The Gaming Den

My work on revising 3.X marches on.

What are the Wizard, Druid, and Cleric Core Spells that are truly a waste of ink because nobody ever memorizes and/or casts them because...

(A) They are too high level for what they do? (I've seen the Evocation thread on this very topic, so we can safely ignore Evocation type spells for the purposes of this thread.)

(B) Their ideal/intended use is so obscure nobody will take the chance on memorizing it because "when the fuck is that ever going to happen"?

(C) It is essentially a repeat of another spell or another spell does the function of this spell better?

(D)Some unsavory combination of (A) - (C).

Game On,
fbmf

Know Direction - No one really cares about knowing north.

Inflict Minor Wounds - Waste of an action for 1 point of damage.

Flare - Dazzle is a worthless status aliment.

Sticks to snakes.

Many many many of the evocation spells are repeats of other evocation spells. As are a number of the summoning spells. You could save a lot of ink space by just combining the many many palette swaps together.

There's a few really weird high level spells like binding and statue which are basically never used.

A lot of the old spells that were split up should probably be remerged, that way they'll see just a bit more use by dint of "Well, actually I could see myself needing to do ONE of these three things today".

Leress wrote:Flare - Dazzle is a worthless status aliment.

Flare lasts a minute and has no ASF. -1 penalty to hit matters a lot at lower levels.

Koumei wrote:A lot of the old spells that were split up should probably be remerged, that way they'll see just a bit more use by dint of "Well, actually I could see myself needing to do ONE of these three things today".

You mean from 3.0 to 3.5 they were split?

I'm sure there are others, but Polar Ray/OFS is the only one I know of off the top of my head.

Game On,
fbmf

I've seen Flare used as a signal, never in combat though. -1 may be useful in theory but no one can be arsed with it that I've seen.

Erase. The mundane use is pointless, the magical use is both obscure and 'you want me to put my hand where???'.

Leomunds Secret Chest. It's weird, memorable and pointless.

Shout. Blasting is not great, blasting from short range doubly so, blasting for piddly damage and a minor status effect entirely so.

Wizard Lock always seems really useless to me. I mean, when they made the magic item and trap system they really should have just folded spells like this into the system. I mean, I like Sepia Snake Sigil as much as the next guy(alliteration!), but even as a Wizard you are memorizing it maybe once your whole career.

fbmf wrote:

Koumei wrote:A lot of the old spells that were split up should probably be remerged, that way they'll see just a bit more use by dint of "Well, actually I could see myself needing to do ONE of these three things today".

You mean from 3.0 to 3.5 they were split?

I'm sure there are others, but Polar Ray/OFS is the only one I know of off the top of my head.

Game On,
fbmf

The other big one was 3.0's Emotion, now a variety of spells like Rage in 3.5.

All the reversed spells were split up at some point too. Cure/Inflict ### wounds, Light/Darkness, Blindness/Cure Blindness, Cure/Cause Disease (Contagion), etc.

Orca wrote:All the reversed spells were split up at some point too. Cure/Inflict ### wounds, Light/Darkness, Blindness/Cure Blindness, Cure/Cause Disease (Contagion), etc.

I think that was changed during the shift from 2nd to 3rd.

Slade wrote:

Leress wrote:Flare - Dazzle is a worthless status aliment.

Flare lasts a minute and has no ASF. -1 penalty to hit matters a lot at lower levels.

Or could just cast a spell that effects more than one creature with the same action. Seriously -1 doesn't mean much even at low levels maybe level 1 but even then there are better spells to cast.

fbmf: yeah, Emotion, Symbol and a few others.

I could see reason to bundle "I'm a prick" spells together (Sepia Snake Sigil, Explosive Runes).

I dunno, I'm all for streamlining, but part of the charm of D&D is the ridiculously large list of spells.

4e with it's "you're level 5, here are the only 4 possible spells anyone could know, 3 of them are flat out inferior", is a bit of a turn off. You start trimming down the spell lists in D&D like that and you're going to have the same problem.

Just because no PC would ever cast them, doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. Wizard Lock and Explosive Runes and Reincarnation might not be much from a PC perspective...but from a plot perspective, they have uses.

Passwall (in 3e) immediately comes to mind. And bringing back "reversed" spells is a great boon for 2e grognards.

Inflict wounds could seriously do two or even three times as much damage without being overpowered. That goes for the whole spell line. Even that's probably not enough. Inflict light wounds does less damage than your mace, but it has a slightly-higher chance to hit against armored foes. You'd be better off throwing a flask or something.

Maybe if it did 1d8 per caster level it'd be usable. You could still keep caps in if you really wanted; cap inflict light at 5d8, moderate at 10d8, etc. Maybe offer some other bonus to the higher-tier versions so that you have a reason to cast cure moderate when you're CL 5 and they'd otherwise heal exactly the same amount of damage?

Of course, inflict spells are healing for the undead, so maybe you should change cure wounds to match--I wonder if they might actually be worth casting at that rate? At 1d8/level, they match HD growth in points healed versus total HP (before factoring in your CON bonus).

Orca wrote:All the reversed spells were split up at some point too. Cure/Inflict ### wounds, Light/Darkness, Blindness/Cure Blindness, Cure/Cause Disease (Contagion), etc.

Yeah, that was a 2E to 3E change. Still, combining them could be nice.

In general, you never take Blindness if you can use Glitterdust, but combining the ability to cause or cure blindness into one spell has some value.

Inflict Minor Wounds gets significant use from Clerics, especially ons with spontaneous Inflict, who happen to have undead on their team. 4 hit points of healing at the end of any day where you didn't have to cast any cantrips is minor, but it's not nothing. People cast that.

-Username17

There's no reason to burn brainpower on "fixing" cantrips (or orisons). In 2E, you burned a first level spell (Edit: "cantrip" not "prestidigitation". My bad.) and got basically the same set of options as something you could just do for a while.. In 3E, they're enumerated. It's pretty much the difference between spending an actual tiny bit of power to be a little magical all the time, or just getting it as a class feature.

If you like how cantrips are handled now, the current list is fine. If you want to mess with it, I'd say noone has to prepare them ahead of time, and they're not subject to metamagic. Yes, that is sad for first level sorcerers. No, I don't care about their pain.

Doom wrote: Just because no PC would ever cast them, doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. Wizard Lock and Explosive Runes and Reincarnation might not be much from a PC perspective...but from a plot perspective, they have uses.

Explosive runes are the 1st step toward a grenade.

Load up a books pages with it, release a wand's Dispel magic watch it blow up deal 6d6 (force) per rune to a foe no save. And 3d6 (1/2 of the 6d6) to all foes within 10 ft reflex save 1/2.

I'm surprised you think so poorly of it.

2e had a weird, bipolar approach to spells. All of the 1e cantrips got folded into a single multi-use spell (cantrip) while many other spells (particularly those added later for the Forgotten Realms) had multiple specific possible uses. Probably the most egregious example were "combinatorial" spells, which is basically saying "I want to cast a fireball and a lightning bolt at the same time."

Ancient History wrote:2e had a weird, bipolar approach to spells. All of the 1e cantrips got folded into a single multi-use spell (cantrip) while many other spells (particularly those added later for the Forgotten Realms) had multiple specific possible uses. Probably the most egregious example were "combinatorial" spells, which is basically saying "I want to cast a fireball and a lightning bolt at the same time."

"Folded" is a slightly inaccurate word. Technically speaking cantrips appeared in Dragon magazine. I don't think they were ever folded into the official canon ruleset of 1E. Personally, I thought they were the bees knees at the time, then again I think that there was a lot of writing in Dragon during this time period that was the best and has never been equaled. There were a lot of well researched articles on all kinds of subjects. (There was also the anti-paladin but in hindsight, far more over the top things have since been written that blow the cheese meter to the realm of infinite numbers.)

I got one, from AD&D: metamagic spells. One of the best things D&D3 did was introduce the concept of metamagic feats.