Ive been reworking ranged damage cantrips for games at my table. Cantrips are supposed to be the most basic bottom end spells, so why are some of the so dang good? Well one of the things that makes them so good is range. Firebolt as 120 foot range when many leveled spells have 30 and 60 foot ranges. So what ive been experimenting with is reducing the ranges of all damage cantrips to 30 feet at first tier and then leveling up the range 30 feet at the damage die increases. So at level 17 firebolt would be 120 foot then, but so would ray of frost, and most others. Some notable exceptions would be poison spray where the range increases 10 feet per tier, and lightning lure where the range would start at 15 and max at 60 feet, the initial hit is a spell attack and the pull feature is based on a strength save and would be optional. Eldritch blast is excluded from this due to its overall importance to the warlock class as it is. So far it keeps lower level character still feeling a but more crunchy, like they should, since they can’t hurl 1d10 firebolts or 1d8 and slow effected rays of frost at creature well outside of danger range. At low levels alot of monsters can be killed with a couple hits from a firebolt well before the creature is even close to a threat. Im not dead set on these changes, my playtest group hasn’t had a change to test all these yet, I've just tried them in a couple one shots that aren’t standardized like we do in the playtest group. Im tossing this out to the group for thoughts and your experiences doing similar things
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Ive been reworking ranged damage cantrips for games at my table. Cantrips are supposed to be the most basic bottom end spells, so why are some of the so dang good? Well one of the things that makes them so good is range. Firebolt as 120 foot range when many leveled spells have 30 and 60 foot ranges. So what ive been experimenting with is reducing the ranges of all damage cantrips to 30 feet at first tier and then leveling up the range 30 feet at the damage die increases. So at level 17 firebolt would be 120 foot then, but so would ray of frost, and most others. Some notable exceptions would be poison spray where the range increases 10 feet per tier, and lightning lure where the range would start at 15 and max at 60 feet, the initial hit is a spell attack and the pull feature is based on a strength save and would be optional. Eldritch blast is excluded from this due to its overall importance to the warlock class as it is. So far it keeps lower level character still feeling a but more crunchy, like they should, since they can’t hurl 1d10 firebolts or 1d8 and slow effected rays of frost at creature well outside of danger range. At low levels alot of monsters can be killed with a couple hits from a firebolt well before the creature is even close to a threat. Im not dead set on these changes, my playtest group hasn’t had a change to test all these yet, I've just tried them in a couple one shots that aren’t standardized like we do in the playtest group. Im tossing this out to the group for thoughts and your experiences doing similar things