Some spells in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dungeons & Dragons are good, and some are bad. You can divide it further, introducing the idea that some spells are 'situational', meaning good or bad depending on the specific scenario, or more broadly, the world and type of campaign you’re playing. Then there's the fact that some spells would be good at a lower level, but are too expensive as they're currently categorised, and others that would be better as cantrips. Mostly though, people think in 'good' and 'bad', and they're right. But also, they're wrong.
There are some spells you just never want to learn. You can only learn a finite amount, and if you need to prepare slots, you can carry even fewer with you day to day. These, obviously, are bad spells. Don't waste a slot on Witch Bolt, even if you're a warlock and can cast spells more freely. It's not a spell you should ever learn, so that makes it a bad spell - one that shouldn't be in the game in the first place, or at least needs a serious tune-up in a future edition to make it viable. But it's not so simple.

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One of the best things about Dungeons & Dragons is that everyone uses the same system. In other games, enemies play by their own rules, especially bosses with special power-ups you have no way of understanding. But in D&D, everything functions through ಞthe same mechanical syღstems, whether it’s a player, a basic monster, or the big bad. A beholder has unique powers thanks to its eye rays, but the spells and effects it produces are clearly documented and rely, as every other operation in D&D does, on dice rolls. The information is there for someone to play as a beholder themselves with just a little bit of homebrew added to the levelling system.
This is why the likes of Witch Bolt are actually great spells - they’re just not always good for players. Witch Bolt has a range of 30 feet, which is bad news for most spellcasters who would rather keep their distance. It's also a spell that does damage over time if you keep it up, but in doing so you use up an action (rather than just a bonus action), and if you upcast it into a higher level for more damage, this continued damage is not upcast alongside it. It's a level one spell that requires you to be very close to your enemy to use it - you'd be daft to choose it. But knowing it's a first level spell means a boss could be equipped with Witch Bolt, which would force the party to think.
Witch Bolt needs you to be close, but presumably at least one melee character in the party is going to be up close and personal, and they can take decent damage each turn. If a boss has multiattack, as you might expect for the party's first tough challenge, they can use Witch Bolt to keep dealing some hits while still having the tools to focus on other things. Since it requires concentration, it also asks the party to handle breaking it (possibly for the first time in a campaign), and gives them a type of damage (lightning) they may never have seen before.
Crown of Madness, which possesses another creature and causes them to attack someone, is also often judged to be useless because of the expense in the action economy. If you play Dungeons & Dragons to fight dragons in dungeons, then yeah, Crown of Madness kinda sucks. But it has a great roleplay function for parties who explore towns and converse more, and are prepared to get a little silly. It's also highly useful for enemies to use it to control the party's barbarian, while also keeping the attention off the main threat.
It's not just 'these spells are good if you're an enemy that attacks three times' though. Skywrite would come near the bottom of nearly every player’s ranking of worst spells, and like its name suggests, it allows you to write in the sky. Specifically, you can make clouds spell out up to ten letters for up to a day, wind permitting. It's the most situational of all the situational spells, to the point where many wouldn't even call it situational, just shituational. Then you'd ask what they meant and they'd sheepishly say it's a play on words between situational and shit, then you'd give them a pity laugh.
Anyway, while Skywrite is next to useless in most situations, in a narrati🌳ve heavy adventure with lots of opportunities to shape the world and influence the characters, the ability to write words in the sky offers opportunities for a lot more fun - either for players or NPCs - than another damaging spell does.Maybe the wizard captain of the guard writes your rogue’s name in the sky, or the big bad announces their threat to the world.
You want to be armed for AoE and single targets, different types of damage, and just the option for variety, but we can sometimes get caught up in which spells work most of the time, and that limits our abilities to be unique. Dungeons & Dragons' design choices have proven to be fallible over the years, but in dismissing huge swathes of the spell list as irredeemably bad, we lose the creativity the game has to offer. Your min-max Clizard won't have any use for Witch Bolt while they maraud high level dungeons. But if you're running around town causing mischief, Skywrite and Crown of Madness are far better tools than your classic Fireball spell.