This spell has been around for a while, since Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, but there’s never been a better time to make use of tiny servant. It’s a hidden gem on many casters’ spell lists!
You can get this spell with a wizard, artificer, or Clockwork Soul sorcerer (the latter using the “swap-out” aspect of Clockwork Magic; see my guide on how to use Homebrew to support this in DDB). It’s 3rd level, lasts 8 hours, and requires no concentration. What do you get? Well… a tiny servant! A li’l bitty lamp or coin or hammer that can walk around and do simple stuff for you. When you first get access to this little servant at 5th level (9th if you’re an artificer), it’s a pretty hard sell to use up your most powerful spell slot to animate one of these guys, but as you get higher in level, it becomes less and less of an ask.
You also don’t necessarily need to be expending useful resources on this. If you have the Extended Spell metamagic, either as a Clockwork Soul sorcerer or through the Metamagic Adept feat, you can extend the spell’s duration to 16 hours. So if you reach the end of an adventuring day and still have slots left, animate some servants, and now you have tireless overnight sentinels with blindsight who will last a good portion of the following adventuring day; probably a good idea to still hang onto some spell slots in case you get ambushed in the night. Even if you can’t extend the spell though, it can be a useful cast during an adventuring day once you have a few more slots under your belt.
Before we get into the fun stuff, let’s address some objections and set baseline expectations. We’ll start with,
1. Animate dead is a better spell. Well, it depends! For ordinary combat, yeah, a skeleton or zombie will serve you better than an animated pot, and you can sustain four of them over 24 hours without having to extend the spell. They’re also stronger, more durable, and more intelligent (though zombies only barely). These are strong points. But tiny servant offers a number of advantages:
A) Availability. No need to dig up bodies! Fish a coin from your pocket and you’re good to go.
B) Blindsight. This is a truly rare sense that sets tiny servant and bats from find familiar apart from other summons. A creature with this sense can detect invisible creatures, see through fogs and magical darkness, and make attacks with advantage when their targets can’t do the same.
C) Culpability. NPCs generally don’t like necromancers, and it’s easy to pin a misdeed on you when your zombie is caught spilling the milk. But if a prison guard claims that an animated silver piece stole his jail keys and ran away with them, he’s likely to be fired, not listened to. These objects are just not suspicious; they are usually common items that draw little to no attention. Even if an NPC hears something moving and comes to investigate, they won’t see a corpse lumbering around; they’ll see a pot, a bell, or a stick, and pay it no mind.
D) Defensibility. At the start of a fight, it makes a lot of sense for an enemy caster who sees that you have a ton of zombies to hit them with a fireball, and now instead of zombies, you have charred corpse corpses. Your servants, on the other hand, can hide in your backpack or in your boot until called, and not only will they draw no attention to you, they may be protected from areas-of-effect altogether depending in how your DM rules. If they are in trouble and exposed, they can use their climbing speed to scramble to safety. The best way to protect them is by keeping them in something like a bag of holding, then leaving it open when it’s time for them to act.
E) Eating. Not only do your servants not need to eat, they won’t try to eat you if you forget to reassert control over them every 24 hours.
F) Flexibility. With animate dead, you only ever get one of two options. Tiny servant lets you animate any tiny object, from about the size of a cat to the size of a coin. Flasks, torches, amulets, silvered daggers, bullseye lanterns, bells, bags of caltrops or ball bearings… Your only limits are the size restriction and your imagination—and your DM’s generosity, of course.
2. Areas-of-effect will kill your minions. It’s true! By 5th level, fireball exists, and effects like it will only show up more and more. But I hope point D from the previous item illustrates how you can protect your servants. Don’t deploy them when facing dragons of the non-green variety. Save them for enemies that only use single-target attacks; then, if the enemy targets them, you’re diverting at least 10 points of damage away from other party members. If enemies don’t target them, we can get into some shenanigans!
3. Minions slow the game down. This is totally true! But they don’t have to slow it down much; this part is up to you. During other players’ turns, think anout what you want to do next. Don’t go for super complex plans (these guys probably don’t have the capacity for them anyway; we’ll discuss that in setting expectations). “Run up to the enemy and use the Help action to give advantage on an attack) is a totally worthwhile turn for a minion that happens to be extremely quick, and the party rogue will thank you for it.
Now, let’s calibrate expectations. As the last objection may indicate, minions can really slow the game down and let you steal the show, spending minutes describing your creatures’ actions in exquisite detail, and forming elaborate plans that prompt rules debates and end with all parties involved confused and frustrated. We don’t want that. Creativity is good! Annoying your friends is counterproductive. So go for the simple stuff. Commands should generally be as simple as the ones listed in the spell description; keep in mind that a creature with 1 Intelligence is not particularly bright, and probably doesn’t have the sophistication to recall and enact detailed attack formations. Telling a bag of caltrops, “Scatter your contents in that spot there” is reasonable. Telling that same bag, “Move over there and ready an action to dump your contents as soon as that creature starts moving”—Now we’re getting iffier, but probably still okay. Telling a bullseye lantern, “Keep your beam focused on any invisible enemy you see and throw glitter on it so we can see it”—now we have multiple commands, a context-dependent designation (“enemy”), and a task with complex hand-eye coordination required. Basically, don’t ask these little critters to act with the tactical cunning of mini-PCs; they just don’t have it in them, and your party has a right to expect their game not to devolve into “the caster and their toys”.
We also don’t want to overly rely on rules gimmicks. Things like so-called “rest tricking,” or any phrase beginning with “the rules don’t say I can’t,” run the risk of alienating your DM and other players. They want to have fun, not micromanage your power level. This spell is powerful enough, even if you leave some potential exploits on (or rather, off) the table.
So what should we expect from tiny servant? We should expect a concentration-free minion that can perform any number of useful tasks, in combat or outside of it. These tasks include:
A) Keep watch. Blindsight makes up for the poor passive perception to a degree. A servant around your neck can twitch to silently alert you if something’s creeping up from behind, for instance. A bell servant can alert the whole party by ringing itself when trouble is near.
B) Check for traps. A time-honored tradition of summoning is using said summons to trigger spike traps and poisoned locks. Your servants have no feelings and can just be reanimated, so sacrifice them with abandon.
C) Use items/themselves. It’s totally reasonable for an animated flask with a [equipment]potion of healing[/equipment] inside to pour its own contents into a dying PC’s mouth. In dark environs, a bullseye lantern should be able to light up enemies while leaving you protected by darkness. Some tiny servants may even be able to use magic items, or the Spell-Storing Item of an artificer. That one probably depends on relative size; keep in mind that these things can only lift 12 pounds.
D) Help in battle. The Help action is the most obvious way, but maybe there will be other options, like closing and locking an intervening door or carrying a lit torch over to the enemy (this is a great way to provide lighting or flames for the pyrotechnics spell). And, of course, if it’s totally necessary, they can attack. On a hit they’ll deal an average of 5 or 6 damage. This is why, if you’re not sure what shape to make a servant, it’s a good idea to have a few silvered weapons, so presumably their slam attack can overcome resistance to nonmagical weapons that aren’t silvered. Keep in mind that any attack hitting them and not your party members is damage the party doesn’t take, and you can bolster their limited hit points with temporary hit point bursts, as with the Artillerist’s Protector Cannon. It’s also not a bad idea to sic them on an enemy that is just about to be taken down, but you don’t think the party will quite be able to knock them to 0 before their turn comes up again. Also if the enemy is prone or blinded, have an object toddle over and throw a net on them to make sure they stay vulnerable; a straight attack roll with +3 to hit has a moderate chance of working until you reach very high levels.
E) Infiltrate. Animate a gold coin and hand it over with other gold when making a purchase, so after the store closes, the coin can unlock the store from inside. Animate a grappling hook and have it bury itself in a wall close to the top (after you attach a rope, naturally). Animate a magnifying glass and sneak it over to an enemy encampment to light their tents on fire (yes, there are actual mechanics for this). If you are tied up but have access to the Subtle Spell metamagic, animate something you’re touching and make it untie you.
In the end, the most creative uses will be specific to your campaign. Think of how you can use this spell to achieve your aims. Just remember our limitations. Our object can only carry 12 pounds or less. It is unintelligent and cannot speak. It can only receive commands within 120 feet, and we can only issue one such command per turn. And for the table’s sake, keep your commands brief and easy to implement. Go forth and create tiny servants, adventurers!
B) Blindsight. This is a truly rare sense that sets tiny servant and bats from find familiar apart from other summons. A creature with this sense can detect invisible creatures, see through fogs and magical darkness, and make attacks with advantage when their targets can’t do the same.
So I play an eladrin wizard, and my familiar is a bat, and I have to agree with you on the usefulness of blindsight.
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Breath Weapon cast on a Tiny Servant us very useful too…
Could be! Depends on whether your DM says dragon's breath can work on a creature that doesn't have a mouth.
That's immaterial - there's as much argument for dragon's breath requiring a mouth as tiny servants failing to have mouths, which is none. If your DM is out to ban Dragon's Breath, they will, but I doubt they'd use such an easily-defeatable excuse.
Breath Weapon cast on a Tiny Servant us very useful too…
Could be! Depends on whether your DM says dragon's breath can work on a creature that doesn't have a mouth.
That's immaterial - there's as much argument for dragon's breath requiring a mouth as tiny servants failing to have mouths, which is none. If your DM is out to ban Dragon's Breath, they will, but I doubt they'd use such an easily-defeatable excuse.
The text of dragon's breath states that the breath weapon comes out of the mouth, and the [monster]tiny servant[/spell] is described as being "the object, plus arms and legs." Unless the item comes with a mouth, or we use Dakael's foolproof plan, those two things seem to be in conflict.
Breath Weapon cast on a Tiny Servant us very useful too…
Could be! Depends on whether your DM says dragon's breath can work on a creature that doesn't have a mouth.
That's immaterial - there's as much argument for dragon's breath requiring a mouth as tiny servants failing to have mouths, which is none. If your DM is out to ban Dragon's Breath, they will, but I doubt they'd use such an easily-defeatable excuse.
The text of dragon's breath states that the breath weapon comes out of the mouth, and the [monster]tiny servant[/spell] is described as being "the object, plus arms and legs." Unless the item comes with a mouth, or we use Dakael's foolproof plan, those two things seem to be in conflict.
If your DM is willing to go with it, you could say that the word "mouth" can just as well apply to the mouth of a jar or pitcher, or a similar opening on an object. It'd be pretty funny for a party to get nervous every time they see an NPC with a Tiny Servant, looking carefully to see if there's an opening it might start spewing fire from.
Breath Weapon cast on a Tiny Servant us very useful too…
Could be! Depends on whether your DM says dragon's breath can work on a creature that doesn't have a mouth.
IMHO Tiny servant doesn't make an object a creature, it just turns the object into a robot/machine
Yeah because if it did make an object into a creature it would have wording like "The target animates and sprouts little arms and legs, becoming a creature under your control until the spell ends or the creature drops to 0 hit points."
Breath Weapon cast on a Tiny Servant us very useful too…
Could be! Depends on whether your DM says dragon's breath can work on a creature that doesn't have a mouth.
IMHO Tiny servant doesn't make an object a creature, it just turns the object into a robot/machine
Yeah because if it did make an object into a creature it would have wording like "The target animates and sprouts little arms and legs, becoming a creature under your control until the spell ends or the creature drops to 0 hit points."
Agreed. There is a type of creature made to represent machines, called a Construct, and that is the type provided on the tiny servant statblock. If we say that a tiny servant isn't a creature, just a machine, does that ruling apply to other construct creatures like modrons, golems, and animated objects? It's a creature, no questions asked.
By the way, on the spell Dragon's Breath, I think it's time we brought a rules lawyer into the table to sort this out. First off, it has the wording "provided the creature has [a mouth] (XGtE, page 154)." The art of the tiny servant on that page does not show it with a mouth, and the wording of Tiny Servant says only that "the target animates and sprouts little arms and legs (XGtE, page 168)." It doesn't say anything about a mouth.
Second of all, Dragon's Breath says that the target of the spell can "use its action to exhale energy (XGtE, page 154, emphasis mine)." Even if the tiny servant has a mouth (perhaps you animated a little wind-up dragon or a clay mask to deal with this problem), I doubt it has little lungs inside it. Thus, it can't breathe, so it can't exhale magical energy.
However, on a closing note, the wind-up dragon shooting a dragon's breath spell is too cute for me to completely rules-lawyer away. Just talk to your DM before doing this to make sure you're all on the same page. And even if your DM vetoes your idea, you can still try to give your Tiny Servant a Wand of Magic Missiles or a Circlet of Blasting to hold in its tiny little constructed hands. Your DM probably won't be cool with that either, but good luck!
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Agreed. There is a type of creature made to represent machines, called a Construct, and that is the type provided on the tiny servant statblock. If we say that a tiny servant isn't a creature, just a machine, does that ruling apply to other construct creatures like modrons, golems, and animated objects? It's a creature, no questions asked.
Well animated objects created by the animate objects are specifically mentioned as becoming creatures.
Modrons and golems are obviously creatures - the term creature has nothing to do with whether something is living or not.
"Creature" is a D&D term, to differentiate things from just being "objects".
If you can get your hands on the magic stone cantrip (like through an artificer dip) you can hand them out to your servants as a bonus action each round.
You can always say that the spell grants the ability to exhale.
There's no reason to deny DB on a TS. TS is a higher level spell and you can already DB a Familiar, a 1st level permanent ally. Putting DB on a TS is a lot less effective than putting DB on an Owl Familiar. So why naysay it for any reason?
Let people have fun. Jeebus.
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You can always say that the spell grants the ability to exhale.
There's no reason to deny DB on a TS. TS is a higher level spell and you can already DB a Familiar, a 1st level permanent ally. Putting DB on a TS is a lot less effective than putting DB on an Owl Familiar. So why naysay it for any reason?
This spell has been around for a while, since Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, but there’s never been a better time to make use of tiny servant. It’s a hidden gem on many casters’ spell lists!
You can get this spell with a wizard, artificer, or Clockwork Soul sorcerer (the latter using the “swap-out” aspect of Clockwork Magic; see my guide on how to use Homebrew to support this in DDB). It’s 3rd level, lasts 8 hours, and requires no concentration. What do you get? Well… a tiny servant! A li’l bitty lamp or coin or hammer that can walk around and do simple stuff for you. When you first get access to this little servant at 5th level (9th if you’re an artificer), it’s a pretty hard sell to use up your most powerful spell slot to animate one of these guys, but as you get higher in level, it becomes less and less of an ask.
You also don’t necessarily need to be expending useful resources on this. If you have the Extended Spell metamagic, either as a Clockwork Soul sorcerer or through the Metamagic Adept feat, you can extend the spell’s duration to 16 hours. So if you reach the end of an adventuring day and still have slots left, animate some servants, and now you have tireless overnight sentinels with blindsight who will last a good portion of the following adventuring day; probably a good idea to still hang onto some spell slots in case you get ambushed in the night. Even if you can’t extend the spell though, it can be a useful cast during an adventuring day once you have a few more slots under your belt.
Before we get into the fun stuff, let’s address some objections and set baseline expectations. We’ll start with,
1. Animate dead is a better spell. Well, it depends! For ordinary combat, yeah, a skeleton or zombie will serve you better than an animated pot, and you can sustain four of them over 24 hours without having to extend the spell. They’re also stronger, more durable, and more intelligent (though zombies only barely). These are strong points. But tiny servant offers a number of advantages:
A) Availability. No need to dig up bodies! Fish a coin from your pocket and you’re good to go.
B) Blindsight. This is a truly rare sense that sets tiny servant and bats from find familiar apart from other summons. A creature with this sense can detect invisible creatures, see through fogs and magical darkness, and make attacks with advantage when their targets can’t do the same.
C) Culpability. NPCs generally don’t like necromancers, and it’s easy to pin a misdeed on you when your zombie is caught spilling the milk. But if a prison guard claims that an animated silver piece stole his jail keys and ran away with them, he’s likely to be fired, not listened to. These objects are just not suspicious; they are usually common items that draw little to no attention. Even if an NPC hears something moving and comes to investigate, they won’t see a corpse lumbering around; they’ll see a pot, a bell, or a stick, and pay it no mind.
D) Defensibility. At the start of a fight, it makes a lot of sense for an enemy caster who sees that you have a ton of zombies to hit them with a fireball, and now instead of zombies, you have charred corpse corpses. Your servants, on the other hand, can hide in your backpack or in your boot until called, and not only will they draw no attention to you, they may be protected from areas-of-effect altogether depending in how your DM rules. If they are in trouble and exposed, they can use their climbing speed to scramble to safety. The best way to protect them is by keeping them in something like a bag of holding, then leaving it open when it’s time for them to act.
E) Eating. Not only do your servants not need to eat, they won’t try to eat you if you forget to reassert control over them every 24 hours.
F) Flexibility. With animate dead, you only ever get one of two options. Tiny servant lets you animate any tiny object, from about the size of a cat to the size of a coin. Flasks, torches, amulets, silvered daggers, bullseye lanterns, bells, bags of caltrops or ball bearings… Your only limits are the size restriction and your imagination—and your DM’s generosity, of course.
2. Areas-of-effect will kill your minions. It’s true! By 5th level, fireball exists, and effects like it will only show up more and more. But I hope point D from the previous item illustrates how you can protect your servants. Don’t deploy them when facing dragons of the non-green variety. Save them for enemies that only use single-target attacks; then, if the enemy targets them, you’re diverting at least 10 points of damage away from other party members. If enemies don’t target them, we can get into some shenanigans!
3. Minions slow the game down. This is totally true! But they don’t have to slow it down much; this part is up to you. During other players’ turns, think anout what you want to do next. Don’t go for super complex plans (these guys probably don’t have the capacity for them anyway; we’ll discuss that in setting expectations). “Run up to the enemy and use the Help action to give advantage on an attack) is a totally worthwhile turn for a minion that happens to be extremely quick, and the party rogue will thank you for it.
Now, let’s calibrate expectations. As the last objection may indicate, minions can really slow the game down and let you steal the show, spending minutes describing your creatures’ actions in exquisite detail, and forming elaborate plans that prompt rules debates and end with all parties involved confused and frustrated. We don’t want that. Creativity is good! Annoying your friends is counterproductive. So go for the simple stuff. Commands should generally be as simple as the ones listed in the spell description; keep in mind that a creature with 1 Intelligence is not particularly bright, and probably doesn’t have the sophistication to recall and enact detailed attack formations. Telling a bag of caltrops, “Scatter your contents in that spot there” is reasonable. Telling that same bag, “Move over there and ready an action to dump your contents as soon as that creature starts moving”—Now we’re getting iffier, but probably still okay. Telling a bullseye lantern, “Keep your beam focused on any invisible enemy you see and throw glitter on it so we can see it”—now we have multiple commands, a context-dependent designation (“enemy”), and a task with complex hand-eye coordination required. Basically, don’t ask these little critters to act with the tactical cunning of mini-PCs; they just don’t have it in them, and your party has a right to expect their game not to devolve into “the caster and their toys”.
We also don’t want to overly rely on rules gimmicks. Things like so-called “rest tricking,” or any phrase beginning with “the rules don’t say I can’t,” run the risk of alienating your DM and other players. They want to have fun, not micromanage your power level. This spell is powerful enough, even if you leave some potential exploits on (or rather, off) the table.
So what should we expect from tiny servant? We should expect a concentration-free minion that can perform any number of useful tasks, in combat or outside of it. These tasks include:
A) Keep watch. Blindsight makes up for the poor passive perception to a degree. A servant around your neck can twitch to silently alert you if something’s creeping up from behind, for instance. A bell servant can alert the whole party by ringing itself when trouble is near.
B) Check for traps. A time-honored tradition of summoning is using said summons to trigger spike traps and poisoned locks. Your servants have no feelings and can just be reanimated, so sacrifice them with abandon.
C) Use items/themselves. It’s totally reasonable for an animated flask with a [equipment]potion of healing[/equipment] inside to pour its own contents into a dying PC’s mouth. In dark environs, a bullseye lantern should be able to light up enemies while leaving you protected by darkness. Some tiny servants may even be able to use magic items, or the Spell-Storing Item of an artificer. That one probably depends on relative size; keep in mind that these things can only lift 12 pounds.
D) Help in battle. The Help action is the most obvious way, but maybe there will be other options, like closing and locking an intervening door or carrying a lit torch over to the enemy (this is a great way to provide lighting or flames for the pyrotechnics spell). And, of course, if it’s totally necessary, they can attack. On a hit they’ll deal an average of 5 or 6 damage. This is why, if you’re not sure what shape to make a servant, it’s a good idea to have a few silvered weapons, so presumably their slam attack can overcome resistance to nonmagical weapons that aren’t silvered. Keep in mind that any attack hitting them and not your party members is damage the party doesn’t take, and you can bolster their limited hit points with temporary hit point bursts, as with the Artillerist’s Protector Cannon. It’s also not a bad idea to sic them on an enemy that is just about to be taken down, but you don’t think the party will quite be able to knock them to 0 before their turn comes up again. Also if the enemy is prone or blinded, have an object toddle over and throw a net on them to make sure they stay vulnerable; a straight attack roll with +3 to hit has a moderate chance of working until you reach very high levels.
E) Infiltrate. Animate a gold coin and hand it over with other gold when making a purchase, so after the store closes, the coin can unlock the store from inside. Animate a grappling hook and have it bury itself in a wall close to the top (after you attach a rope, naturally). Animate a magnifying glass and sneak it over to an enemy encampment to light their tents on fire (yes, there are actual mechanics for this). If you are tied up but have access to the Subtle Spell metamagic, animate something you’re touching and make it untie you.
In the end, the most creative uses will be specific to your campaign. Think of how you can use this spell to achieve your aims. Just remember our limitations. Our object can only carry 12 pounds or less. It is unintelligent and cannot speak. It can only receive commands within 120 feet, and we can only issue one such command per turn. And for the table’s sake, keep your commands brief and easy to implement. Go forth and create tiny servants, adventurers!
This spell has been around for a while, since Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, but there’s never been a better time to make use of tiny servant. It’s a hidden gem on many casters’ spell lists!
You can get this spell with a wizard, artificer, or Clockwork Soul sorcerer (the latter using the “swap-out” aspect of Clockwork Magic; see my guide on how to use Homebrew to support this in DDB). It’s 3rd level, lasts 8 hours, and requires no concentration. What do you get? Well… a tiny servant! A li’l bitty lamp or coin or hammer that can walk around and do simple stuff for you. When you first get access to this little servant at 5th level (9th if you’re an artificer), it’s a pretty hard sell to use up your most powerful spell slot to animate one of these guys, but as you get higher in level, it becomes less and less of an ask.
You also don’t necessarily need to be expending useful resources on this. If you have the Extended Spell metamagic, either as a Clockwork Soul sorcerer or through the Metamagic Adept feat, you can extend the spell’s duration to 16 hours. So if you reach the end of an adventuring day and still have slots left, animate some servants, and now you have tireless overnight sentinels with blindsight who will last a good portion of the following adventuring day; probably a good idea to still hang onto some spell slots in case you get ambushed in the night. Even if you can’t extend the spell though, it can be a useful cast during an adventuring day once you have a few more slots under your belt.
Before we get into the fun stuff, let’s address some objections and set baseline expectations. We’ll start with,
1. Animate dead is a better spell. Well, it depends! For ordinary combat, yeah, a skeleton or zombie will serve you better than an animated pot, and you can sustain four of them over 24 hours without having to extend the spell. They’re also stronger, more durable, and more intelligent (though zombies only barely). These are strong points. But tiny servant offers a number of advantages:
A) Availability. No need to dig up bodies! Fish a coin from your pocket and you’re good to go.
B) Blindsight. This is a truly rare sense that sets tiny servant and bats from find familiar apart from other summons. A creature with this sense can detect invisible creatures, see through fogs and magical darkness, and make attacks with advantage when their targets can’t do the same.
C) Culpability. NPCs generally don’t like necromancers, and it’s easy to pin a misdeed on you when your zombie is caught spilling the milk. But if a prison guard claims that an animated silver piece stole his jail keys and ran away with them, he’s likely to be fired, not listened to. These objects are just not suspicious; they are usually common items that draw little to no attention. Even if an NPC hears something moving and comes to investigate, they won’t see a corpse lumbering around; they’ll see a pot, a bell, or a stick, and pay it no mind.
D) Defensibility. At the start of a fight, it makes a lot of sense for an enemy caster who sees that you have a ton of zombies to hit them with a fireball, and now instead of zombies, you have charred corpse corpses. Your servants, on the other hand, can hide in your backpack or in your boot until called, and not only will they draw no attention to you, they may be protected from areas-of-effect altogether depending in how your DM rules. If they are in trouble and exposed, they can use their climbing speed to scramble to safety. The best way to protect them is by keeping them in something like a bag of holding, then leaving it open when it’s time for them to act.
E) Eating. Not only do your servants not need to eat, they won’t try to eat you if you forget to reassert control over them every 24 hours.
F) Flexibility. With animate dead, you only ever get one of two options. Tiny servant lets you animate any tiny object, from about the size of a cat to the size of a coin. Flasks, torches, amulets, silvered daggers, bullseye lanterns, bells, bags of caltrops or ball bearings… Your only limits are the size restriction and your imagination—and your DM’s generosity, of course.
2. Areas-of-effect will kill your minions. It’s true! By 5th level, fireball exists, and effects like it will only show up more and more. But I hope point D from the previous item illustrates how you can protect your servants. Don’t deploy them when facing dragons of the non-green variety. Save them for enemies that only use single-target attacks; then, if the enemy targets them, you’re diverting at least 10 points of damage away from other party members. If enemies don’t target them, we can get into some shenanigans!
3. Minions slow the game down. This is totally true! But they don’t have to slow it down much; this part is up to you. During other players’ turns, think anout what you want to do next. Don’t go for super complex plans (these guys probably don’t have the capacity for them anyway; we’ll discuss that in setting expectations). “Run up to the enemy and use the Help action to give advantage on an attack) is a totally worthwhile turn for a minion that happens to be extremely quick, and the party rogue will thank you for it.
Now, let’s calibrate expectations. As the last objection may indicate, minions can really slow the game down and let you steal the show, spending minutes describing your creatures’ actions in exquisite detail, and forming elaborate plans that prompt rules debates and end with all parties involved confused and frustrated. We don’t want that. Creativity is good! Annoying your friends is counterproductive. So go for the simple stuff. Commands should generally be as simple as the ones listed in the spell description; keep in mind that a creature with 1 Intelligence is not particularly bright, and probably doesn’t have the sophistication to recall and enact detailed attack formations. Telling a bag of caltrops, “Scatter your contents in that spot there” is reasonable. Telling that same bag, “Move over there and ready an action to dump your contents as soon as that creature starts moving”—Now we’re getting iffier, but probably still okay. Telling a bullseye lantern, “Keep your beam focused on any invisible enemy you see and throw glitter on it so we can see it”—now we have multiple commands, a context-dependent designation (“enemy”), and a task with complex hand-eye coordination required. Basically, don’t ask these little critters to act with the tactical cunning of mini-PCs; they just don’t have it in them, and your party has a right to expect their game not to devolve into “the caster and their toys”.
We also don’t want to overly rely on rules gimmicks. Things like so-called “rest tricking,” or any phrase beginning with “the rules don’t say I can’t,” run the risk of alienating your DM and other players. They want to have fun, not micromanage your power level. This spell is powerful enough, even if you leave some potential exploits on (or rather, off) the table.
So what should we expect from tiny servant? We should expect a concentration-free minion that can perform any number of useful tasks, in combat or outside of it. These tasks include:
A) Keep watch. Blindsight makes up for the poor passive perception to a degree. A servant around your neck can twitch to silently alert you if something’s creeping up from behind, for instance. A bell servant can alert the whole party by ringing itself when trouble is near.
B) Check for traps. A time-honored tradition of summoning is using said summons to trigger spike traps and poisoned locks. Your servants have no feelings and can just be reanimated, so sacrifice them with abandon.
C) Use items/themselves. It’s totally reasonable for an animated flask with a [equipment]potion of healing[/equipment] inside to pour its own contents into a dying PC’s mouth. In dark environs, a bullseye lantern should be able to light up enemies while leaving you protected by darkness. Some tiny servants may even be able to use magic items, or the Spell-Storing Item of an artificer. That one probably depends on relative size; keep in mind that these things can only lift 12 pounds.
D) Help in battle. The Help action is the most obvious way, but maybe there will be other options, like closing and locking an intervening door or carrying a lit torch over to the enemy (this is a great way to provide lighting or flames for the pyrotechnics spell). And, of course, if it’s totally necessary, they can attack. On a hit they’ll deal an average of 5 or 6 damage. This is why, if you’re not sure what shape to make a servant, it’s a good idea to have a few silvered weapons, so presumably their slam attack can overcome resistance to nonmagical weapons that aren’t silvered. Keep in mind that any attack hitting them and not your party members is damage the party doesn’t take, and you can bolster their limited hit points with temporary hit point bursts, as with the Artillerist’s Protector Cannon. It’s also not a bad idea to sic them on an enemy that is just about to be taken down, but you don’t think the party will quite be able to knock them to 0 before their turn comes up again. Also if the enemy is prone or blinded, have an object toddle over and throw a net on them to make sure they stay vulnerable; a straight attack roll with +3 to hit has a moderate chance of working until you reach very high levels.
E) Infiltrate. Animate a gold coin and hand it over with other gold when making a purchase, so after the store closes, the coin can unlock the store from inside. Animate a grappling hook and have it bury itself in a wall close to the top (after you attach a rope, naturally). Animate a magnifying glass and sneak it over to an enemy encampment to light their tents on fire (yes, there are actual mechanics for this). If you are tied up but have access to the Subtle Spell metamagic, animate something you’re touching and make it untie you.
In the end, the most creative uses will be specific to your campaign. Think of how you can use this spell to achieve your aims. Just remember our limitations. Our object can only carry 12 pounds or less. It is unintelligent and cannot speak. It can only receive commands within 120 feet, and we can only issue one such command per turn. And for the table’s sake, keep your commands brief and easy to implement. Go forth and create tiny servants, adventurers!
Breath Weapon cast on a Tiny Servant us very useful too…
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Could be! Depends on whether your DM says dragon's breath can work on a creature that doesn't have a mouth.
I reply with my failproof plan:
I cast Magic Mouth on the servant with the circumstance of it's turn beginning with the message "DR. OCTOGONAPUS BLAAAAAAARRRGHHHH!!!!!"
The mouth problem is solved with style lol
So I play an eladrin wizard, and my familiar is a bat, and I have to agree with you on the usefulness of blindsight.
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Just a shame about the INT 2 for it trying to be alert when it doesn't know if something is "creeping up" or just walking normally, behind you.
Yeah, good thing I have magical control over it.
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That's immaterial - there's as much argument for dragon's breath requiring a mouth as tiny servants failing to have mouths, which is none. If your DM is out to ban Dragon's Breath, they will, but I doubt they'd use such an easily-defeatable excuse.
The text of dragon's breath states that the breath weapon comes out of the mouth, and the [monster]tiny servant[/spell] is described as being "the object, plus arms and legs." Unless the item comes with a mouth, or we use Dakael's foolproof plan, those two things seem to be in conflict.
If your DM is willing to go with it, you could say that the word "mouth" can just as well apply to the mouth of a jar or pitcher, or a similar opening on an object. It'd be pretty funny for a party to get nervous every time they see an NPC with a Tiny Servant, looking carefully to see if there's an opening it might start spewing fire from.
IMHO Tiny servant doesn't make an object a creature, it just turns the object into a robot/machine
playing since 1986
Yeah because if it did make an object into a creature it would have wording like "The target animates and sprouts little arms and legs, becoming a creature under your control until the spell ends or the creature drops to 0 hit points."
Agreed. There is a type of creature made to represent machines, called a Construct, and that is the type provided on the tiny servant statblock. If we say that a tiny servant isn't a creature, just a machine, does that ruling apply to other construct creatures like modrons, golems, and animated objects? It's a creature, no questions asked.
By the way, on the spell Dragon's Breath, I think it's time we brought a rules lawyer into the table to sort this out. First off, it has the wording "provided the creature has [a mouth] (XGtE, page 154)." The art of the tiny servant on that page does not show it with a mouth, and the wording of Tiny Servant says only that "the target animates and sprouts little arms and legs (XGtE, page 168)." It doesn't say anything about a mouth.
Second of all, Dragon's Breath says that the target of the spell can "use its action to exhale energy (XGtE, page 154, emphasis mine)." Even if the tiny servant has a mouth (perhaps you animated a little wind-up dragon or a clay mask to deal with this problem), I doubt it has little lungs inside it. Thus, it can't breathe, so it can't exhale magical energy.
However, on a closing note, the wind-up dragon shooting a dragon's breath spell is too cute for me to completely rules-lawyer away. Just talk to your DM before doing this to make sure you're all on the same page. And even if your DM vetoes your idea, you can still try to give your Tiny Servant a Wand of Magic Missiles or a Circlet of Blasting to hold in its tiny little constructed hands. Your DM probably won't be cool with that either, but good luck!
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Well animated objects created by the animate objects are specifically mentioned as becoming creatures.
Modrons and golems are obviously creatures - the term creature has nothing to do with whether something is living or not.
"Creature" is a D&D term, to differentiate things from just being "objects".
Back to the original post. For Fire Breath / Dragon's Breath you need to be able to exhale. Tiny Servant does not provide that capability.
P.S. A chair also has arms and legs, but is it a creature?
Cedo nulli, Calcanda semel via leti.
Parvi sed magni.
A teapot can exhale, when they come to heat. Just animate teapots, then, for your fire breathing needs. Voila.
If you can get your hands on the magic stone cantrip (like through an artificer dip) you can hand them out to your servants as a bonus action each round.
You can always say that the spell grants the ability to exhale.
There's no reason to deny DB on a TS. TS is a higher level spell and you can already DB a Familiar, a 1st level permanent ally. Putting DB on a TS is a lot less effective than putting DB on an Owl Familiar. So why naysay it for any reason?
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Fun stuff
Make a tiny servant carry your Eldritch Cannon and you can use flamethrower as a bonus action every turn, no mouth lungs or creatures required.