So I’ve been running a campaign (43 sessions so far) with the following house rule: if your class gives you cantrips, you have access to all the cantrips of that class (from PHB). Other cantrips from the temple of elemenral evil or xanathar’s show up as sort of treasures (books or other means of learning).
No real issues with power level. Whatever benefit having multiple attack spells option grants it hasn’t seemed to make spell casters more dangerous. They do find themselves useless less often.
The sheer number of cantrips available often means that they forget, or ignore them. It seems counter intuitive, but whereas seeing a small list of prepared spells they are able to manage that pretty well. But the big list of cantrips is harder to keep in the mind.
That said, I’ve seen lots of interesting, useful, and surprising uses of cantrips from mending, to bladeward, to true strike that we probably wouldn’t if people had to choose only a few.
Spellcasters are being more tactical, seeing shocking grasp, thorn whip, acid splash coming up more often when a valuable alternative to creatures with resistance or in melee. I think this makes spell casting more fun for them on a round by round basis compared to previous eldritch blasts , fire bolt, sacred flames. The side cases get more thought and attention, sometimes almost too effectively (thorn whip in the pit room comes to mind).
Some cantrips are used very frequently like message and guidance. In both cases these tend to increase cooperative play, though it does occasionally become routine.
Players very interested in getting those non-phb cantrips.
It definitely does make the use of magic more routine, they almost never use torches, but it is high magic world, so that makes sense.
Multiclassing (warlock-bard) gives a lot of cantrips, but the utility benefit is mitigated by point 2 above.
A multiclass dip (fighter 8 bard 1) definitely grants a lot utility to our meat shield, but I’d say this has made it more interesting for him to play. He is less often without so thing he can do.
My original goals were to deal with the “buyers remorse” of feeling like you made the wrong choice, the “overly optimistic casting” of trying to use certain spells like prestigitation, druid craft or thaumaturgy to accomplish way more than the cantrip was designed for, and lastly giving the spellcasters a more “flavorful” feel where they embody their particular magic domain and use it ubiquitously rather than in limited well defined cases. I feel like it has achieved those goals. So far I don’t feel like there are many downsides.
When I consider just how little cantrip use I've seen in my old game since my players hit 5th level (obviously excepting Eldritch Blast), I'd be hard-pressed to imagine how or why this would be a big problem.
I do like the sense of meaningful choice that cantrips place on low-level characters, and the degree to which those choices define and describe that character. But, those choices are almost always in favour of the few "good" cantrips (we can hopefully agree some are much more useful than others), and I can't recall ever seeing someone genuinely cast something like Create Bonfire or Resistance. Maybe with your house rule they finally would.
I also like it, I think.
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So I’ve been running a campaign (43 sessions so far) with the following house rule: if your class gives you cantrips, you have access to all the cantrips of that class (from PHB). Other cantrips from the temple of elemenral evil or xanathar’s show up as sort of treasures (books or other means of learning).
My original goals were to deal with the “buyers remorse” of feeling like you made the wrong choice, the “overly optimistic casting” of trying to use certain spells like prestigitation, druid craft or thaumaturgy to accomplish way more than the cantrip was designed for, and lastly giving the spellcasters a more “flavorful” feel where they embody their particular magic domain and use it ubiquitously rather than in limited well defined cases. I feel like it has achieved those goals. So far I don’t feel like there are many downsides.
I like it. I might implement it in my usual games, but definitely not my west march game. That one runs on scarcity.
When I consider just how little cantrip use I've seen in my old game since my players hit 5th level (obviously excepting Eldritch Blast), I'd be hard-pressed to imagine how or why this would be a big problem.
I do like the sense of meaningful choice that cantrips place on low-level characters, and the degree to which those choices define and describe that character. But, those choices are almost always in favour of the few "good" cantrips (we can hopefully agree some are much more useful than others), and I can't recall ever seeing someone genuinely cast something like Create Bonfire or Resistance. Maybe with your house rule they finally would.
I also like it, I think.