What solution for "Cantrips don't feel magical"?

[doctorbadwolf]

Walls, or castle walls? The rules for castle walls would stop that situation. The rules for walls would not. Even doing very little damage would still eventually result in a destroyed normal wall or even a normal non-castle sized building.

Good! I should be able to EB my way through normal walls.

Castle walls should take hours and hours and hours, and the DM should require Con checks to keep going without exhaustion levels coming into play, just like trying to single handedly pickaxe your way through a castle wall. Given enough days without someone to stop you, you...can.

 

[WhosDaDungeonMaster]

So, that's random, not rare.

You might get lucky and get cantrips every round.
You might get one and then no more.

Hmm... true, it is random; after all, it is a die roll. But, think about this, depending on how you implement it, you probably won't be doing it every round instead of being able to do it every round. Thus, it is "rarer". If you really need me to explain that further, I don't know what to tell you...

 

[Blue]

As a serious response to the OP, I don't think players of wizards should expect to overcoming all-problems all-the-time with magic in order to feel magical. If you imagine your PC as magical, then they'll feel magical.

Actually, the first post shows rare to limited usage of spells for "all-problems all-the-time", it is showing most spell usage during hostile encounters.

Combat takes the most mechanical wall time of any other activity, and 5e is designed with the expectation that all characters contribute. We're mostly calibrating around that, not "all-problems" nor "all-the-time".

As a corollary, would you expect a fighter to solve all-problems, all-the-time with fighting? Does interacting non-violently with NPCs make them seem less fightery? Must a fighter hack apart an entire dungeon room to search for treasure or tend to a fallen comrade by fighting them back to health?

These are rather ludicrous examples, centered around the strawman that swinging a weapon in non-combat situations is the only mundane counterpart to casting a spell.

The equivalent would be to say that the Wizard firebolts to non-violently interact with an NPC, firebolts a dungeon to search for treasure, and firebolts a fallen comrade back to life.

 

[Blue]

[MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION], as you note, damage output is just one way to evaluate class balance. But to concentrate on it is really .... unfortunate. There is so much more to D&D than just combat, and so much more to combat than just damage output.

Complete agree. That's why I put so many disclaimers in there that I wasn't focusing on damage,t here there are so many valid ways to contribute, and that I was using damage solely because ti was a number we could use to discuss for an apples-to-apples comparison with swinging a weapon.

I'm sorry if I poorly communicated and that didn't come across that you felt I was overly focusing on it.

In the end, imo, if cantrips don't feel "magical", you need to figure out what "magical" means. Because D&D is a game that involves lots of magic, so "rarity" is a poor definition of "magical", imo. To me, the magical feeling of cantrips is about perception and description. And at my table, to get a more magical feel, I try to get myself and my players to describe magical actions using magical terms. It works for us.

That's what this comes down to. The word "magical" is overloaded with so many meanings. Looking at the two contradictory opinions from the original post.

We have cantrips are good because they let caster do things in magical instead of mundane ways, from attacking to getting their pipe. From this point of view, magic seems to have two meanings. First is close to the system definition - using something labelled as magic. An attack cantrip and a ranged weapon may have similar mechanical realizations, but at the very least the wizard isn't throwing darts. Though more likely they are doing something interesting - like cold damage and preventing healing with a trade off for less damage.

The second part of that definition is mimicing all of the mundane tasks from stories wizards do. Snap their fingers to light their pipes, have quills pick themselves up from a desk and start to write, all of that stuff. Things that make little mechanical effect, but much narrative effect. "Magic" there seems to be able to do things in ways others can't.

Looking at the flip side, cantrips aren't magical because they aren't special. They are there all the time, they work at beck and call just like things mundane. They aren't differentiated enough. I think that means that magic should be both rarer/limited/draining, and have more unpredicability. It's something you horde and use, and it's never quite your slave.

But that second one is just my interpretation of what's being said, maybe others can jump in for a good definition of "magical" in that context.

 

[Blue]

Okay, folks. Raise your hand if you've also seen this problem.

I had a DM who wouldn't allow the 3ed Warlock because he felt they could eventually blow away mountains.

I've never seen it in actual play.

 

[5ekyu]

"Over and over" has no ending language to it. It just keeps going over and over.



That's you adding end conditions, though. No such end conditions exist in the rules.

In common language if someone says something is hapoening or being done over and over it is not taken as 24/7 unless that is specified.

You do you... Thats fine.

But if your imagined 24/7 rule is evidence of how you game and read game rules, thats saying something.

 

[5ekyu]

Hmm... true, it is random; after all, it is a die roll. But, think about this, depending on how you implement it, you probably won't be doing it every round instead of being able to do it every round. Thus, it is "rarer". If you really need me to explain that further, I don't know what to tell you...

Di i need to explain what probably means to you?

Gotta say tho, if every turn you roll your prof or under scratches these "not rare magical itches" sufficiently, that just sportlights how serious a problem this really was.

 

[Blue]

"Over and over" has no ending language to it. It just keeps going over and over.



That's you adding end conditions, though. No such end conditions exist in the rules.

But there is. The rules are pretty explicit that they aren't comprehensive to cover every single corner case, and expect the DM to step in to make rulings.

"Ruling over rules" isn't a cop-out, it's the concept that the DM is supposed to step in to the corner cases where the rules don't cover. You could expand the books to ten times the page count and there still are situations not covered. So instead they leverage that this is a tabletop game with a live DM to say "deal with it appropriately".

It's like that there were no rules in the PHB & DMG about repercussions for not sleeping for days or weeks. The game empowers the DM to deal with situation.

 

[Umbran]

Yes, I understand that. If we just say, "rulings over rules.", though, every time something comes up, there'd be precious little to discuss about 5e. You can make a ruling about pretty much any issue that you encounter and just move on.

Quite true. That's a feature, not a bug. If it happens once, you make a ruling, and go on. If it happens a lot at your table, you make a house rule. If we find it is a common occurrence across many tables, then we start considering that the system has a notable fault that needs correcting.

This thread is specifically about cantrips and the issues with them being at-will, so that's what I'm discussing.

You appear to be focused on what seems to be an edge case, that can happen in theory, but in practice is pretty rare.

There's two points to make about changing rules:

1) Any rules design choice has consequences. If you aren't in a position to do a lot of playtesting, you are apt to miss some of the unintended consequences, and introduce a problem that's worse than the thing you were trying to fix.

2) If you are changing rules that are central to some operations, you are apt to be "moving someone's cheese" as they may say in the business world - changing something that someone *really* liked.

These are not so great things that GMs perhaps should try to avoid, especially when the issue you raise can probably be handled with a conversation, rather than a rule....

"Hey, folks? I'd like to try to preserve the spirit of these rules, that make sure that folks don't have to sit around doing nothing in combat because they are out of spells or other special maneuvers to use. But, there are some technical edge cases. Could you, you know, *not* try to abuse those edge cases? Otherwise, I might have to consider some exhaustion rules or something like that, which may otherwise cramp your style..."

And suddenly the problem goes away, because breaking down castle walls with cantrips probably wasn't central to anyone's character concept, so they can just not try to do that, and preserve all the stuff they do like. You don't get anyone spamming basic attacks for hours, they get not having to worry about *exactly* how many rounds they've been using those attacks.

While in large groups people can be difficult, often individuals can be quite reasonable, especially when it is in their own self-interest.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

How does this work in actual play? I know one of my dislikes about the Earthdawn system (on top of a lot I did like) was that casters needed to spend rounds gathering "threads" (I think they were called). So after waiting 15 minutes for your action to come up you did a gatekeeping action that made no changes to the scene, and then sat back down and waited another 15 minutes to do something.

Sadly, nobody has chosen to play that class yet, so it remains untested.

The idea is that your normal spellcasting works just like it did in 2E, where you can instantly cast by spending slots. Taking an action to Focus is supposed to take the place of throwing a dart, so you would only do it if you weren't going to do anything exciting anyway. Imagine if Wizards in 5E had an ability, "As an action, recover a first level spell slot. Use this ability only if you have no first level spell slots remaining." My thing is a little more versatile than that, since you can use it to conserve slots you haven't spent yet, but it should only ever come up in easy fights where you wouldn't cast a big spell every round anyway.

I suppose it's possible that the class might be disappointing in very easy fights, where everything is dead before their second turn, but those fights should be a rare exception rather than the rule.