Our Top Ten Uses of the Contingency Spell in D&D 5e

greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d d including advice for players and guides for dungeon masters we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are taking a look at a topic suggested to us by one of our amazing patreon supporters lord samuel which is the top 10 spells to use with the mighty contingency spell in d5e and if you want to suggest topics for future episodes you can make sure to join our patreon by checking the links below now contingency is a really awesome spell available for wizards and it's a little confusing on how to use and has a lot of different components in play when you use it so we thought that this was a really fun topic to get into and decide what the best contingencies are now some might say that the best laid plans are the first to fail but i would respond by saying failing to plan is planning to fail so let's take a look at how to make this complex spell work best for you there's a lot to discuss so let's get rolling so first and foremost i think that we should discuss what the actual contingency spell does this is a six level spell available for wizards it has a casting time of 10 minutes it can only be cast on yourself but the spell lasts for 10 days once it's cast so with a little bit of planning and foresight you can make some really powerful contingencies when you cast the contingency spell as part of casting contingency you cast another spell of fifth level or lower and so you actually expend two spell slots casting the spell the spell that you cast alongside contingency though has to obey a few rules it has to have a casting time of one action you can't use reaction spells with contingency you can't use bonus action spells with contingency you can't use spells with a casting time of one minute or longer with contingency it has to be a one action casting time spell in addition the spell can only target you so this means that the spell either has to be one of those spells with a range of self that only affects you or if it's a spell that you could normally cast on somebody else you're going to be the target of the spell this spell that you cast doesn't come into play when you cast contingency instead it comes into play when the conditions that you specify when you cast contingency occur for all of you programmers out there i haven't done programming in a while so i might be behind the times but this spell kind of reads like an if then statement yes where you set the parameters for if blank then blank the first statement is going to be the trigger the second is the second spell that you cast which comes into effect upon the trigger you can only have one contingency and effect at a time and once the triggering effect happens your contingency spell is now used and once the contingency occurs if the spell that is cast is one that requires concentration then you have to concentrate on it so you don't get to skirt around concentration free casting of this spell contingency is a spell that is only available to wizards however if you were a bard i would say it's probably a must-have magical secrets pick at 14th level and if you are on a camera domain cleric when you get that very high level feature i think contingency is going to be the one that you want to pick if you have any way of getting the contingency spell from multi-classing or anything else like that it's it's an awesome choice but with all of that in mind let's talk about two elements of contingency first of all what are some of the cool triggers that we can think of and then let's get into some of our top spell choices so first off what are some cool triggers that we can use for contingency i think everyone looks at contingency and immediately thinks of i want my contingency to go off when i take a bunch of damage or have been reduced to a certain threshold of my hit points i think that that's the classic one that's the one that spoke out to me when i was first getting started in d d i saw this spell and said oh well i want something to trigger if i'm close to death so if i'm below 25 hit points trigger another spell another great trigger that you can use is contingency is actually open to the idea of having a keyword that you speak to activate the spell you probably want to make sure that it's a word that you don't use a lot in your day-to-day vocabulary so you don't accidentally trigger your contingency such as giggle shorts or antiquing having your contingency operate off of a spoken word is a fantastic choice because usually speaking doesn't consume an action of any kind and speaking depending on your dungeon master can even be something that you can do when it's not your turn in combat if you can scream in pain when you're stabbed hopefully you can still say giggle shorts so that's a great way of getting a cheeky contingency in it's also can be a really cheeky way of being able to cast another spell without using your action during a really important turn we'll talk about what spells that you can use this with but a spoken word is probably my favorite contingency because it is so adaptable and so open-ended in when you can trigger it as long as you can speak sometimes though you might not be able to speak because you might be stunned paralyzed incapacitated or otherwise and this is another really valuable contingency to have triggering off of a specific status condition so you might have a contingency that happens if your character becomes paralyzed or continue contingency that happens if your character becomes stunned i would actually note that a contingency that occurs when you become incapacitated will actually activate when you are stunned paralyzed or incapacitated because both of those status conditions include the text that says you're incapacitated by by this but you might even go with something more esoteric like if you are charmed or frightened just bear in mind though that if you are incapacitated you won't be able to concentrate on a spell so whatever spell you pair with being incapacitated is going to have to be one that doesn't require your concentration otherwise your contingency is just going to clip right off the moment it occurs you could also use contingencies such as being affected by a certain element or if something specific happens to you you're dragged under water by a creature or you are falling from a thousand feet up or you're hit by fire poison acid lightning cold these could all be uses for using a contingency that might save you from those circumstances also if you want to go a little more broad with that you could make a contingency for when you fail a saving throw or when you fail a death saving throw you can even be really specific and say if i fail my second death saving throw then use this contingency very specific contingencies can be very powerful if you can plan ahead of time but in general the more open-ended your contingency is probably the more likely it is to come up and be useful whereas a very specific contingency is could bail you out of a very very very bad situation so this might even be a circumstance where you decide to have a contingency that triggers when you encounter a certain individual or a certain type of monster for example you might have a contingency that triggers if you are within 30 feet of a mind flare or you might have a contingency that triggers when you are within 60 feet of the big bad evil guy these types of proximity-based triggers you might need to talk with your dungeon master if you have to worry them as can i see them because it does come into this weird thing of like what if the mind player is invisible and mind-blanked yeah does your spell know that they're there so that would be my first question as a dm like it's like if you see a mind flare or something like that might be more appropriate so ask your dm about that one but that could be a super cool way of bringing in a contingency that was very specific if you're worried about a specific type of monster creature or encounter or if you know that you're going to be facing down the big bad evil guy and you want to prepare something extra special for them when you when you get face to face with them i think that no matter what these are some examples but what's great about the contingency spell is how open-ended and creative it allows you to be once again if you have the brain for programming then there's a lot of possibility for your if then statement and whatever if you think might put you into a dangerous situation in the upcoming 10 days then what spell would solve that problem so with all of that let's go through our list of our top 10 contingency spells some of these will have honorable mentions as well but we tried to narrow it down to 10 great options and i think we should kick things off with what i deem is probably the most famous and most usable example is going to be invisibility invisibility is a second level spell and we would also include its cousin greater invisibility in here but even within these two spells there's these are both great cases of when to use which depending on what your contingent statement is and what you're hoping to do contingency is great because you can just use it to vanish and escape if nothing else the most basic contingency can be if i am reduced to half of my hit points or fewer cast invisibility on me and that way you have the ability to bail you can run away from combat you'll be invisible enemies will have disadvantage on attack rules against you even if they kind of know where you are just having that disadvantage on attack rules and being able to scoot away is super super useful it's a it's a great general purpose get you out of a bad situation sort of contingency greater invisibility is an example of using contingency aggressively rather than defensively so when you trigger greater invisibility you now become invisible but you also get to buff yourself up getting advantage on your attacks and giving disadvantage to your enemies this might be an example where instead of using the half hit points trigger you use the keyword trigger so you yell giggle shorts at your enemies confuse them with the word and suddenly you disappear and then start stabbing them this is a great trick if you're a blade singer but also you can just turn invisible and throw some fireballs if you're any other type of wizard now moving along the same general idea of something that triggers to kind of protect yourself and get you into a disappearing situation not quite disappearing but i think mere image which somebody lands an attack on you and suddenly there are more of you that could be an interesting contingency the really excellent reason to use mirror image over invisibility and greater invisibility especially as a defensive contingency is that both both invisibility and greater invisibility require your concentration if you're in the middle of battle and you have a wall of force spell down and then all of a sudden you start getting attacked and now you have to make all these concentration checks you don't necessarily want your contingency to activate cast invisibility on you and then make the wall of force go down so mirror image because it doesn't use your concentration gives you this defensive perk but doesn't ask anything of your concentration similar an option that you might be considering is blur but for the reasons that monty just gave that's exactly why we don't want to use blur because it's kind of the worst of all of those situations blur is a great spell but for contingency i think that you're better off with either invisibility or mirror image the only circumstances where you might choose blur over greater invisibility is against a foe that can see through the invisibility and where you want the defensive feature um but even then you might if you're running up against someone with true sight blur is not going to help you there anyways either blur comes up in a lot of conversations around contingency but it's actually superseded by a lot of other spells i think that as we follow this train of thought with this sort of genre of spell i think one amazing pick that's similar to some of the ones we mentioned before but stands on its own is mislead mislead is really cool because not only do you turn invisible but you leave a duplicate of yourself behind which can be much more confusing for your enemies and so i think that if you're getting bombarded by attacks and you get lowered past half hit points and all of a sudden a version of you is there being hit by all these attacks while you actually slink away that's a great escape plan it is a phenomenal escape and miss lee being a fifth level spell slot in any circumstance where you might use invisibility you might want to use mislead because it does leave behind that decoy again if you're using invisibility aggressively for example you want to combine invisibility or greater invisibility to attack then of course you wouldn't want to use mislead as your contingency but if you are just looking for that defensive escape with the decoy it's a lovely touch and will really confuse your foes when you disappear now sometimes though you just want to get out of dodge and sometimes you might be up against enemies that have true sight or blind sight like dragons have blindside so these strategies might not work against them or enemies that can pinpoint you with their psionic powers in this case it might just be best to create some space and this is why i love using dimension door as a contingency dimension door is pretty straightforward you can teleport 500 feet in any direction you don't really need to see where you're going you don't want to end up stuck in a wall or anything but if you know generally that you can teleport through a wall to another room go for it so it's a really easy way to say i just got hit for 40 damage or a group of people surround you you immediately dimensioned or 500 feet back it could be a really good way that if somebody tries to attack the squishy wizard because they attacked from the back you teleport back in front of your party so that now the fighter and paladin and everybody else can get into combat with those people that were trying to kill you teleportation is a really great way to just get out and using it as a contingency is awesome now there are other teleportation spells that i think are honorable mentions if you are being surrounded by enemies a better option than to mention door might be thunderstep so that you can destroy all of those minions while you get the heck out of there might not be too handy though if your allies happen to be beside you and as a reminder you can't use misty step because misty has a casting time of a bonus action so it's not a valid contingency because you got to have a one action casting time spell there are some dungeon masters out there that rule that you have to choose the direction and destination of dimension door when you cast contingency the first time this basically is tantamount to saying you can't use dimension door with contingency because there's no reliable way that you could ever know that you're going to be teleporting into a safe space so this ruling effectively says dimension door does not work with contingency you could under this ruling say that you're going to just go 500 feet straight up and then have featherfall and hopefully feather fall down i personally think that this is not a very good ruling i would never rule this way myself when i dm in general if you are the wizard and you've set this contingency up and you're standing at the edge of a cliff and all of a sudden somebody hits you and it triggers your contingency and you teleport 500 feet over the cliff and fall to your death that's not very fun uh yeah that that kind of ruins the whole shtick of why you made a contingency in the first place and yes this is a powerful spell but i think if wizards are casting contingency let them do let them let them have fun with i would say the dimension during out of dodge with contingency is by far away not the most powerful thing you can do with the spell and there's no reason to rule against it for some sort of game balance reason like it just doesn't i just don't understand the logic there aside from being draconian now as as we move on another great option for dealing with very specific situations at the table is going to be dispel magic a lot of times magical conditions can come into effect they can change the entire battlefield if there's a magical effect that is triggered during a battle and it affects you being able to cast dispel magic to just get rid of that effect can be game changing and save your life using dispel magic with contingency is a little bit tricky and can be a little bit risky because dispel magic isn't necessarily going to affect every single spell that could possibly affect you depending on how you word it the wording that i use is if i fail a saving throw against a spell that would leave me incapacitated cast to spell magic on me so what this means is that if you get hit by a whole person your contingency goes off because whole person paralyzes you which incapacitates you so dispel magic goes off boom the spell ends second if you get hit by hypnotic pattern which also incapacitates you boom dispel magic gets you out of there if you get hit with hold monster though you're in a little bit of trouble here because now you're gonna have to roll the dice with dispel magic because dispel magic is cast as a third level spell and there's nothing in the rules of contingency that discusses whether or not you can up cast the spell that you cast with contingency so that's one to ask your dungeon master about because conceivably if you could up cast a spell magic to be a fifth level spell then you could use it to bump off a hold monster 100 of time and then if you get hit by an even higher level spell than that then you know you're rolling the dice to figure out whether or not you get out of there some other honorable mentions that are similar to this idea are spells like remove curse or if you're a bard you could use it on greater restoration or lesser restoration both of these have more specific effects but same idea applies here you could also use this to apply to if you are charmed which could be great for dominate person or other such spells the next spell that we're going to talk about is great if you're playing a bard or a blade singer wizard or if you're in a situation where you are in melee combat for some reason haste is going to be a great spell this is going to allow you to take an extra attack on your turn it's going to up your ac it's going to allow you to move faster so there are a lot of benefits to haste it's a great buff spell and it might be worth casting if you need to buff yourself up in the midst of combat spells that you could use in a similar manner include shadow blade and spirit shroud and your trigger for this contingency actually could be cast haste on me when i draw my sword if that's your contingency not only are you now hasted but you didn't have to use your action at all to cast haste so now you are able to attack regularly with the effects of haste or shadow blade or spear shroud or however else this is a way of using contingency in an aggressive manner so that you can save yourself that action of buffing yourself up in combat and there's a few other buff spells we talked about this with with uh greater invisibility as well but this idea of using contingency to buff yourself up during the first round of combat because oftentimes you have to do that setup round sort of thing this also is a way of casting more than one spell out of turn because you're getting around those rules of bonus action casting or needing to have additional actions to set a couple things up the next spell is actually one of my favorites and the first time that i was able to cast contingency as a wizard in dungeons and dragons my contingency used this spell and that is polymorph now polymorph is a great spell because it kind of does a little bit of everything it buffs you it technically in a way heals you and uh it also lets you get out of situations or get more into situations it does a whole bunch so my first contingency that i ever created was if i am dropped below 25 hit points i will immediately polymorph myself into a t-rex and the one the one thing to be aware of is polymorph requires concentration so you might end up making quite a few concentration checks if you're a high level wizard you're casting six level spells there's a good chance that you might have resilient constitution and you might have warcaster also it is worth noting that both the t-rex and the great ape have pretty decent constitution scores so you are probably still going to be making those concentration checks and the amount of times that my wizard was this close to dying and then got to turn into a t-rex and eat a bunch of enemies was pretty cool and so not only did i gain over a hundred extra hit points as my t-rex form but now my damage was skyrocketed as well as i was whacking people with my tail eating other people and it's just a really useful way to do that you could also turn into the great ape which gives you you know a bit more attacking ability or you could turn into a flying creature so that you can get the heck out of there and grab the party on the way if you turn into a giant eagle because the situation is looking really dire and your whole party jumps on your back and you fly away well you're good to go the next contingency that i really like as well as a defensive measure is auto luke's resilient sphere auto looks resilient sphere is almost an impenetrable barrier it's kind of like being put in a hamster ball of force um and it renders you impervious to a lot of damage when you are encased in it um and so this is another really surefire survival strategy because one of the things that otter luke's resilient sphere does that other contingencies like mislead even dimension door even invisibility and even polymorph don't do is when you are in that auto looks resilient sphere there's not a lot of monster abilities that are gonna let them actually hurt you at that point invisibility isn't going to protect you against monsters with true sight or they can see through invisibility polymorph you're still going to be taking those attacks and still making those concentration checks uh mislead again they might be able to see through illusions they might know where you are you're still there dimension door maybe in some battles even teleporting 500 feet away might not be enough to save you depending on who your enemies are maybe what you just want to have happen is crawl up into a little ball and rock back and forth while you endure the assault that is coming your way otolux resilience fear is a great choice and it's better for this purpose than say stone skin stone skin is a terrible contingency it uses your concentration you only get resistance to damage so it's probably not going to save you if you're surrounded by enemies and if you fail a concentration check now your resistance to all damage goes away and you are double screwed as we move on to the next spell it's interesting because we went through a few iterations of what we were going to pick here first i had mentioned feather fall but feather falls a reaction so you can't even use that so next we brought up fly well that's a great choice if you are stuck in an aerial battle and you get knocked off the wyvern that you're riding you automatically cast fly on yourself and now you can soar around one of the things that contingency might not be able to save you from is when you are flying and you are stunned or incapacitated still fly is a great choice but i think that there's actually one that stood up above fly for us and that's the one that we actually want to talk about here and that is gaseous form it does much more than just let you fly you turn into a cloud you are now resistant to all damage you can fly you can squeeze into areas like a cloud of smoke so it's kind of this really neat way maybe not getting knocked off your mount you might want not want to turn into a big fart cloud that's floating around but if you need to get out of a situation or into a different situation there's a lot of cases where turning into a cloud of smoke and drifting under a door or through a keyhole or just out the window could save your life i think the really interesting thing about gaseous form is that it compares in a really interesting way to its gaseous form is like a weird combination of invisibility even though you're technically not invisible as a gaseous form fly um but also like a stone skin resilient sphere like it puts you into this mode where now you have a nice defensive buff and this extra type of mobility in that you can escape because yes gaseous form is going to help you again against those foes that have true sight and it's also going to help you against those foes that might have you surrounded or trapped in a certain way because you have the ability now to fly otherwise when you're invisible you're still on foot right so it's still there's still a chance that your footsteps might give you away but with gaseous form you just take the air and start blowing away like a cloud now the last spell that we are going to talk about today this one forget about wizards this one's for you bards out there we actually think that it's great to keep in mind that contingency actually doesn't require you to be able to cast the spell using an action because it triggers automatically when the triggering effect happens this means that if you die you can use that as the trigger for a spell like revivify so let's say for example you're a bard you've gone down you've rolled two failed death saving throws the clerics on their way over to you but then the cleric goes down as well now it's your turn and you roll a three well that's okay because you have a contingency that if you die you cast revivify on yourself and now you're back in the game and then you save the cleric's life and now you're the hero i had to double check because i was worried for a second that contingency had this um this spell ends if you die it doesn't um can the only way that contingency clicks off is if it gets triggered or if the material component which has to be a jeweled statue of yourself very appropriate for a bard or a wizard to have is not on your person so that's the one thing to be aware of is that if you uh do lose that um or for example if you are disintegrated but revivify is not going to help you if you're disintegrated either and it's and it's worth noting here that rey's dead doesn't work with contingency even though it's a fifth level spell ray's dad has a casting time longer than one action so revivify is the only one you can do this with you can't do this with the heal spell either it doesn't work um i don't i actually don't think i would do even if as a bar i don't think i would do a contingency for a healing spell do you no i think revivify is useful if you're really worried about going down yeah but you would have to have a bit of foresight i actually think although revivify is really cool because it's a fail safe against death but a lot of these feel like they're more continually useful than revivify would be however if you're in a situation where you're very worried about a tpk and you have time to prepare for that uh revivify could be the game changer so i do think it's a cool choice so of all these what would be your general purpose contingency like if you didn't know what was going to happen the next day and you just want to have a general contingency that you renew what do you think your contingency would be i'm still a sucker for a good polymorph yeah i i i know that there are better options but there i the amount of fun that i've had at a table when you think that you're about to kill me and then suddenly i'm a giant monster eating the bad guys it's a lot of fun and although i've i've heard many people argue with me no there's way better options and i'm like that's cool there's nothing cooler for me than being a t-rex on the battlefield eating people so that's my game i really am into the aggressive use of contingency i think that as a blade singer i would really like if i was playing on my blade singer wizard again i think i would really go for some of those contingencies just because it's interesting to be able to like drop all that at once i do also think the for general purpose auto looks resilient sphere is pretty reliable like there's not a lot of circumstances where you trigger that like you can't have it on the damage you can really count on it in my experience at least i found i often can't always count on the dimension door and i can't always count all the invisibility ones to protect me this has been our top 10 uses for the contingency spell in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about your favorite spell to use alongside contingency in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon community our patrons contributions help us do what we do here on youtube so if you enjoy our videos please consider becoming a patron of our channel by following the links in the description below and if you want to see me enjoying using polymorph maybe not contingency you should check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim which airs tuesday evenings on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more great guides to all the spells in d5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

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Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: 3BGPl7ckmfg

Length: 30min 41sec (1841 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 16 2022