D&D General Limiting Utility Cantrips

[jmartkdr2]

The comments don’t seem to reflect the poll results.

I wouldn't change it, and I probably left a comment on why I think it works fine on the thread about setting off traps. But if you do feel the need to change it...

Make them be castable at will, but you have to prepare them with one of your normal spell preparations to be able to cast them--they can't be selected as one of your known cantrips.

Even doing that I expect (based on my experience with allowing people to do that in addition to the normal rules) that players will almost never prepare cantrips. The undesirability of sacrificing a prepared leveled spell for another at-will cantrip is high.

Making them actually use a 1st level slot to cast is basically eliminating them from the game. Might as well make them some sort of ritual instead at that point.

Kind of like how 13th Age does it? Could work, though you'd probably want to give a couple extra prep slots to compensate.

I think they might be a bit more popular given the fact that you don't prepare spells into specific slots - having detect magic on hand is more likely to come up than giant insects if you already have a summon prepped.

 

[kigmatzomat]

casters might have less slots than 3.5e but it seems more often than not past the first few levels they're still not running out of slots before long resting again and getting them all back, most groups just don't seem to want run the requisite attrition to get to that point,

That's not my experience. Plenty of days in tier3 & 4 where all I have left are cantrips, 1st, 4th and 7th slots. And in addition to cantrips, a lot of the time I am using an action to animate a non-concentration 6th level Major Image of an "Eversmoking Bottle" to blind enemies.

I am sure some of it is my character is a Bard, which has no class mechanism to get extra spell slots in a day, unlike wizards, warlocks, clerics or paladins. Then add a series of adventures where we need to deal with a ton of enemies as fast as possible day after day, but I desperately feel the lack of spell slots compared to earlier editions.

 

[Emerikol]

I'd say get rid of cantrips all together but hey I'm pretty old school.

 

[Stormonu]

I'd say get rid of cantrips all together but hey I'm pretty old school.

I've loved cantrips since I first encountered them in 1E's Unearthed Arcana. But I am not enamored with 5E's implementation.

 

[Emerikol]

I've loved cantrips since I first encountered them in 1E's Unearthed Arcana. But I am not enamored with 5E's implementation.

I think most of the good from cantrips could be illustrated by a single spell. You cast the spell and for 24 hours you get these special abilities which are low key but worthwhile. You can with concentration produce a flame the burns from your finger, you can also produce a pure light that hovers and moves up to 30 feet away at your command. Things like that. 5e's spell system also kind of limits how that would work but I'm basically speaking from past editions in my thinking. I don't play 5e.

 

[Stormonu]

I think most of the good from cantrips could be illustrated by a single spell. You cast the spell and for 24 hours you get these special abilities which are low key but worthwhile. You can with concentration produce a flame the burns from your finger, you can also produce a pure light that hovers and moves up to 30 feet away at your command. Things like that. 5e's spell system also kind of limits how that would work but I'm basically speaking from past editions in my thinking. I don't play 5e.

That was done in 2E with the 1st level spell Cantrip, and it wasn't worth bothering with.

I like having them as extra little tricks you can play around with without eating into the spell economy, but I don't want them to be unlimited in their use.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I am sympathetic to a desire to rein in caster power a little, so I'd say uses per short rest. Perhaps proficiency x2? That's few enough that at low levels, there's a reasonable concern that you might run out, without being so few that you're always running out. And by the time you're getting 12 uses per short rest, you're already a very powerful spellcaster, so the fact that the "limitation" has mostly vanished doesn't seem like an issue to me.

Might increase the duration on some of the light-creating cantrips, particularly dancing lights since it giving only 4 min/SR is...pretty harshly limited. I'd say allow light to last 4 hours and dancing lights to be Concentration up to...maybe half an hour? That way, snuffing out your source of magical light is still a cost, but not a huge one.

All of this is assuming that it's Profx2 uses for each cantrip. If they're actually sharing one singular pool of uses, even 4 might still be too limited.

 

[Distracted DM]

I am sympathetic to a desire to rein in caster power a little, so I'd say uses per short rest. Perhaps proficiency x2? That's few enough that at low levels, there's a reasonable concern that you might run out, without being so few that you're always running out. And by the time you're getting 12 uses per short rest, you're already a very powerful spellcaster, so the fact that the "limitation" has mostly vanished doesn't seem like an issue to me.

Might increase the duration on some of the light-creating cantrips, particularly dancing lights since it giving only 4 min/SR is...pretty harshly limited. I'd say allow light to last 4 hours and dancing lights to be Concentration up to...maybe half an hour? That way, snuffing out your source of magical light is still a cost, but not a huge one.

All of this is assuming that it's Profx2 uses for each cantrip. If they're actually sharing one singular pool of uses, even 4 might still be too limited.

To my mind, giving pb*2 uses per cantrip per short rest is effectively not limiting them at all.

Having 6 uses of Light and 6 uses of Mage Hand per short rest really isn't going to affect how often you make use of either.

But you did ask a good question, are we talking a pool (like spell slots) or per cantrip?
I guess that makes me consider the roll-to-cast model, per cantrip. Hm.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To my mind, giving pb*2 uses per cantrip per short rest is effectively not limiting them at all.

Having 6 uses of Light and 6 uses of Mage Hand per short rest really isn't going to affect how often you make use of either.

But you did ask a good question, are we talking a pool (like spell slots) or per cantrip?
I guess that makes me consider the roll-to-cast model, per cantrip. Hm.

At first level, it's only 4. It's only when you hit level 5 that it becomes 6/SR. It isn't until you hit level 9 that it becomes any higher, at which point limiting cantrips doesn't seem like it's that big a thing. Not sure why you thought it would be 6 to start with?

And, again, I'm not really seeing how this ISN'T limiting. Any cantrip that requires concentration is already going to be pretty harshly limited, especially since taking short rests is such a huge ask (a full hour of doing functionally nothing at all is a pretty steep cost!) That's six and only six mage hands, and given most groups never take more than two short rests a day (and sometimes less), that means a maximum of 12 mage hands in an entire day.

Limiting it down to PB/sr is extremely limiting. Now you get two lights, two, and then you're out, until you spend a whole hour doing nothing. Six total for an entire day until you hit level 5.

 

[James Gasik]

Invoking Grod's Law* here- if you limit a cantrip like Light to the point that it can't replace torches, thus forcing people to have torches, nobody is likely to take Light, at which point you may as well have just banned it.

*To summarize, balancing mechanics by making them annoying to use tends to lead to people not engaging with said mechanics in the first place.