D&D General Limiting Utility Cantrips

[HappyHubris]

Mending is the only one I limit, mostly for worldbuilding purposes (Micah Sweet would be proud!). I have the magic unravel after 24-hours, restoring it to the original state. I don't sweat a lot of world building implications, but instantaneous and permanent fixing of broken items really does change things beyond what I want them to be, even for a world such as Eberron.

Oh, Guidance as well. You can only benefit from Guidance once per short rest. I added scaling and removed concentration though.

Interesting. My tables generally forget about guidance or are surprised by rolls before it can kick in.

Mending makes sense conceptually. Can you elaborate on where it became game-breaking?

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Interesting. My tables generally forget about guidance or are surprised by rolls before it can kick in.

I give the cleric and bard poker chips for guidance/bardic inspiration as well as other color chips for heroic inspiration. It helps them remember to actually use them. Ditching concentration also stops the warlock from stressing about Hex maintenance or cleric with Enhanced Ability.

Mending makes sense conceptually. Can you elaborate on where it became game-breaking?

So it's not game breaking, but a TON of species now get crantrips, so mending is going to be more ubiquitous than it was before.
This means any job involving fixing a broken item is basically gone from society. You still need to have craftspersons to create items obviously, but it kind of bothered me. It came to the forefront in our Abomination Vaults game where the party decided to take over Gauntlight Keep and restore it. Having 4 casters spamming mending for weeks at a time just felt wrong compared to engaging with the town laborers, protecting them from monsters bursting from the depths, etc. The party and I just agreed it wasn't the feeling and world we wanted to emulate. For random dungeon adventuring, there's not a lot of difference between mending a chain permanently and mending it for a day.

 

[HappyHubris]

So it's not game breaking, but a TON of species now get crantrips, so mending is going to be more ubiquitous than it was before.
This means any job involving fixing a broken item is basically gone from society. You still need to have craftspersons to create items obviously, but it kind of bothered me. It came to the forefront in our Abomination Vaults game where the party decided to take over Gauntlight Keep and restore it. Having 4 casters spamming mending for weeks at a time just felt wrong compared to engaging with the town laborers, protecting them from monsters bursting from the depths, etc. The party and I just agreed it wasn't the feeling and world we wanted to emulate. For random dungeon adventuring, there's not a lot of difference between mending a chain permanently and mending it for a day.

Mending only works on a 1 foot break or tear so if your keep has issues that are larger in magnitude like a collapsed wall, pulverized door, or two foot gap, you're out of luck. It also works only on mechanical breaks or tears, not burned out elements, acid damage, etc.

While I agree that RAW you could stave off a bunch of the trades, you would still need heavy trade investment for rehabilitation. You'd probably run into issues very quickly with "1 foot," if your damage is say a ten-foot vertical break in a wall, a 5-foot gap in a gate, etc. And RAI its perfectly fine to declare a use unintended or rule that mending only works on single simple points of damage in simple objects, not things like mechanisms or paintings.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

Mending only works on a 1 foot break or tear so if your keep has issues that are larger in magnitude like a collapsed wall, pulverized door, or two foot gap, you're out of luck. It also works only on mechanical breaks or tears, not burned out elements, acid damage, etc.

While I agree that RAW you could stave off a bunch of the trades, you would still need heavy trade investment for rehabilitation. You'd probably run into issues very quickly with "1 foot," if your damage is say a ten-foot vertical break in a wall, a 5-foot gap in a gate, etc. And RAI its perfectly fine to declare a use unintended or rule that mending only works on single simple points of damage in simple objects, not things like mechanisms or paintings.

That also makes me do a judgment call on what it can do. I'm fine ruling more liberally on a temporary solution. I'd honestly be more fine making it a 1st level spell and allowing it to do more, and have a casting time of 1 action.

 

[Stormonu]

I give the cleric and bard poker chips for guidance/bardic inspiration as well as other color chips for heroic inspiration. It helps them remember to actually use them. Ditching concentration also stops the warlock from stressing about Hex maintenance or cleric with Enhanced Ability.

So it's not game breaking, but a TON of species now get crantrips, so mending is going to be more ubiquitous than it was before.
This means any job involving fixing a broken item is basically gone from society. You still need to have craftspersons to create items obviously, but it kind of bothered me. It came to the forefront in our Abomination Vaults game where the party decided to take over Gauntlight Keep and restore it. Having 4 casters spamming mending for weeks at a time just felt wrong compared to engaging with the town laborers, protecting them from monsters bursting from the depths, etc. The party and I just agreed it wasn't the feeling and world we wanted to emulate. For random dungeon adventuring, there's not a lot of difference between mending a chain permanently and mending it for a day.

In my game, I've prevented mending from working on anything that has a Damage Threshold (DT) as I feel it's become the same issue as Cure Minor Wounds in the 3E era. I've further created a Repair spell akin to Cure Wounds that repairs objects of 1d10 hit points per spell level. Most objects of significance have a DT of 5 or 10, so it takes far more investment to get something fixed - and it's a basic, possibly ugly fix at that if you don't have skill in the appropriate tool that you'd need for regular repairs.

I do like the idea of making it a temporary fix - and may play around with that for the leveled versions (likely, once you cast it as a 5th+, it becomes a permanent fix otherwise it'll hold for a limited time, from a few minutes to a day or so).

 

[Sword of Spirit]

The way I deal with unwanted world consequences like mending making mundane labor obsolete, is to say that "at-will" casting is a mechanical abstraction. For adventuring purposes, yes its effectively at-will. But in the world, casting a cantrip takes a significantly bigger toll on you than working with artisan tools.

You can simply tell the players that any caster knows you can't really keep that up for hours on end. If they just want to try (or there is some adventurous situation where it would actually be interesting, like repairing some sort of defenses before a fast approaching massive assault), then Constitution checks are in order. Consequences for failure should be at least Exhaustion, and may some sort of magical burn-out where they lose access to some spell slots for a few days afterwards. "Oh, so that's why people don't do that!"

The goal is to reconcile "casters can cast these things at will, which should really change how the world works" with "I've decided it doesn't actually change how the world works" by coming up with interesting ideas about how both elements could be true. Almost every problem I've run across like this has possible creative solutions to let you eat your cake and have it too. Fantasy FTW!

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Yep, so really the only thing to consider is with failed saves come riders often... so they might be worth it, or they affect multiple targets. It's a balancing game as to which is better for a situation.

Personally, I prefer save cantrips, but builds around attack cantrips can be super effective of course.

So, correct me if I came to a wrong conclusion about how the relative power of attack versus save cantrips work.

I believed for years that attacks were more effective than saves. I mean, they are 2 points higher and you can crit, right?

But then, a couple months ago, I wondered if that was actually right, and I started fiddling with math. Initially, I examined it from a PVP situation as a baseline (we already know how monsters are different than PCs mechanically, so that lets us later extend the findings).

I took the members of your typical 5e adventuring party (you know, that Champion, Thief, Life cleric, and Evoker WotC used in initial design balance) and figured out what the average AC would be at various levels. Figuring out the average spell attack roll was even easier. That gets a % to hit equal level opponents.

For saving throws, most characters will only be proficient in 1/3 of the saves, including one of the strong and one of the weak ones. I picked the ability scores that made sense for a class, and then determined what a character's average overall saving throw should be. Determining the save DCs was also easy, and from that their % of failing saves can be detemined.

At every level characters were on average more likely to fail a save than to be hit with an attack.

If we extend that to monsters, while lower level monsters often have weaker AC than PCs, higher level monsters offen have superior AC. Most monsters have zero saving throw proficiencies, although some (particularly high level ones) might have more than PCs. Except at the high levels where monsters start rocking 3+ saves, monsters are actually going to be amplifying this effect of save spells being more likely to take effect.

And that is all assuming the caster is firing blind without knowing which saves are weak for a target. In reality, if a caster knows two cantrips that use different save abilities, and can even guess right about which a foe is going to be weak to some of the time, they should be a lot more effective.

So, this is all new to me, and completely reverses what I thought I knew about the relative power of attack vs save cantrips (and spells in general). If I am wrong, I would very much like to be corrected, because it directly impacts my own cantrip designs.

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

Cantrips are already limited by how long you can talk and wiggle your arms before you get tired, as most of them have verbal and somatic components. I would be skeptical of anyone who thought that they could use them for more than 1,000 rounds in a row, or more than 4,000 rounds per day without picking up a level of exhaustion. If you need a lower limit than that I have no suggestions.

 

[James Gasik]

So, correct me if I came to a wrong conclusion about how the relative power of attack versus save cantrips work.

I believed for years that attacks were more effective than saves. I mean, they are 2 points higher and you can crit, right?

But then, a couple months ago, I wondered if that was actually right, and I started fiddling with math. Initially, I examined it from a PVP situation as a baseline (we already know how monsters are different than PCs mechanically, so that lets us later extend the findings).

I took the members of your typical 5e adventuring party (you know, that Champion, Thief, Life cleric, and Evoker WotC used in initial design balance) and figured out what the average AC would be at various levels. Figuring out the average spell attack roll was even easier. That gets a % to hit equal level opponents.

For saving throws, most characters will only be proficient in 1/3 of the saves, including one of the strong and one of the weak ones. I picked the ability scores that made sense for a class, and then determined what a character's average overall saving throw should be. Determining the save DCs was also easy, and from that their % of failing saves can be detemined.

At every level characters were on average more likely to fail a save than to be hit with an attack.

If we extend that to monsters, while lower level monsters often have weaker AC than PCs, higher level monsters offen have superior AC. Most monsters have zero saving throw proficiencies, although some (particularly high level ones) might have more than PCs. Except at the high levels where monsters start rocking 3+ saves, monsters are actually going to be amplifying this effect of save spells being more likely to take effect.

And that is all assuming the caster is firing blind without knowing which saves are weak for a target. In reality, if a caster knows two cantrips that use different save abilities, and can even guess right about which a foe is going to be weak to some of the time, they should be a lot more effective.

So, this is all new to me, and completely reverses what I thought I knew about the relative power of attack vs save cantrips (and spells in general). If I am wrong, I would very much like to be corrected, because it directly impacts my own cantrip designs.

So, let's look at it this way. Goblins.

The CR 1/4 Goblin Warrior has a 15 AC and a Dexterity save of +2.

If we assume a level 1 caster has a 16 in their primary ability, then your attack bonus to hit with, say, Firebolt, is +4. You hit on an 11, so that's a 45% chance to hit (dropping to 35% if there is soft cover).

Now let's switch this to something like Sacred Flame. It has a save DC of 13. Our Goblin friend has a Dexterity save of +2, so they save on an 11 for a 45% chance of a saving throw. This should, by rights, be exactly the same. And even better for SF, it doesn't really care about cover. Granted, the Fire Bolt will do 1 more damage to the Goblin's 10 hit points, so we'll call it pretty close to even.

Now, it's somewhat easier to boost accuracy for attack cantrips than save DC's- advantage is easy to get for players, forcing disadvantage on foes, not so much. Bless straight up adds 1d4 to hit, and while Bane should be equal, imposing a -1d4 saving throw, it itself has a saving throw to complicate things. Plus, your weapon using friends will gain more advantage from things like Bless than the Sacred Flame user will (ironic since it's probably that same SF user providing the spell in question).

This alone shouldn't be a big issue. Further, as you go up the goblin family tree, AC's might go up, but Dex saves remain fairly constant. So why does Sacred Flame seem to miss so much? I actually thought it was just confirmation bias until I played Baldur's Gate 3, and found that poor Shadowheart can't seem to land a Sacred Flame to save her soul- something must be going on here!

A slight problem comes with the nature of a d20 itself. The average of 1-20 isn't 10, but 10.5. By rights, a d20 should land on 11 slightly more often than a 10. This is to the advantage of attack cantrips, and to the disadvantage of saving throw cantrips. Is it enough to really matter? Out of 40 attack rolls, you should hit one more time than you usually would. So probably not.

And yet, I still see it all the time. In my current game, my 10th level Wizard has an 18 Int (I really wanted Resilient Con at level 8). The 10th level Cleric in my party has a Wisdom of 20. Yet my at-will attacks rarely miss, and his Sacred Flame seems to land about 50% of the time. And thanks to his subclass, he even does more damage with his cantrip, as he gets to add his Wisdom to it!

So on paper, he should be superior, but he isn't in practice. Now, part of this, I think, comes down to the fact that he casts leveled spells more often than I do. Generally, I throw out a control spell and focus on staying out of harm's way, holding concentration. I might throw a fireball if the stars align for me to get multiple targets and not risk harming my allies, but those moments are fairly uncommon. So I'm plinking away with my cantrip a lot.

He, on the other hand, is spending spell slots most turns. He starts with the Spirit Guardians + Spiritual Weapon combo (we're not playing 5.2024), and from there, actions and bonus actions are spent on healing spells as needed.

Conservatively, I'd say I use my cantrip twice as much as he does. It could be more. With such a small sample size, it would seem that I hit more often. Except I started keeping track some time ago. In the 5 sessions since I started doing this, I missed with my cantrip once. He's missed with his cantrip 6 times.

Last session I got a Wand of the Warmage +2, so I'm not sure if it's worth continuing to keep track, since my accuracy is greater.

But it's worth noting that his cantrip is more broadly useful across fights, since radiant is rarely resisted, and I've been in fights where my cantrips have been resisted.

-

Another thing to keep in mind though, is that save cantrips tend to suck. Poison Spray not only has a volatile d12, with a high variance, but it's damage type is commonly resisted (or worse, enemies are immune to it). Toll the Dead has similar problems with it's Necrotic damage. And Acid Splash, though it can hit more than one target on occasion, does a lousy d6 damage, which isn't anything to write home about either. Frostbite has a strong effect, but Constitution tends to be a good save for many things. Mind Sliver and it's older brother, Vicious Mockery, have great effects but lower damage.

When people complain about attack cantrips, I'm always a bit confused. Yes, their non-physical damage and lack of ammunition requirements are advantages, but damage wise, even with scaling, they pale compared to multiple attacks and innate Dex to damage (getting your caster stat to damage isn't something everyone gets access to). The argument that they obsolete 1st level spells is less the fault of cantrips, and more the fault of leveled spells just being terrible. When your enemies start getting 50 hit points and up, what good is 3d4+3 from a Magic Missile? Even 1d10+2d6 for Ice Knife is only likely to deal 12.5 damage! You'll run out of spell slots long before you take out a single CR 2 Ogre!

-

Back to the topic at hand. How useful utility cantrips are is dependent on the game and the creativity of the players (and how open the DM is to said creativity). Most cantrips have some fine print (like the limits on what you can Mend or the time limit on Prestidigitation- most effects can last up to an hour, some only last until the end of your next turn!). It's not like I never see opportunities to use, say, Mage Hand, but they come so infrequently I rarely take the cantrip! The only one I generally always take is Prestidigitation, and mostly for roleplay reasons (unless nobody has Light).

If, in your game, someone found a good use for a cantrip, that should be a good thing, IMO. If it's becoming a problem, I don't think it's the cantrip's fault. If a 10 pound object is enough to set off traps, what of it? Couldn't you just have the strong guy of the party throw a heavy object, if you had one laying around?

I suppose that would be slightly more interesting, as you could ask for a die roll (Athletics or an attack roll), but if the trap is so easily foiled, it was inevitable, whether someone had Mage Hand or not, that the party would do so. I see this as more a problem with traps in general (being pretty boring by design most times- did you notice the trap? If yes, can you disable the trap? If no to either question, take some damage, sound an alarm, drop someone into a pit or seal an entry/exit). Complex, Rube Goldbergian traps make no sense to be encountered often (and the trap itself would be worth more than most treasure it would be protecting!), and the best traps are magical, often requiring magic to overcome.

Further, you have to think about how sparse the equipment list is. A lot of times, cantrips are subbing in for levers, long-handled lockpicks, glass cutters, hacksaws, mirror poles, and listening cones that have vanished from modern adventuring equipment! If you want to make utility cantrips less notable, bring back specialized adventuring gear!

 

[Guest 7037866]

So, correct me if I came to a wrong conclusion about how the relative power of attack versus save cantrips work.

I believed for years that attacks were more effective than saves. I mean, they are 2 points higher and you can crit, right?

But then, a couple months ago, I wondered if that was actually right, and I started fiddling with math. Initially, I examined it from a PVP situation as a baseline (we already know how monsters are different than PCs mechanically, so that lets us later extend the findings).

I took the members of your typical 5e adventuring party (you know, that Champion, Thief, Life cleric, and Evoker WotC used in initial design balance) and figured out what the average AC would be at various levels. Figuring out the average spell attack roll was even easier. That gets a % to hit equal level opponents.

For saving throws, most characters will only be proficient in 1/3 of the saves, including one of the strong and one of the weak ones. I picked the ability scores that made sense for a class, and then determined what a character's average overall saving throw should be. Determining the save DCs was also easy, and from that their % of failing saves can be detemined.

At every level characters were on average more likely to fail a save than to be hit with an attack.

If we extend that to monsters, while lower level monsters often have weaker AC than PCs, higher level monsters offen have superior AC. Most monsters have zero saving throw proficiencies, although some (particularly high level ones) might have more than PCs. Except at the high levels where monsters start rocking 3+ saves, monsters are actually going to be amplifying this effect of save spells being more likely to take effect.

And that is all assuming the caster is firing blind without knowing which saves are weak for a target. In reality, if a caster knows two cantrips that use different save abilities, and can even guess right about which a foe is going to be weak to some of the time, they should be a lot more effective.

So, this is all new to me, and completely reverses what I thought I knew about the relative power of attack vs save cantrips (and spells in general). If I am wrong, I would very much like to be corrected, because it directly impacts my own cantrip designs.

Well, I was hoping to avoid the maths of it, but IME you are certainly on the right track.

Generally, opponent AC by tier averages out to 13, 15, 17, 19. Attack bonuses by PC average (by tier) to +5, +7, +9, +11. So, it holds fairly universally that the chance of a typical PC succeeding in their primary attack is 65%. Now, there are lots of ways to improve attack chances: advantage, class features, bless and other magic, magical items, etc.; so, while 65% is an established baseline, IME it is often higher and closer to 75-80% in practice. Of course there will be the rare outliers, who are AC 18 in tier 1, for instance, but those are offset by the other end with zombies, etc. with lower than 13 ACs. In the long term, it all balances out IMO.

Now, for saving throws, the DCs mirror opponent ACs by tier: 13, 15, 17, 19 (if not a bit quicker since these are typically PC-side). Given most creatures have about +0 to +2 in an ability in which they are not proficient in a save, we have to take those into account and I'll assume an average of +1. It is a foolish (or desperate) player who uses a save vs. spell against a creature they know is strong in that ability or has proficiency in a save!

Non-proficient saves: at +1, that means the opponent has to roll (by tier) 12, 14, 16, or 18 to succeed. At tier 1, they are more likely to make the save (45%) than be missed by an attack (assuming average AC 13). Attacks have a slight edge. By the time tier 2 rolls around, things even out (65% chance failed save and 65% PC will hit that opponent with an attack). The shift continues in tier 3 to favor saves if attacks have no extra assistance! However, this is rarely the case. At best, the two are roughly still even, but often the favor still lies in attacks due to assistance which saves rarely get. Finally, in tier 4 saves are failed 85% of the time when not proficient. Since most attacks will benefit from assistance, you might have a slight edge in favor of saves at this point.

Overall, I think you'll find a slight favor in attack cantrips over save cantrips. However, part of that also depends on if the DM uses the half-cover rule for firing a cantrip into melee, etc. Effectively a -2 penalty to the attack, this makes saves look more appealing. The character build is also an issue, of course. I had a character with three cantrips, one for DEX save, CON save, and WIS save each. Depending on who my foe was, I would target their weakest save and generally use that cantrip. It was very effective.

IMO there is no clear "one is better than the other". Too much depends on what your goal is, your character build, how your table plays the game, and so on. As I mentioned upthread I like a lot of the riders save cantrips get, but I have played PCs who focus on attack cantrips instead because it suits them better. Many players do so with feat like elven accuracy, spells like bless, or just having advantage through flanking if your table uses it.

I don't know if all that will be much help to you or not, but I hope so.