With everything that goes on during a fight, and trying to remember everything to do, quite often, I forget to roll the d20 to see if my Wild Magic sorcerer gets to roll on the surge table. Are there any tips people have to remind them to roll that d20 after they cast their leveled spells?
On the platform we use my DM taught me how to make buttons on our board (as opposed to character sheets) for easy access, so I remember more often to hit magic surge roll. I agree though. It’s weird how often we forget when in the thick of it.
I suspect that problem is one of the reasons some folks like wild magic- the background is great as fluff but the table results are not so if your forgetting to roll it’s the best of both worlds.🤪
One suggestion I have is to, instead, drop the randomness and rolls all together. Talk with your GM prior of course but, instead of the normal 'magic surge' stuff, have it be that you can trigger off a chaos surge at will or a number of times per fight equal to your CHA bonus (both work) but only when Tides of Chaos is on cooldown. Additionally the GM can trigger it off like normal. This way it adopts a 'risk/reward' aspect in which you use ToC to intentionally set off a surge hoping it's good, or set off a surge hoping it's benign (or at least not fireballing yourself) to get back ToC. Not every GM will be interested in this homebrew solution and it WILL result in an increase in your power level (since you can now intentionally set off a surge when you see the reward as being worth more than the risk) but you'll also be actively using this class feature instead of forgetting about it.
Failing that another solution is to just ALWAYS roll. Get a different colored d20 and, whenever you'd roll for a spell, roll it as well, 95% of the time it won't actually matter and the 5% of the time it does it's just a matter of checking to see if it's applicable. Since the dice is different colored (and you've presumably explained that beforehand to your table) people won't mistake you as rolling for advantage or something and it's a simple matter of just paying attention for the nat 1.
Edit: To clarify. Part of the problem is that, normally, it's up to the GM to decide when you roll to see if you get the nat 1. Which is both a blessing and a curse since, very frequently, most GM's simply FORGET to make you roll. That means that you won't be risking anything but also will be missing out on potential gains and a huge aspect of your class. So by always rolling you remove that aspect even if you also drastically increase the chance of something happening. Of course depending on how you feel about the surges literally anything, even bad things, happening could be an improvement over complete non-engagement.
One suggestion I have is to, instead, drop the randomness and rolls all together. Talk with your GM prior of course but, instead of the normal 'magic surge' stuff, have it be that you can trigger off a chaos surge at will or a number of times per fight equal to your CHA bonus (both work) but only when Tides of Chaos is on cooldown. Additionally the GM can trigger it off like normal. This way it adopts a 'risk/reward' aspect in which you use ToC to intentionally set off a surge hoping it's good, or set off a surge hoping it's benign (or at least not fireballing yourself) to get back ToC. Not every GM will be interested in this homebrew solution and it WILL result in an increase in your power level (since you can now intentionally set off a surge when you see the reward as being worth more than the risk) but you'll also be actively using this class feature instead of forgetting about it.
Failing that another solution is to just ALWAYS roll. Get a different colored d20 and, whenever you'd roll for a spell, roll it as well, 95% of the time it won't actually matter and the 5% of the time it does it's just a matter of checking to see if it's applicable. Since the dice is different colored (and you've presumably explained that beforehand to your table) people won't mistake you as rolling for advantage or something and it's a simple matter of just paying attention for the nat 1.
Edit: To clarify. Part of the problem is that, normally, it's up to the GM to decide when you roll to see if you get the nat 1. Which is both a blessing and a curse since, very frequently, most GM's simply FORGET to make you roll. That means that you won't be risking anything but also will be missing out on potential gains and a huge aspect of your class. So by always rolling you remove that aspect even if you also drastically increase the chance of something happening. Of course depending on how you feel about the surges literally anything, even bad things, happening could be an improvement over complete non-engagement.
The GM and I have actually discussed how often the wild magic surge happens after a spell, and have tweaked it so that if it doesn't happen on a 1, the next time it happens on a 1 and 2, and so on, increasing each time it doesn't fire off, with the counter resetting on a long rest.
It's now just a matter of trying to remember to roll that D20 each time my character casts a non-cantrip spell, which sometimes I forget to do. I like the idea of using a different dice, which could work for a physical tabletop, and I'll have to keep that in mind if I roll a wild magic sorc in that scenario. For the campaign we are in, we're running it on roll20, and I have seen that there are macros that can automate this, but they work if you are using roll20 for character management. We're using the Beyond20 plugin to parse rolls et al from DnDBeyond to our VTT. I was hoping some people might have had experiencing in setting something up that would display some text in the roll20 chat when the spell roll is parsed through or something like that. For the moment, what I've done is, I have the character notes open, reduced to a small size with large, yellow highlighted text saying to roll after a spell, but it's not really an elegant solution :P
You're almost never going to get Wild Magic from the d20 roll anyways, you could easily dispense with it. The important thing is that your player remembers to use Tides of Chaos as often as they can, and you as the DM remember that that triggers a roll on the wild magic table for the next leveled spell they cast (as often as you deem appropriate, it doesn't have to be *every* round, but it should be most).
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With everything that goes on during a fight, and trying to remember everything to do, quite often, I forget to roll the d20 to see if my Wild Magic sorcerer gets to roll on the surge table. Are there any tips people have to remind them to roll that d20 after they cast their leveled spells?
On the platform we use my DM taught me how to make buttons on our board (as opposed to character sheets) for easy access, so I remember more often to hit magic surge roll. I agree though. It’s weird how often we forget when in the thick of it.
I suspect that problem is one of the reasons some folks like wild magic- the background is great as fluff but the table results are not so if your forgetting to roll it’s the best of both worlds.🤪
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
This is a bit unorthodox but...
One suggestion I have is to, instead, drop the randomness and rolls all together. Talk with your GM prior of course but, instead of the normal 'magic surge' stuff, have it be that you can trigger off a chaos surge at will or a number of times per fight equal to your CHA bonus (both work) but only when Tides of Chaos is on cooldown. Additionally the GM can trigger it off like normal. This way it adopts a 'risk/reward' aspect in which you use ToC to intentionally set off a surge hoping it's good, or set off a surge hoping it's benign (or at least not fireballing yourself) to get back ToC. Not every GM will be interested in this homebrew solution and it WILL result in an increase in your power level (since you can now intentionally set off a surge when you see the reward as being worth more than the risk) but you'll also be actively using this class feature instead of forgetting about it.
Failing that another solution is to just ALWAYS roll. Get a different colored d20 and, whenever you'd roll for a spell, roll it as well, 95% of the time it won't actually matter and the 5% of the time it does it's just a matter of checking to see if it's applicable. Since the dice is different colored (and you've presumably explained that beforehand to your table) people won't mistake you as rolling for advantage or something and it's a simple matter of just paying attention for the nat 1.
Edit: To clarify. Part of the problem is that, normally, it's up to the GM to decide when you roll to see if you get the nat 1. Which is both a blessing and a curse since, very frequently, most GM's simply FORGET to make you roll. That means that you won't be risking anything but also will be missing out on potential gains and a huge aspect of your class. So by always rolling you remove that aspect even if you also drastically increase the chance of something happening. Of course depending on how you feel about the surges literally anything, even bad things, happening could be an improvement over complete non-engagement.
The GM and I have actually discussed how often the wild magic surge happens after a spell, and have tweaked it so that if it doesn't happen on a 1, the next time it happens on a 1 and 2, and so on, increasing each time it doesn't fire off, with the counter resetting on a long rest.
It's now just a matter of trying to remember to roll that D20 each time my character casts a non-cantrip spell, which sometimes I forget to do. I like the idea of using a different dice, which could work for a physical tabletop, and I'll have to keep that in mind if I roll a wild magic sorc in that scenario. For the campaign we are in, we're running it on roll20, and I have seen that there are macros that can automate this, but they work if you are using roll20 for character management. We're using the Beyond20 plugin to parse rolls et al from DnDBeyond to our VTT. I was hoping some people might have had experiencing in setting something up that would display some text in the roll20 chat when the spell roll is parsed through or something like that. For the moment, what I've done is, I have the character notes open, reduced to a small size with large, yellow highlighted text saying to roll after a spell, but it's not really an elegant solution :P
You're almost never going to get Wild Magic from the d20 roll anyways, you could easily dispense with it. The important thing is that your player remembers to use Tides of Chaos as often as they can, and you as the DM remember that that triggers a roll on the wild magic table for the next leveled spell they cast (as often as you deem appropriate, it doesn't have to be *every* round, but it should be most).