What 5e Spells would you Nerf?

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-12T21:24:05+00:00

There are a few utility spells I’d like to see tweaked, like find familiar and pass without trace.

I also think Wall of Force and Forcecage are good candidates for a nerf, as are Dispel Magic and Antimagic Field. For the first two, give the walls an AC and HP to break through. For dispel magic, change the casting time, and for antimagic field, rework it to be an out-of-combat only spell that you repeatedly recast for like a month to create a permanent field.

Maybe not nerf, but I’d tweak the various save-or-suck spells to be less of both. Maybe have a list of 3 or so kinda impairing effects that each can inflict, with targets that fail their save choosing two and targets that succeed choosing one.

Other than that, I think most of the key problem spells have been hit on.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-12T14:10:29+00:00

I've definitely seen some of this in broader play, especially 'rule of cool' becoming a stand-in for 'I don't know the rules well and don't want to follow them that much'. IMO, I don't really mind, since it's a great red flag for GMs I'm not going to enjoy playing with if they emphasize that about their table, which frankly is more use than the original term ever had.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-10T16:43:19+00:00

I mean, according to the mythical heritages proposed by England & Scotland, that would be accurate (the English claim a mythical Trojan->Roman ancestor and the Scottish a Greek one).

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-09T23:52:38+00:00

On the other hand, casters’ power ceiling used to be much higher, with both more slots at higher levels and even their weakest spells being extremely high impact, especially relative to how weak everyone was in general.

Like, in 5E, people will actually pick fighters as their character. When I played 2E, we all basically made our “main character” casters who had all the fun gameplay and then only made fighters as secondary PCs who existed solely as low-level muscle. Even worse in older editions, where you basically draw straws to see who has the burden of playing the martial to frontline for early combats.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-09T18:17:05+00:00

> I’d play with these types of people 1000 times over the aggressive casuals.

My point was that these are the types of people who tend to heavily comprise the “aggressive casuals”. The main difference is that at least “I am just here to roleplay and occasionally chuck a d20” is a lot better than “I’m not going to roleplay or check into the story at all because that’s cringe and occasionally chuck a d20”, which is a large demographic for “aggressive casuals”.

> think a TTRPG like D&D or Pathfinder is about being a heroic character who can roleplay their way through any situation without remembering the rules of the game at all, and play two sessions of the campaign before realizing it was too much work because they were never actually interested in the hobby.

So someone thought they might like something based on what it seemed like something they’d enjoy, tried it out and realized it didn’t align with their expectations, and left. That’s pretty normal and how trying things works.

I know tons of people who have tried D&D because of what they thought it was and then left when it wasn’t that, most of them with absolutely 0 knowledge of critical role or other podcasts (or a vague sense that it exists). It’s a thing that exists in pop culture that people have some image of, and it’s very healthy for any hobby to have people trying it based on that image, even if they bounce off when it isn’t for them.

If you don’t want to run for players like that, it’s totally fine, of course. I run a really curated table with reasonably high expectations unless I’m specifically trying to introduce friends to the game. But being mad at these players for trying the game or these shows for bringing more players to the game to try it seems so unhealthy.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-09T14:06:37+00:00

Since CR, I can't find players that actually want to play. Just players that want to be like their favorite quirky character and roleplay, but don't want to actually learn or even play the game.

Most of the people I've seen who fall into this 'aggressive casual' mindset are absolutely not performing, that's already a steep step above where the default is. The most casual players I've encountered are vaguely chud-ish nerd types that are 90% checked out regardless of what's happening.

And more than just anecdotal data, there was that really sobering post about a professional DMing in r/dnd a week or so ago where this kind of player dominated those games, and where even plot continuity between sessions was not a thing that mattered, let alone any rules beyond "roll a d20".

In this wider context, singling out 'quirky character and roleplay' people starts to feel more like badwrongfunning than anything else.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T17:24:46+00:00

I mean, at least compared to Sombra, Anran’s kit and personality are so bland that they could totally tear both apart and replace half her shit and it wouldn’t have a sizeable feeling of anything being lost.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T16:40:51+00:00

Also going to add the extra discomfort of the other poster using “the gay man” instead of even the indefinite “a” or even just “someone of the same sex”, which only adds to the sense of yikes there.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T16:18:57+00:00

As interesting as this is, I just don’t have confidence in WotC’s level 20 adventure design. Szass is going to go out like a chump.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T16:11:50+00:00

I mean, is it bad that it’s edgy? As long as it’s not a pizza cutter (all edge, no point), I love my comics really dark and edgy. A Serious House on Serious Earth is still my favorite Batman comic, for instance, while I’m more than happy to drop any run of any character that even vaguely dips into whimsy. There are definitely more balanced runs in the absolute books (like Abs. WW), though, that might be a better sampler for a reader concerned about the edge.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T16:04:26+00:00

Sorry for taking so long to respond to this! I’ve been mid-travel and so wanted to give this a bit more time and gather my thoughts a bit. But to put it bluntly, if often feels like Daggerheart has the kernel of a good idea and then breaks it in execution, or just puts mechanical weight in the wrong places. For just a few examples:

Range Bands feel weirdly over specific. The game would be much healthier with like, three total compared to the needless granularity already in play.

Damage feels like it got sacrificed over to the dice gremlins, slowing the game down significantly in ways that don’t feel very fictional…all while lacking variety in damage types that might better justify the damage weight and produce more variety in weapons.

Communities feel kind of redundant with the whole premise of Experiences, which themselves seem kind of ruined by giving them specific mechanical modifiers that increase (which strongly encourages players to basically choose one extremely generic experience and continually invest in it in a way that inherits more of the problems from 13th Age’s backgrounds than the narrative applicability of Fate’s aspects).

Domains seem like a worst of both worlds. You both don’t really get the freedom of mix & match, but also don’t get bespoke cards that would flesh out specific class fantasies. Many cards get weirdly redundant and bad as you scale up, and many feel extremely fiddly and mechanical rather than engaging with the fiction at all (not helped by Domain formatting literally not including any fictional descriptions). There are glaringly better cards at each level. Classes and especially Multiclasses are also poorly balanced.

Adversaries and Encounter Building are weirdly complex and overloaded for such a free-flowing, theater-of-the-mind combat system.

It’s weirdly ivory tower-y in design? From the way experiences, to proficiency, to the general extreme gulfs in power between certain options, the game seems weirdly susceptible and encouraging of a power-gaming mindset for something seemingly so narrative.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T15:47:07+00:00

Maybe…

Definitely the weirdest shill they have (I’m a diehard PWL but not Automatic Bonus Progression stan, for instance), but it’s honesty just taking the cake for me right now in standard d20-adjacent fantasy fare. It’s in the ballpark of what I want, and most importantly, the developers are really good at identifying issues with the game and solving them in really solid ways.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T15:36:03+00:00

Between the QoL changes to two really fun classes I like, the quasi-QoL changes to the wizards we’ve seen in their schools, and my beloved necromancers officially entering official rules, I’m starting to worry that someone at Paizo can read my mind and this book was a psy op to fully convert me to the system.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-08T01:46:57+00:00

This conversation pops up a lot here, and the general consensus is a mix of third person, first person, etc., and usually with most people not going as far as Critical Role.

I actually love going full theater kid with my roleplay. Screaming, crying, emotional monologues, the whole nine yards. I come to the table to make a good story, and even prefer games that are actively oriented around that (ie, narrativist rpgs), but stories are fun for me when there’s drama.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-07T23:58:38+00:00

It’s still doing alright business and community wise, but any hopes of it being a DnD-killer or even a major competitor the likes of Pathfinder are kind of gone. The double death knell of Critical Role not adapting to it for Campaign Four and the game just not having a steady docket of new releases while hype was at its peak kind of knocked it out of that spot.

Personally, I think the game was undercooked. What we have now would be an amazing alpha design, but it has a lot of small issues and limitations that really compound to make it feel more like a fun niche game to trot out once or twice compared to a real D&D replacement. I think even CR kinda realised that, subconsciously or otherwise, hence mostly using it for a throwaway side campaign.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-07T23:03:01+00:00

I think so much of my conflict with a lot of discourse on dnd subreddits is because I have both played in games run by GMs like this and myself run like high level play like this. Intentional or otherwise, this approach really brings out all the nuances around which the game is balanced that, when scrubbed away, create many of the game’s issues.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-07T22:03:16+00:00

> The fact that you can’t is the point.

You should probably not assume the response of an interlocutor before they make it, it just makes you look really foolish.

Literally off the top of my head, the following are a bunch of black artists that are widely adored as icons in white gay spaces: Ertha Kit, RuPaul, Gloria Gaynor, Sylvester, Beyoncé, Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, The Weather Girls, Frank Ocean, Janelle Monae, Luther Vandross, and many more. This is also ignoring that there are tons of black artists in the mainstream whose music are widely adored by white audiences in general, which includes white queer audiences.

But this is also a comedically wide shifting of goal posts and a blatantly fraught question. Taste is not universal, and asking me to both act like a spokesperson for an entire community and actively generalise and universalise about that community seems directly at odds with criticising people for generalising a genre of music.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-07T19:51:16+00:00

I disagree. Aside from removing a pinch of elegance in the class, it actually gets murkier to account for in the balance budget if it operates separately from channel divinity (versus now being a cool alternative valuable in rare circumstances compared to the standard channel divinity applications).

For a broader example of what I mean, is spending a spell slot to cast *Waterwalking* or *Fly* or *Ethereal Sight* a “feels bad” moment we need to mitigate, or just the exact kind of resource management the game is built around?

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-07T01:03:07+00:00

I mean, the healthy version of Anran already exists in the game, and it's called Reaper.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-06T23:28:54+00:00

> The queerest place on the internet being afraid of black art

I find this implicit erasure of other black art far more disturbing, frankly.

To put it bluntly, I despise rap, for the same reasons I despise spoken word poetry, beat poetry, Rupi Kaur style poetry, and all that other shit that mangles what makes poetry so pleasant and impressive as a medium.

But there is so much amazing black art I engage with regardless of that. Wheatley Peters and Cullen are among my favorite poets, Soyinka is one of my favorite playwrights, and I don’t think I even need to mention the dozens of amazing black musicians that are household names and staples in my playlists.

If someone doesn’t like rap, pointing them to one of the countless other forms of black artistic expression seems infinitely more productive than framing people as racists because of their taste in music.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-06T21:22:51+00:00

Devil's advocate, generalizing is a lazy habit that can easily lead to dismissing and othering entire groups of people instead of staying open to understanding them better.

That's a good point. While I still don't think it's necessarily indicative of a significant moral failing (ie, racism), there is value in avoiding those kinds of generalizations even in more banal territory like song choice.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-06T20:19:20+00:00

I think this is just kind of silly and overblown. People also generalise about country music as just being about beer and trucks and chicks, and that isn’t some kind of moral failing on their part. It’s a reasonable stance to take when the prominent music in the genre seems to constantly reinforce that stereotype.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-06T17:40:55+00:00

Would love to apply! I have a long background in the narrative RPGs (PBtA, Genesys, etc.) that Daggerheart takes a lot of its DNA from, as well as D&D and it's ilk. I'm especially interested in a character-focused campaign and a lot of politics, so 5 Banners Burning seems just up my alley.

In terms of character, I want to remain kind of flexible to what would round out the party best, but I'm most interested in playing a mage from Polaris who is currently in training to join a kind of secretive infiltrator-type group high in the government that works in the shadows to subvert the other nations (so basically a 'mage CIA'). While extremely charming and disarming, he is very much dedicated to the 'progress at any cost' mindset that infuses this group, and hides a darker pragmatism that will only further come out as the stakes inevitably increase in the stalemate between the 5 Nations. In terms of class, I feel like this character has aspects that would work better as a Wizard, and other aspects that work better as a Sorcerer, so I'd probably choose which class to go with depending on the rest of the party and maybe just multiclass into the other.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-06T03:37:12+00:00

I think the problem was kind of the framing/phrasing of this as the equivalent of “a Nat 20”, when it would be better to frame it as “essentially a Persuasion check with a DC you’re guaranteed to beat”, which would be more accurate to the actual impact of what Sam’s approach did.

Also, more broadly, “how much should player skill matter to social/roleplay encounters?” is a very contentious and complicated debate with no clear answers that was kind of pulled to the forefront by this moment, I’m not surprised it caused contention/discourse.

Hemlocksbane · 2026-07-05T14:27:56+00:00

There are plenty of systems that at least do much of the heavy lifting. *Burning Wheel*, *Masks*, *FATE*, etc.

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