Talk:Common Magic (3.5e Variant Rule)

Ratings
== Damaging Cantrips ==

Not sure I see a reason for not having these. Why not? It basically amounts to the same thing as a fighter shooting an arrow from a bow. --Ghostwheel (talk) 23:11, 1 March 2013 (UTC)


 * +1. There are potentially weird interactions with item damage from certain elemental types (like acid ignoring hardness), but otherwise I'm pretty happy to let wizards fire ray of frost all day instead of loading and firing a light crossbow when they're out of spells. - Tarkisflux Talk 00:58, 2 March 2013 (UTC)


 * If damaging spells might not be overpowered, what about cure/inflict minor wounds? As a damage spell, both are fairly banal and require touch attacks, but the healing aspect could be problematic. Paleomancer (talk) 22:32, 4 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I'd be hesitant to include those, even though I don't think they're really problematic. I don't think that an ability that lets you spend ~5 minutes bringing your party back from the brink of death at level 1 is a big deal (and would probably do a fair bit to make early levels less lethal), and the time required to bring people back with cure minor just goes up from there to the point that it's often not worth it. At level 10 you might have 100 hp, and it takes you ~10 minutes to patch that one guy up. If you're in any sort of a time crunch, you just spend charges from your relatively inexpensive wand of cure light wounds or burn a spell instead. So like the rest of the damage cantrips, the utility of it really drops off as your levels and hp goes up. But there are plenty of people who don't like infinite, if slow, healing in games (for fluff reasons or desire to not make hp attrition time sensitive), and you could make an argument against including it along those lines pretty easily.


 * Cause minor probably goes the same way as cure minor does, if only so that the undead (and undead PCs) are on the same playing field as everyone else. - Tarkisflux Talk 23:13, 4 March 2013 (UTC)


 * I'll make it an optional extra to ban/allow these spells, and clarify that cure/inflict minor wounds are a special case. Thanks! Paleomancer (talk) 22:23, 7 March 2013 (UTC)