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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9887036" data-attributes="member: 4937">Cantrips as presented in 1e AD&D are mostly color.  Sure, every 100 hours of play you might find some real use for them if you kept some prepared, but for the most part they don't do enough to justify losing a valuable spell slot to do something as minor and unimpactful as what the cantrips do.  The entirety of 1e AD&D cantrips became the 3e edition Prestidigitation spell with 1 hour duration in which you could create cantrip like effects at will, and it still wasn't unbalanced or very clear what it was good for RAW.  Somewhat after the introduction of the 1e AD&D UA (roughly ~1987), as I started a new campaign, I introduced the idea of cantrips being minor magics that M-U's could do at will, thinking it would be a good roleplaying device to add some color to the player's actions. My bad.  Even though the cantrips didn't do anything, merely making them cost zero meant that players wanted to do them every round.  This was such a problem in slowing play that the experiment only lasted a day before I limited them according to the amount that they have in this write up.The situation gets worse if cantrips can actually do something and they are free, as in Pathfinder 1e or later D&D.  While I feel that in both 1e AD&D and 3e D&D the designers are usually too conservative about what cantrips can do, long experience between 1987 and 2019 with unlimited cantrips tells me that it's a bad idea with undesirable side effects on game play.If you are going to give someone unlimited magic, the least offensive sort of unlimited spell though would be a magic dart you could throw once a round.  That is offensive magic is the least problematic thing you can give to a PC in unlimited amounts, provided that the attack mode is really no better than a dart or a sling stone or equivalent attack available to someone of equivalent level.  Unlimited utility spells however is just game breaking both at the meta and in game level.</blockquote>

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