary and subject to the whim of the mob, as @TwoSix suggested.
jmartkdr2
Hero
I think it's likely they dropped any attempt at that; too many spells have unique effects, so creating general scaling rules would create more problems than it solves.
If you want to have upcasting increase the number of targets that get a condition, you have to either balance all the conditions or accept that some spells scale a lot better than others. If each condition has it's own scaling, you need to have those rules somewhere other than the spell or repeat them in each spell description - and if you're doing special cases for each condition you now need to do special cases for every spell that creates a unique effect, which is a lot of them. In other words, you don't really save page count by generalizing unless you throw what little balance there is and include a bunch pf trap options.
On top of that, there was a general trend of getting away from 'hidden rules" that plagued 3e. Stuff like creature-type-based immunities, special size modifiers, and general secondary effects to changes in general concepts. No more size modifiers, no more creature-type or other tag-based traits not found in the stat block. Spell descriptions should tell you everything you need to know about how to use a spell in the game, aside form some jargon (eg spellcasting ability modifier) or really general rules like action types.
This is, I think, a good thing. Exception-based rules shouldn't spread the exceptions that apply to a case across the books.
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