Dungeons Demystified

I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons for over 25 years, and I'm here to answer all your questions and share my valuable XP. Lost in a labyrinth of rules? Need advice as a DM or player? Don't know where to start? Just ask the Dungeon Mistress! My inbox is...

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Hi :) Me and a group of friends (all new to D&D or haven't played in 10 years) want to start our first game in a few weeks and we ordered the starter kit including Lost Mines Of Phandelver yesterday. The description online says it's for 4 players but there's 5 of us. I found some threads on reddit saying people played this with more than 4 players. Is it easy to adjust it to 5 players? It's also our DMs first time.

Sorry for what is probably a too-late response, but for anyone else who has this question: it is in fact very easy to adjust the Lost Mines for 5 people. It even comes with enough premade characters, if my memory serves correctly. I wouldn’t worry about making actual adjustments; it might be a little easier but there’s always some flexibility there.

Five is honestly probably the ideal adventuring party. The classic group is a warrior (like a Fighter), a magic-user (like a Wizard), a skilled expert (like a Rogue), and a support/healer (like a Cleric). In the classic group, the Rogue can do damage similar to a Fighter and the Cleric can engage foes similarly to a Fighter, while the Wizard acts like artillery, so everyone’s useful in combat and the Fighter isn’t just out there alone.

If you’ve got a fifth person, it’s really good to stack a second warrior in (which I think is how the starter set does it, having one Strength-based Fighter and one Dexterity-based Fighter) or get someone who can cover multiple roles, such as a Bard or Druid. If you’ve got six, of course, you want two warriors and one jack-of-all-trades. Paladins and Rangers are nifty in that they’re warriors who can also do some healing and support/expertise stuff.

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Greetings, Dungeon Mistress ! As an internet-adventurer I have found myself lost on what you call a "tumblr" with a question burning my lips : What's the most effective way to describe a scene ? I've been DMing for a while with a group of friend and we don't use maps/tokens. While I do not try to force them to imagine the exact scene I have in mind, I still feel like I have a hard time building an atmosphere. How can I find the right words to make them live as part of my world ?

There’s a story of ancient Sparta, that when a group of Samian exiles came to Sparta to beg for relief, they made a great speech of supplication to Sparta’s ruling council of eiphors, full of every trick of rhetoric and diplomacy they knew. At the end of it, the eiphors said, “It was a very pretty speech, and I’m sure it was all very important, but by the time you got to the end of it, we couldn’t remember how it began! Come back tomorrow and try again.”

So the next day, the refugees came back and they tried to plead their case in simpler, more direct terms. Still the eiphors protested that it was too long and bid them to come back and try again.

So on the third day, the supplicants came back to the eiphors and simply held out a sack, saying, “The bag needs grain.”

The Spartans replied that they were finally making sense... but there was no need to go on about the bag.

What I’m saying is: keep it short and sweet. As you might imagine from the fact that I started with “There’s a story of ancient Sparta,” this also goes against my own inclinations. But your players are looking for a few key things. Where are they? What’s important? What can they do. If you’re planning in advance, think about designing your description the way you would create an interactive puzzle game. Think about what they need to know and give them that. 

You can elaborate as they ask questions. This will actually help them remember the details better, because they participated!

The one other piece of advice I can give is: don’t punish your players for having missed something in your description, or having not asked something that you didn’t put in the initial slate of key details. The character knows if they’re standing on a precipice, even if the player overlooked that. They’re not going to step forward and plunge to their death.

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I'm a tome, goo, warlock with one level of knowledge cleric. I thought of taking crossbow expert to use repelling eldritch blast in melee (because who doesn't like knocking people back 10-40 feet from melee?). But is there another way to be effective in close quarters (I'm thinking like a tunnel)? Or, should I simply consider eating the AoO to use EB? Or are there other, better tactical options?

I’m not sure from your question if the opportunity attack would be from stepping back out of melee, or if you’re under the impression that using a ranged attack would provoke one. Just to be clear, making a ranged attack doesn’t trigger an opportunity attack in 5th Edition; the penalty is that it gives you disadvantage. 

Either way, Crossbow Expert does mitigate that (yes, even for ranged attacks that don’t involve a crossbow), but you’d only be benefiting from one of the three bullet points that the feat gives you. Feats in 5E aren’t like feats in 3E or 4E, where they’re part of the progression. They’re bigger in impact because they’re rarer and more costly; you’re giving up part of your normal ability score increase to get them. 

I love feats, I love the greater degree of control they give you over character customization, but if you’re playing at a table where you’re worried about character optimization you’re probably not actually going to want to throw away the chance to boost your Charisma modifier to get a tactical advantage in a situation 

If you want to take a feat to make this situation work, I suggest Lucky. How often are you going to want to use Eldritch Blast in melee, most days? Is it more than three times a day? Lucky gives you three luck dice that you can spend after you have rolled, and when you spend one you roll and choose from any of the dice involved in the roll. Which means if you make your Eldritch Blast with disadvantage, you roll two d20s, and if they’re both high rolls you’re golden; if one of them is low enough that you think you’re going to miss, you throw out a luck die and then take the highest one present. 

With Crossbow Expert, you’ve thrown away an ability score increase to get a feat you’re only going to use 1/3rd of, some of the time. With Lucky, you’ve got a feat that covers your corner case but can also apply to literally any other situation. You can use even it in a day that you don’t go into the dungeon and don’t cast a single spell. 

Hope that helps... anyone else in the same situation, since this message is probably literally years old. Sorry!

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My DM has always used an intelligence check for characters to look for traps (magic and non magic), but I've always thought that that would be a wisdom based thing, since wisdom is for perception. Am I missing something?

Your DM is probably looking at the Investigation skill, which is under Intelligence. In my opinion, this is a mistake. Take it out and Wisdom and Intelligence are pretty easy to sort out -- all the knowledge skills are under Intelligence so it’s what you know and all the skills that rely on awareness, empathy, or intuition are under Wisdom so it’s what you notice. 4th Edition made that divide pretty clear, ending an argument that has persisted since the game began. 5E added Investigation, which muddles things up.

Your DM’s not doing it wrong but if you happen to be trained in Perception and/or have a better Wisdom modifier than you do Intelligence, it might be worth talking to your DM between sessions about if you can use Perception to try to spot traps instead of carefully investigating. 

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I am a paladin and many spell require "bonus action." Is this something I need to get before I can use the spell? For example, do I need to somehow aquire the ability to do a bonus action before I can cast that spell?

Hi, I wound up going on a Tumblr hiatus unexpectedly and because it wasn’t planned, I didn’t put any kind AFK notice up, so I’ve got no idea how old these questions are. 

But since part of the point of this blog is that other people might have the same question, I’m going to answer them anyway.

No, you don’t need to acquire a bonus action. Every character, every single round on their turn, can take one and only one bonus action. Unless you’re under a condition that restricts this, you’ve always got that one bonus action. 

The reason so many of your Paladin spells take a bonus action is because they’re intended to work together with the Fight action, which is how you attack. So you’ve got a spell like searing smite, you cast that using your bonus action, then you take the Fight action to attack just like you normally would to actually make the attack that searing smite will affect.

Hope that helps!

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Please excuse a brief hiatus.

My schedule is likely to be unusually busy through Friday, April 8th. I’ll resume answering all your questions about 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons the following week!

[dungeons-demystified]

Attack or Save?

New players are sometimes surprised to learn that attack rolls aren’t just used when you’re physically fighting. Some spells require them, too.

If a spell tells you to make a “ranged spell attack” or “melee spell attack”, this means you have to make an attack roll against the target for it to work. A spell attack uses your character’s spellcasting ability (the ability score that drives your character class’s magic, like Intelligence for wizards or Charisma for bards) modifier and proficiency bonus as its attack bonus. 

If that sounds complicated, realize that you don’t need to figure it out every time. Because your spellcasting attack bonus will be the same for every spell you cast as a member of a given class, you can save a lot of time by making sure you calculate this and write it down on your character sheet before play. There are standard spell sheets available for downloading and printing that have a space for it right at the top.

A spell attack roll works just like any other attack roll; you roll 1d20, add your bonus, and try to meet or beat the target’s Armor Class. The spell’s description will tell you what happens if you hit. Usually, this will be some amount of damage. Occasionally, there will be other effects. For instance, the ray of frost spell does 1d8 cold damage when you cast it at level 1, and the chill also reduces the target’s speed by 10 feet.

While some harmful spells require the caster to make an attack roll to hit the target; others require potential targets to make a saving throw to avoid the spell. The distinction can be confusing for new players, but each spell will say quite clearly in its description whether the caster makes an attack or the targets make a saving throw.

If you want to know why some spells work one way and others work another way, just look at which spells do which. Spells that call for an attack roll are usually targeted at a single creature or a specific small number of creatures. They create a single projectile or a narrowly focused stream of energy, often described as a bolt, beam, or ray. If you imagine trying to hit someone with such a spell, you would imagine yourself trying to hit them. You’d have to be aiming precisely, and you would either hit or miss.

In comparison, many saving throw spells tend to target a whole wide area, either with an explosion like fireball or a broad beam or blast like the lightning bolt spell. Such saving throw spells are not spells that you have to aim, they are spells that you unleash. Even ones that target individuals (like acid splash) convey a more “wide angle” approach in their description than attack roll spells do.

Other saving throw spells don’t create a physical effect at all. Spells like charm person or dominate monster wouldn’t use an attack roll because you’re not trying to hit anyone with anything. Since Dungeons & Dragons assumes that spells just work automatically if you have the mystical strength to cast them, it’s up to the victim to resist such spells, not up to you to do anything beyond casting the spell to ensnare them.

Of course, as I said above, the eal trick to telling what kind of spell you’re dealing with is just to read its description. New players often feel like they’re missing something when they read a spell and don’t see everything they’re expecting to see. If most of your early experience is with attack roll spells, the first time you cast a spell that doesn’t require an attack roll it might feel like you’re getting away with something. 

One thing that can really throw people for a loop is when they encounter the rare spells that affect other creatures and don’t require an attack roll or allow the victim a saving throw. Magic missile, sleep, and power word: kill are all examples of such a spell. You’re not missing anything and you’re not cheating. These spells just do what they do, no d20 roll required.

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rule dispute - gnome wizard with mage armor, INT 16 DEX 14. is my AC 17 (15 from mage armor +2 from DEX) or AC 15 (15 from mage armor), or 20 or 18 (with +3 from INT)? DM says 15 but that seems low to me

I’m afraid your DM is right, Adventurer. 

If 15 seems “low” to you, compare it to the 12 you’d have without it. As a wizard, you couldn’t wear armor effectively without spending a feat, so mage armor is one of the most useful defensive spells in the game when you’re starting out and low on slots.

Here’s how it works: 

The spell changes the target’s AC to 13 + their Dexterity modifier. The key word here is changes. A lot of people get hung up on this spell and similar effects like Unarmored Defense, thinking that they should be adding their Dexterity again because they’re thinking there’s a general rule that you add your Dexterity modifier to your Armor Class. 

There isn’t, though... just a general formula for Armor Class that includes your Dexterity modifier. If you’re using mage armor or Unarmored Defense or any other effect that changes your AC, you are using a new formula in place of the old one.

This is also why things like Unarmored Defense features and mage armor don’t “stack” with each other. If you follow the instructions for each of them, the second one you try to apply will tell you to “change” your AC to whatever it gives you. 

You’re trying to add your Intelligence modifier because that’s your spellcasting ability, but there’s no general rule that you add your spellcasting modifier to any number a spell uses; there are specific rules regarding spell attacks and spell saving throw DCs that involve your ability modifier, from which you might (mistakenly) infer a general case, but if a spell wants you to do anything with your ability modifier it will tell you.

Chances are that mage armor uses 13 instead of 10 as its base in deference to the fact that it doesn’t involve your spellcasting ability. 13 is very high for a level 1 character’s main attribute, but it doesn’t scale up. This is probably because the two closest analogues to mage armor are the Draconic Resilience feature belonging to Draconic sorcerers and the Unarmored Defense features belonging to Monks and Barbarians. 

Draconic Resilience works exactly like mage armor (13 + Dexterity modifier), while the Unarmored Defense features are 10 + Dexterity modifier + a secondary ability modifier. They thus have more potential for growth than mage armor or Draconic Resilience, but a higher opportunity cost. They also belong to warrior classes. A wizard, sorcerer, or warlock is very likely to have their spellcasting ability as their highest ability score. So if you could use your spellcasting ability as part of your AC as a mage-type character with mage armor, you’d likely be better protected than an unarmored monk or barbarian, which might be attractive for you as a wizard, but wouldn’t exactly be balanced or fair.

Remember that as a wizard, you have other options for defense, from casting shield when something slips past your mage armor to gaining the special ward from specializing in Abjuration. You can also use spells to control enemy movement or to move yourself out of harm. 

And of course, the best defense is a good offense, and wizards can mount a strong offense.

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

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Remember!

The most important thing with Dungeons & Dragons is to just remember to have fun and be your elf.

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Is ranger underpowered?

Not really, Adventurer. The ranger is perhaps the most frequently complained about class in the game, but from those who’ve delved into the matter, the complaints are more often that the ranger is “lackluster” or “good but not great” or that the class lacks a “unifying gimmick”. 

A lot of those complaints come from players who see character classes as abstract packages of game mechanics rather than flavor, though even those who are looking for a primal scout or warrior of the wild archetype still find that the ranger just doesn’t have enough going for it over a rogue/fighter with the Outlander background.

The combat-focused Hunter ranger archetype is seen as a solid choice for straight combat utility, to the point that every once in a while you see people try to re-work the other ranger archetypes to match its damage output on the idea that this will make them all balanced with each other (never mind that the other ranger archetypes have other things going for them that the hunter doesn’t).

The Beast Master ranger is pretty widely believed to be where the ranger needs the most improvement. Now, some of this is people missing where the companion gets to add proficiency bonuses and where its hit points scale with level at all. but even those who are familiar with the workings of the archetype often come away with complaints.

Some of this is the desire for things that would be more satisfying but also kind of game-breakingly good, like the companion having full PC levels of hit points and being able to move and act independently instead of sharing an action economy with the ranger.

Some of it comes from the fact that even with hit points scaling to 4 times the ranger’s level, the ranger’s companion is just not as “survivable” as a PC. To me as a DM, this is a cue that the companion shouldn’t be targeted the same way a PC would, but it’s still vulnerable to things like area effect spells.

And some of it comes from the fact that the most useful feature of many potential beast companions are attacks that cause a saving throw effect, and these do not grow in strength the way the rest of the beast companion’s capabilities do.

Still and all, a Beast Master ranger is perfectly viable. Try to pick a beast whose natural abilities complements yours rather than duplicating them. If your ranger is an archer, then having a beast gives you a strong melee option. If you fight in melee yourself, get a beast with high speed and mobility who can act as a “ranged option” by running after enemies you can’t reach. At level 5, the ability to use your attack in conjunction with the beast opens up combos like a wolf knocking a target prone so you can make a melee attack with advantage.

Above all, though... don’t worry too much if a character is “underpowered” or not. Certainly don’t worry about it so much that you skip a character class or sub-class that is otherwise exactly what you want to play. 5th Edition is the most balanced edition of D&D ever produced. A lot of players of older editions are still using the lens of those editions when they rank classes, exaggerating the gulf between “optimal” and “underpowered”. 

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

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Why shouldn't you split your levels down the middle? Fighter 6/Bard 5 here.

Excellent question, Adventurer! You’re asking this because in a previous answer I said that there are solid reasons to not quite do so. The key word there was “quite”, meaning “exactly”, so, don’t worry, you’re doing fine for now. 

In fact, even if you wind up with 10 levels of each class, you’ll still be fine. 

The solid reasons are reasons to consider not doing so, not hidden pitfalls or traps you can fall into. Whether you should or not depends a lot on your actual combination of classes and what your goals for your character are.

It is a function of D&D 5E’s design—one of the many things they kept from 4E—that you get something from your class at every level. Some levels, it’s an Ability Score Increase/feat opportunity, some levels of some classes it’s only another spell level (those are the only levels with a line through where the benefit would go on the class’s level chart), but there’s always something, and usually, what you get at higher levels is better or stronger than what you get at lower levels. 

This means that when you multiclass, you are giving up those higher level abilities for your class in favor of having more versatility or better synergy. A lot of players who multiclass make the decision of where their final split should fall by looking at the level progression table for each of their classes and figure out what they’re giving up.

And 11 is sort of a threshold level. You’re basically entering another tier of power when you hit level 11. If you wind up a level 11 Fighter, you get three attacks per round instead of two, which means your fighting power goes up by 50% just because you got that one level. 

If you wind up a level 11 Bard, you get access to 6th level spells, and magic above 5th level is basically on a whole different tier from it (hence why abilities that let people regain spell slots are generally capped at 5th level). 

If you look at the character classes, most of them get a big step up at level 11. Paladins get +1d8 radiant damage to all their attacks and the two ranger archetypes in the PHB both get some sort of multiattack benefit, meaning that like the fighter, their overall offensive power increases. All the primary spellcasters get access to 6th level magic, and some of them gain other benefits.

The bard is admittedly a little lackluster in comparison to some of the others, as the bard’s level 6 spell list isn’t very expansive and you’d only have that one opportunity to learn spells from it… but if you’re taking the Attack action on most of your turns, that’s a solid argument to consider grabbing one extra level of fighter at the expense of your tenth level of bard. 

Now the counter argument is, what do you give up when you end your bard career at 9 instead of 10? As it happens, quite a bit. Level 10 is a nice level for bards. You get a second fifth level spell slot—and if 10 is the ceiling on your bard progression, then 5th level spells are the capstone of your magical ability, the same as a half-caster like a paladin—your bardic inspiration dice go up a size, and you get access to magical secrets, which is widely considered to be one of the best perks of being a bard.

Other classes are fairly lackluster at level 10. Depending on your fighter archetype, you might get nothing more than access to a second fighting style, which you could use to slightly boost your AC or give yourself some ranged versatility… but it won’t change your life, you know?

Of course, you have eight or so levels to go before any of this becomes relevant, and a lot of time to think about what you want to do. Do you want more magic? More attacks? Which would benefit your character more?

So the advice here is not “don’t split your levels down the middle”, but “think about where your character is going, what you give up for each level, and what you get in return.”

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

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what is the difference in intelligence vs. wisodm?

Oh, Adventurer, these two ability scores have caused so much confusion… they’re almost perfect synonyms, right? In most sentences where you could use one, the other would fit.

Back in the day, the six main attributes were called “Prime Requisites”, because they were mainly used to qualify for a character class and measure how good you were at being that character class. Back then, Intelligence meant “how good you are being a wizard” and Wisdom meant “how good you are at being a cleric”, and everything else they did was an afterthought.

Ever since 3rd Edition, though, each of the six ability scores has “plugged into” the game system in the same unified mechanical way, which means more specific uses for each of them has had to be defined. And since then, though there are still weird throwbacks and exceptions, the game has been trending towards a fairly specific and easy to remember definition for both Wisdom and Intelligence.

Are you ready, Adventurer?

Wisdom is your character’s chance to notice something.

Intelligence is your character’s chance to know something.

That’s the secret. It’s not completely intuitve, as wisdom as in “wisdom of the ages” usually refers to accumulated lore and lessons learned, which is knowledge, and all knowledge skills are governed by Intelligence. 

But if you just think of Wisdom as “Awareness” and Intelligence as “Knowledge”, you will very rarely go astray when it comes to figure out which one you should be prioritizing as a player trying to build a certain type of character, or having a player roll a check on if you’re a DM.

Now, some DMs are really in love with the idea of Intelligence as a single actual discrete measurable quantity, because some people are really in love with that, and so you might hear about DMs doing things like making players roll an Intelligence check before allowing their characters to do the good idea the player had or things like that. Rest assured, that is not a part of the game as written. 

Have a question? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

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stupid question - how DO you play the game without a map? we don't really like fucking around with mini's, especially when we keep reusing the same ones for different things, but how do you figure out things like distance without them?

Hail, Adventurer! If you have questions in the future, I wish you would refrain from calling them “stupid” both because that is a harmful word and because it’s easier to talk yourself into asking a difficult question when you’re not also talking yourself out of it. This ask box is here for questions like this.

If your formative experience with RPGs was using map grids and miniatures or tokens, then I can understand it can be a bit of a leap, so I’m going to suggest that you first of all do your best to just forget about how you would do things if you had them.

The second thing I’m going to suggest is: forget a bit about the idea that you need exact positioning. Think about the last time you read a book without illustrations that had a fight scene or complicated action sequence in it. Chances are that, like most people, you had an image in your head of exactly how it went: where everyone was standing, exactly how everyone moved, exactly how it all looked when it played out.

There’s a good chance (not a certainty, but a good chance) that if I asked you where that positional information came from, you would tell me, “Well, it was right there in the book,” and if you did, there’s an even greater chance that you would be wrong. I say this as an author who has seen this experience from many angles, but: people's imagination are really good at inferring that the visual details their minds fill in came from the text. 

An action sequence in a book that dwelt too long or in too much depth on the positions and angles and distances would bog down to the point that you’d never actually be able to picture it as one fluid thing in your head; you’d be lost by the second or third sentence of what would have become a very complicated word problem.

And yet, it all works out just fine in your head.

That’s how “theater of the mind” play works, in terms of nitty-gritty details. Treat it like a story you’re telling. You don’t need to know precisely what “space” Gorak the Conquerer occupies, only that he’s standing toe-to-toe with Vallis the Virtuous and that Destry Shadowheart is sneaking up behind him. 

If you’re playing out a scene like that and you get tripped up, it’s probably because you’re trying to see it as a battle map in your head, rather than a scene unfolding like you would get in a book.

Now, this is not to say that you ignore distances entirely in theater of the mind. If you did, there wouldn’t be any of them in the Player’s Handbook. I will tell you that the key here is simple math. It’s always helpful to have someone who’s really good at arithmetic at the table when you game, and it’s always particularly useful when that person is the DM, but it’s especially helpful to have someone with a head for numbers when you’re doing things at range in a theater of the mind game that uses concrete numbers.

Of course, you don’t have to be a math whiz or have a talent for visualization to know that the knights who are 100 feet away from you are beyond the normal range of your short bow (80 feet) but within the long range (320 feet). If you know you can move 25 feet a round, you can pretty quickly figure out that you could get from 100 feet to 75 feet away, and then they’d be in normal range. (Or you can ask the DM/your number-friend “How close can I get without dashing?” and find out it’s 75 feet.)

Some critics of theater of the mind claim that it’s all “DM fiat”; meaning the DM just makes up numbers all the time to say how far away something is. This is no more or less true than it is with a map. With a map, the DM does not consult an actual map of the actual world and then put models down to represent where the kobold cultists really are; rather, the DM decides, and marks their location with miniatures. Without a map, the DM decides, and tells the players, “They are on a raised dais about 30 feet away from you.” 

In either case, once the location of the kobolds is marked, it is a known fact to both the players and the DM, an established part of the world.

Now, I will be honest, Adventurer: there is a certain amount of fudging involved in playing theater of the mind. I will be even more honest: playing with a map grid is constantly fudging. 

You think the world the game takes place in actually neatly divides into 5 foot squares? You think spells and attack ranges always neatly line up in 5 foot intervals? You think actions always occur in five foot increments?

Nope.

The grid system requires you to fudge everything by 5. The theater of the mind approach requires you to fudge more flexibly. Both of them, though, employ basically the same amount of fuzziness: everything involving measurements and position is fuzzy. In fact, most of the fuzziness inherent in theater of the mind will involve you rounding things to 5 feet just as you would on a grid, because that’s the smallest unit of measurement the system commonly refers to.

But to bring this back to your question, Adventurer, the keys to playing the game without a map are the same as playing it without one:

Keep things moving; if there’s a question, rule and move on.

Don’t be afraid to get things wrong.

If you’re not sure about how something “should” happen, pick the one that’s more interesting without upsetting the game balance.

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

[dungeons-demystified]

favorite class?

Well, Adventurer, I’m glad you asked.

In 5th Edition, my favorite class is, hands down, the warlock. When I first picked up the book, I expected it to be bard. Bards were my favorite class in 4E; I liked the notion of warlocks, but in 4E they were pigeonholed into the “striker” role (high damage to single targets) to a greater degree than interested me.

In 5th Edition, the warlock class has great options for supporting that style of play, to please their fans returning from 4th edition (this was one of the design goals for 5E). Many people are so taken by the combination of the spell hex, the cantrip eldritch blast, and the invocation Agonizing Blast that they declare they are “core features of the warlock” and necessary and expected rather than optional. 

This is far from true, but it is true that taking these three options in your first two levels will do a lot to give you what you’re missing if you were a 4E warlock. It’s also true that taking these three options–which represent a fraction of your overall character-building decisions—frees you up to do basically whatever else you want with the rest of your spell and invocation selections and always know that your character will be one of the most consistently effective combatants in the party. You can pick all your other abilities based on what sounds fun or what fits your character or what has the most pleasing pattern of white space around it, and you’ll be fine.

I don’t always go for that combo myself, but if you’re considering playing a warlock it’s good to know about it for that reason.

The fact is, warlocks in 5E have a lot of things going for them. First, there’s what people call the “fluff”… the backstory, the exposition, the roleplaying cues and plot hooks. You do magic, okay? But you don’t know magic like a wizard is, nor are you magic in the way that a sorcerer is. Instead, you sort of have magic… but if the cops ask, it’s not yours. You’re just holding it for a friend.

Maybe you made a classic deal with a devil. Maybe you are sworn to the service of a fey monarch. Maybe you read a forbidden tome full of unspeakable secrets and something in it broke through the feeble shell of your workaday mind and put you in contact with something vast and implacable and unfathomable, somewhere out there in the darkness between the stars…

Those are warlocks.

Pretty sweet, huh?

Mechanically, warlocks are weird. My boyfriend was just brushing up on the multiclassing rules and was surprised to learn that warlocks aren’t included in the MC spell table. “No,” I told him. “Warlocks are the weird loners sitting off in the corner talking to their invisible friends.”

Where every other spellcasting class has a feature called “Spellcasting”, warlocks have one called “Pact Magic”. While every class’s Spellcasting feature is slightly different, the warlock’s Pact Magic is completely different, hence the name. 

Warlocks don’t have one set of slots for each level; they have one set of slots, which grow in power (level) as they do. Warlocks don’t get their slots back on a long rest, but on a short one. And where most dedicated spellcasters have spell slots that go up to 9th level, the Warlock’s weird quick-refresh slots top off at 5th level. A level 20 Warlock has only four spell slots at a time, but they are all 5th level, and they come back on a short rest. If you rest twice a day, that’s 12 5th level slots.

Of course, that’s only part of the story. Warlocks also get invocations, which are like mini-feats that represent eldritch secrets they glean from their patrons. Some of these just boost eldritch blast. Others give you supernatural powers that aren’t otherwise accessible. And some of my favorite ones give you access to spells that aren’t on the warlock list, some on an unlimited basis. Even at level 2, warlocks with the right invocations can cast spells like disguise self and speak with animals as if they were cantrips.

And while warlocks never get slots above 5th level, their spell list goes up to 9. Weird, huh? That’s because they get a class feature called “Mystic Arcanum” at certain levels that gives them one spell of each level 6th through 9th, which doesn’t use a slot but can be cast once per day. 

Mechanically, the reason for these weird invocations and arcana instead of just having all those spells as, well, spells, is that it makes it easier to balance a class that has few spell slots but always gets them back. If a warlock’s slots progressed all the way to level 9, they could be casting four level 9 spells in a row, resting, and then doing it again. Barring some truly epic level stuff, no one else can cast two level 9 spells in a day, much less four or eight or twelve. 

At the same time, all the little utility spells that show up as invocations would rarely be justifiable “expenditures” when you’ve only got a maximum of two slots at a time for so much of your career.

But the upshot of the way all of these things work—spells, invocations, and mystic arcana—is that warlocks play much less like a standard mage and more like someone who just has magical superpowers.

All that said, while warlock is my favorite class, I will say that you can’t go wrong with any class in 5E. They’re all exceptionally well-designed. I would never have imagined myself playing a paladin or a fighter, for instance, but I’m playing one of each right now.

If you do go warlock yourself, a piece of advice: make sure the rest of the party knows how short rests work and that they are important to your character, and make sure your DM is not a “short rest non-believer” (there are a dismaying number of those). 

The short rest is built into the balance of 5th Edition. Without it, some characters (notably monks, warlocks, and to an extent fighters; to a greater extent, Battle Master fighters) are hampered in comparison to others. You should be trying to take a short rest after every two fights or so. If your party balks at this, try reminding them that short rests allows them to spend hit dice, which allows the cleric or whoever to save spell slots for things other than healing. 

If they still balk, rather than hoarding your precious few spell slots, use them for something awesome and then tell the party, “Did you like that? Okay. The price is that our characters take a lunch break so I can keep being a warlock in the afternoon.”

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

[dungeons-demystified]

Starting a campaign, want to encourage 'nontraditional' or monster races for PCs. any ideas?

Sure! For specific folk that are fairly easy to adapt into PC stats, look at Bullywugs, Kenku, and Kobolds: you get frog folk, raven folk, and my personal favorite, tiny little yappy dragon folk. 

For how to do it, I have two general pieces of advice.

First of all, look at the section in the DMG on creating NPCs, particularly the chart on page 282. This lists a lot of humanoid (in form if not creature type) creatures and the traits you would apply to a character created using them. Coincidentally, it includes lines for Bullywugs, Kenku, and Kobolds. This is a great starting point!

However, it should be treated as a starting point. What you do with it is my second piece of advice: look at all the options in the PHB and create a write-up for your chosen monster folk types that is comparable to them in design specifications and power level. This means no ability score penalties, most races should have +2 to one ability score and +1 to another, there should be few drawbacks (as in, most races will have none, not every race should have “few”), and no race should have a walking speed of lower than 25 or higher than 35.

This does not mean you alter the nature of the creature in general across your world, only that you specify that those who are PCs are individuals who happen to be a bit above (or in some areas, below) average in the name of game balance.

Remember: the rules you find in the PHB for making a human or elf or halfling character are not the general rules that govern human or elf or halfling existence, they are the rules for making a human adventurer or elf adventurer or halfling adventurer who is balanced against any other hypothetical adventurer made using the same rules. This is why humans get so many extra bonuses; it’s not that every single human being in the world is somehow paradoxically above the statistical average for human beings... but the ones who can hack the adventuring life alongside elves and dwarves sure are.

I call this the Lake Wobegon School of Character Design, where the gnomes are strong, the dwarves are good looking, and all the player characters are above average.

Now, if you want to get weirder than “here are some more basically humanoid types of people you can be” and get into things like playing as monstrosities, shapeshifters, or undead, you do have to get more creative and think outside the box. 

My advice here is basically the same, though. 

First, look at the table on page 282 for inspiration for how to drill a monster down to some traits you could use for a standard PC race write-up. 

Second, make sure you’re comparing the final product to the other options available. This means your werewolf or vampire PC variant is going to be a lot weaker than the ones in the MM. That’s okay. These types of creatures were designed and balanced with the intent of having horror movie monster fights against them, not the idea of them fighting alongside a barbarian and a ranger. If you want to cast them as plucky, slightly-larger-than-life heroes (or antiheroes), you need to bring them down quite a bit. 

It’s a lot more work for you and there’s no quick-and-dirty guide, but honestly, if you want to allow PCs to take on the role of powerful monsters like werewolves, vampires, or dragons, it’s best to handle that as a custom character class, so they can gain the awesome abilities they associate with that creature one level at a time, the same as everyone else.

On the other hand, if you just meant you want to throw in more humanoid types: can’t go wrong with Bullywug, Kenku, and Kobold!

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

[dungeons-demystified]

How is the damage cap on Divine Smite supposed to work?

Hello, Adventurer! This is a surprisingly common question, so much so that the lead designer Jeremy Crawford has answered it on his Twitter. Before I link you to that, though, please allow me to give you some insight into how the rule is written and why it’s written that way, as knowing the logic behind the rules can help you to better answer your own questions using only the text.

Now, the text for Divine Smite reads as follows:

Starting at 2nd level, when you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, you can expend one paladin spell slot to deal radiant damage to the target, in addition to the weapon’s damage. The extra damage is 2d8 for a 1st-level spell slot, plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st, to a maximum of 5d8. The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is an undead or a fiend.

Two common points of contention here are whether the “maximum of 5d8″ refers to the increase you get from using a higher level slot (which would mean you can use a 6th level slot you got from another class to get +5d8 damage on top of the 2d8 you normally do), and whether the extra 1d8 damage for undead and fiends counts towards the cap.

To untangle this, we must remember that rules in 5th Edition are written procedurally. That is, they act as lines of instruction. Let’s read through this one and see what we come up with. We’ll start by assuming a 5th level spell, the maximum level that paladins can cast without multiclassing, and that we’re attacking a zombie.

Our relevant rules are:

The extra damage is 2d8 for a1st-level spell slot, plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st, to a maximum of 5d8. The damage increases by 1d8 if the target is an undead or a fiend.

We have four different rules here:

2d8 for a 1st level spell slot

Plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st

To a maximum of 5d8

Plus 1d8 if undead or fiend

To figure out how to process this, we have to look at how it fits together. At the risk of going all English class, the little dots and marks used are not accidental. That second rule, “plus 1d8 for each spell level higher than 1st”, is between commas, showing that those first three “rule-ettes” are all part of one rule. So this tells us that the maximum of 5d8 applies to that first sentence as a whole, encapsulating the 2d8 you get for a 1st level spell and the +1d8 per level above. So our fifth level spell is 4 levels above 1, which would be 4d8, for a total of 6d8, but we have to stop at 5d8. 

The part about adding 1d8 if undead or fiend happens in a new sentence. At the point where we apply it, we have completed the procedure that ends with “to a maximum of 5d8″, so if you hit an undead or fiend with a 4th/5th level Divine Smite, you will do 6d8 damage.

The same logic applies even more strongly to the extra radiant damage all your attacks get from Improved Divine Smite at level 11; despite the name, it is a separate feature entirely and its damage exists independently of the cap on damage from just plain Divine Smite. So if you hit a fiend with a 4th level Divine Smite and you are a level 11 paladin with Improved Divine Smite, you will be doing 7d8 radiant damage (1d8 + 5d8 + 1d8)

If you really dig into the game’s guts the way I do, you will find that the whole thing fits together in ways that back up this procedural reading. 

First, the only 5th level Paladin “smite spell” (Banishing Smite) is the first and only one that would outclass Divine Smite for damage, even if you read Divine Smite in a way that lets you get extra damage from a 5th level slot. This would be a weird inconsistency with how the other levels work.

I personally believe this more than any mechanical difference between 5d8 and 6d8 is why they capped the damage where they are: a class’s highest level spell slots function as a sort of “capstone” for the class. Reaching them is a game-changer. A lot of paladins lean on Divine Smite pretty hard through their entire career. If getting that last level of spells meant you could do 1d8 more damage with them, they’d keep using them that way. Cutting off any further benefit from Divine Smite encourages high level paladins to look at their high level spells as a different kind of resource than the other ones.

On that note, multiclassing is considered an optional variant rule in 5th Edition, so the rules for a paladin core ability would not be written in a way that takes into account the possibility of 6th level slots. Multiclass synergy is considered for balance purposes, but they wouldn’t give a “half caster” class a feature with an arbitrary cap that is pegged to a “full caster” slot. 

Anyway, that’s what the rule is: 5d8 radiant damage total, but that’s before you add the fiend/undead bonus or Improved Divine Smite. And that’s why the rule is. 

And for any Adventurers who don’t find this logic compelling, here’s a citation from Jeremy Crawford.

Have a question about D&D 5E? Ask the Dungeon Mistress!

[dungeons-demystified]

Dungeon Definitions: Theater of the Mind

“Theater of the mind” is not an actual rules term but one that is applied to a style of play, one that is traditionally associated with Dungeons & Dragons and that was--prior to 3rd edition--the de facto default standard for playing the game.

While the standard pop culture image of fantasy roleplaying games is a table covered with maps and miniatures, theater of the mind play is more narrative-focused, with the DM setting the stage and painting the scene in words and players---rather than moving pieces on a board---simply describe what they’re doing in response. 

Theater of the mind play is contrasted with map-based play, which uses maps (with or without grid lines or hexes or dots; a ruler or tape measure might be used if the map isn’t divided into spaces.) to represent the environment and miniatures or tokens or other game pieces to represent the positions of various creatures and objects.

Both styles of play have their advantages. 

A map makes it easier to quickly convey the position of multiple combatants, and it certainly makes things easier when there are a large number of individuals moving independently of each other. With tokens on a map, you don’t have to keep track of which zombie is next to you and which one is next to Steve. You can point to the one you’re attacking each turn. It’s easy to quickly tell at a glance who’s in range, who will get caught in a fireball blast, etc.

The advantage theater of the mind has is that it can be quicker and fluid. Scenes don’t take any time to “set up” except the time needed to describe them, and no time at all to “tear down”. Without square rooms divided into squares, players feel more free to become inventive in describing their maneuvers. It’s easier for many people to lose themselves in a scene that exists entirely in their heads than one they’re seeing as a bird’s eye view.

If the two styles have a difference, it’s the kind of battle scenarios they encourage. Map-based play is better for mass battles with large numbers of otherwise identical combatants, and for battles that involve “positional gimmicks”; monsters that move in a certain pattern, or abilities that allow one to reposition allies or enemies, or tactical advantages that depend on precise positioning. 

Mind-based play is better for battles with more of a descriptive flair, such as fights against individual distinct foes, or battles with a heavy stealth/fog of war component, or battles against giant “boss monsters” that are best experienced when you imagine them looming up in front of you, rather than as a slightly larger piece of plastic adjacent to your piece of plastic. 

In other words, the two styles of play each emphasize another aspect of the modern RPG’s parentage: tactical tabletop war gaming, or fantasy storytelling.

There’s not actually as hard and fast a line between the two styles as heated debates around them portray it, though. Even in theater of mind, maps may be used for reference, and a quick chart may be sketched to explain a complicated arrangement. Even with a map on the table, the characters still exist in three dimensional world in which things don’t always have to fall in increments of 5 feet (or 1 yard, or whatever standard the system in question uses).