Ten Commonly Banned Spells in Dungeons and Dragons 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 and 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 break out the band hammer it's time to lay smack down and change the rules by banning some of the most problematic spells in d5e today we're going to be looking at our top 10 spells that are most banned in people's games we're going to discuss why these spells might be banned some workarounds for some of them on how to implement them better into your games and for some cases why we think that maybe they don't need to be banned as a disclaimer right off the top kelly and i do not ban any of these spells in our own dnd games we've played in games where they have been banned and we spoke with a lot of other community members on our patreon who have banned them who have considered banning them or asked about what the impact these might be so whether or not you want to do this is really up to you as a dungeon master and something that you should absolutely discuss with your players during a session zero if you are going to decide to ban a spell from your game you do owe it to your players to have a good reason and tell them the reason why at the start of the campaign so that they don't have any unexpected surprises the worst time to ban a spell is after a player has already used it as a knee-jerk reaction to them you know breaking an encounter or or the campaign so we're going to go into the why on each of these spells some of them are banned for story or world building reasons and others are banned for the implications of the power that they have over the mechanics of the game we haven't ranked these spells beyond putting them in our top 10 we are just going to be going through them in alphabetical order from lowest spell level to highest spell level there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling the first spell that we're going to look at today is a rather innocuous first level spell available to druids and rangers and that's good barry believe it or not this pretty innocent spell can actually derail an entire campaign concept if that's one that's valuable to you because with a single first level spell goodberry feeds the entire party for a day so this spell has implications if you are planning a campaign where you want the foraging and hunting and feeding your party to be a problem that needs to be solved if you're designing a campaign where the players have to travel across the country camping out in the wilderness foraging for food and finding ways to survive but then you have that druid who says i have good barry and that whole system gets thrown out the window this might be the campaign where banning good berry is the right choice one of the ways to soft band this spell is to require a more specific material component or to say that actually you need to find the berries and imbue them with power rather than just having the berries appear magically in your hand so that's a good kind of middle ground if you want to allow the characters potentially an opportunity to use the spell but you do want to say maybe when they're crossing the desert or in the middle of the arctic oh there's a bit of a struggle here in finding the material component and but once they can cast the spell they're fine now if your campaign has no interest in worrying about foraging and survivability then there's no reason to ban goodberry this really only has implications for that sort of campaign where foraging and survivability is important the next candidate that we have is actually a four-way tie between several divination ritual spells that are low level but can go a long way to spoiling a bit of the mystery and investigation that comes in a lot of campaigns these spells are detect magic identify comprehend languages and to another extent speak with dead all of these spells have implications where if the dungeon master has not thought about what these spells can do and has tried to present the party with a mystery that involves an old ancient language that nobody can read anymore or who killed this dead person lying in the middle of the room or what are the properties of this mysterious magic item that we've just uncovered if that is the core of the adventure that you are trying to set out for your players these spells can undo those elements now monty and myself actually love these spells and we try to plan adventures where the use of these spells is a key part to solving the mystery yeah now of course there's lots of ways to integrate these spells so that they don't solve the problem entirely for example you might have players that use comprehend languages to decipher a long dead ancient language but even though they understand the words it's still written in metaphor or poetry or a riddle and they still have to use their brains to to determine yeah you know what the words mean but what was the meaning behind the words or the subtext of the words itself with a spell like speak with dead maybe the characters saw their murderer but that doesn't necessarily mean that they know who that was yes the victim can say i was stabbed by someone who was wielding a blade that had an eagle on the hilt but it doesn't reveal immediately the identity of the killer maybe the identify spell will tell you that a magic item is cursed but it's not really going to tell you how to break that curse given how many creative options there are to work around these spells we actually don't think that these ones are necessary to ban at most game tables we think that instead you should take note if your players picked one of these spells and incorporate that into the mysteries that you're weaving for your players it's very easy to make these spells just not useful which is tantamount to banning them so walking that very fine line between making the spells a meaningful thing and rewarding the players for using them but not making them the kind of silver bullet that solves the problem requires some skill and experience the next spell that we are looking at on our list is actually probably one of the most controversial ones that we're gonna talk about today and that is counterspell counterspell is a really powerful spell and a lot of people love to take it it's almost an essential pickup if you're a spell casting player i would say by and large in many of our guides we've said if you can take counterspell take counter spell yeah it is a spell that as a player it will it often prevents more damage than in a healing spell it will save your party's life it is an absolutely important tool for any adventurer at the same time counterspell does lead to some kind of degenerate gameplay much for the same reason that for any of you that have played games like magic the gathering there were long periods of that card game's history where counter spell type cards were either not very effective or not printed at all because well counterspell is a fun strategic spell you know what really sucks getting counterspelled yeah and this is where the players using it against the dm oftentimes that is the clutch moment that wins them the fight and on the flip side of that a player can get really excited about a spell that they're about to unleash that is the right spell at the right moment and although we all like to imagine counterspell like that wizard duel where the two spells clash and there's this flash of light as both of them hold their stabs or wands out instead what it feels like at the table is the dm just says sorry no and cast counterspell and the fun of the moment is just gone and from the dungeon master's point of view if you have two characters in your party that can cast counter spell it can feel like you're basically not allowed to use spell casting enemies anymore because those two players will just be able to counterspell that foe and that foe will never be able to do anything meaningful for the entire combat encounter so it really can lead to these things where you have to introduce the counter play and there is counter play around counter spell uh it only has a range of 60 feet fireball has a range of 150 feet so a fireball can outrange counterspell you can if you're invisible when you cast the spell well you can't be counterspelled if you're using a spell like globe of vulnerability sometimes dungeon masters also introduce this really weird rule that really breaks the dynamics of the table where spells have to be identified and you don't know what the spell is that you're is being cast so you don't know whether or not you want to counterspell it and i've actually seen a really degenerate behavior emerge where um a player would tell the dungeon master i'm casting a spell and cross their arms and wait for the dungeon master to decide whether or not the enemies were going to counterspell them um and i've seen it work the other way around where the dungeon master says this foe casts a spell and looks at the players and waits for them to decide whether they're going to counterspell it or adds an arcana check or something like that and i don't think any of these things do good things for the dynamic of the game table and so i totally understand why there's a legitimate argument to say you know what this spell is dumb i do want to go on the flip side of this because neither of us ban counterspell we actually love this spell now there are a few soft rules that i use i don't really announce these to anybody but as a dungeon master one of my big rules is that yeah counter spell is first of all not a spell that i give to all of my spell casting enemies i like more uh pointed spells that deal a lot of damage and scare my players rather than something that just shuts down their fun but especially if i am giving them counter spell i will only counterspell a spell that targets my enemy creature if for example my party is trying to cast healing word i feel like counterspelling that is just so mean oh man i live for the day where i can counterspell a healing word is it strategic yes but is it really mean it's such a winning move like when you really think about it counterspelling a healing word that would be be otherwise save a player a player character's life that is the most villainous thing i think a villain could do i agree but man will that make your players feel bad yeah oh yeah so brutal these are the things to look out for now i also want to say that if you aren't banning counterspell there's a few things to keep in mind first of all as a player who has always taken counterspell when it's available there are still many cases where i've gone through three or four combat encounters i have three or four third level spell slots i've used fireball i've used hypnotic pattern i've used many of the other amazing third level spells and now i'm fighting the evil spellcaster and i have to decide is my third level spell do i hold on to it for counterspell and when is the right time to use it so there is play here there is a reason why this is a viable spell because you still have to make the choice to use a spell slot if the only spell caster your player fights is the evil necromancer at the end of the dungeon of course counterspell is going to feel powerful because that's the only spell caster your party is facing but if you throw in a if you pepper in a couple more spell casting foes throughout the adventuring day it does dramatically lower the power of counterspell by virtue of the fact that the percentage of spells getting countered lowers if you are fighting like an evil lich at the end of the dungeon they probably have necromancer apprentices wizards will often have mage apprentices there's there's a great use case for using apprentices and lesser spell casters in a dungeon or adventure where the main villain is a spellcaster and yeah then they have to make a choice how are they going to use their resources spell slots are a resource and deciding when to use them on what is really important the next spell is actually one that i think a ton of dungeon masters and even the core rule books soft ban anyways and that is remove curse remove curse does exactly what it says on the tin it just so happens that there's a lot of curses in d that can't actually be removed with remove curse uh and and they we see them in publish source books we see them in so many different sources where yeah this monster is cursed to be a werewolf but they're a loop guru so you can't actually undo the curse just with remove curse um this soft banning of the spell by basically saying it doesn't work in a case where you think it should work um is pretty inelegant um and i think that it exemplifies the fact that probably the spell itself just needs to be acknowledged that yeah it's a little boring and anticlimactic if the thousand-year curse that cursed this bloodline is just removed by a fifth level wizard rolling up and casting remove curse there needs to be more than that because curses are such a big part of folklore and fiction i do think that curses are something that is really cool and not used enough in the games of d d what's really interesting to me is you could make a great moment out of remove curse by doing something that we've actually seen implemented in the grim hollow books yeah grim hollow takes the remove curse and adds in costly material components but it's a place a person a thing or something of that sort that is specific to the type of curse you're experiencing and what i actually love about this is there's that great scene that we see in many books movies video games where the removing of a curse involves the exorcist coming in or we've seen this in the dresden files or the witcher or constantine from the comic books does this all the time where they come in with their kit and they have to like draw that circle of sand around the person they're removing the curse from they they place the objects around the room and i actually think if we added this to remove curse rather than banning the spell have them have to seek out the the items that are needed for the removal of the curse and then perform this sort of ritualistic spell casting and maybe even if you want to add another layer by removing the curse they draw the curse out of whatever it is they are uncursing and it appears as a shadow or a wraith that the party now has to fight you've now turned this into a moment it's a whole adventure and and so remove curse could be one of those spells that is really an adventure masquerading as a player ability and yes it could be cool that yes remove curse works to undo hex and the basic levels of the bestow curse spell but if the spell actually went into more detail and said that like here's a couple curses and there can be more requirements to removing a curse and really built that out and that was more widely supported and widely acknowledged i think it would just go a long way to making it clear how this spell is supposed to work and the intended usage of it the game rules kind of make it so simple like make it seem on the surface that it's just simple you just need to be a cleric and curses would never exist in this world because clerics it's like well no it's more complicated than that this actually carries over to the next three-way tie for spells on our list which is revivify raised dead and resurrection the implications here with banning these spells is if you want a game that is going to be in a way grittier and make player death more permanent we've actually seen this implemented in published materials like tomb of annihilation but i think that this is the same case as the remove curse spell where matt mercer actually did something really cool with this where he took these sorts of spells and added a ritual where the players now need to commune with the soul of their fallen ally and through a series of dice rolls determine whether or not the soul is willing to return and i think that's a great implication again adding this weight and this character moment that brings the whole party together to determine the outcome of the casting of the spell and i think that that is way cooler than just oh my player character died well that's okay we have a cleric who has a revivify yeah i think of those all those stories from greek myth where the heroes had to descend into the underworld to bring back the spirit of the fallen that's a cool adventure and we don't want that to be just upended by ray's dead i i bust out my diamond and get your body and and raise you up right we we also want something that's a little bit more meaningful of saying like well obviously you can't assassinate the king anymore because the cleric the high priest is just going to show up and raise them from the dead so we we need something that kind of melds the world building the fantasy storytelling while also giving players a good tool to use that's why i actually really like revivify as a spell because it really does give the players that emergency like defibrillator to bring someone back in the moment and i could actually see a really interesting argument for bumping all the resurrection spells up so make so take out your resurrection make revivify a fifth level spell raised at a seventh and resurrection a ninth and that might be an interesting way of still letting that live in the world be an option because then it's still okay for players to bring each other back you can have a continuity of story there but in the world as a whole bringing someone back that's been dead for more than a minute is much rarer and harder the next spell that we're going to talk about is one that we've talked about before and there's some really dangerous implications with conjure woodland beings mainly this smells great i love this spell but one of the main things about this spell that we've talked about is it can summon pixies at first doesn't seem like a problem but pixies also have the ability to cast polymorph and flight and you can summon eight of them with this spell um this this particular technique of summoning pixies that polymorph the party into a bunch of flying t-rexes is often addressed by soft banning the spell by not allowing players to choose what they summon i'm not a fan of this ruling um i think that with both conjure animals and other of the other kind of the classic php summoning spells i think it's better when the players do get to choose what they sum and it feels right but uh the pixies are a problem yeah and so with this we don't ban the spell at our table we just say that you can't use the pixies or if you are going to summon the pixies we've just simply removed polymorph from their spell your pixies can't cast polymorph because it it it is it's kind of that double dipping thing where it's like one spell is actually giving you a bunch of different spell slots um and it also interacts with that thing where with polymorph the challenge rating of what you polymorph someone into is not based on the caster it's based on the target so even though the pixies are only like challenge rating one quarter or one eighth they can still polymorph an eighth level pc into a t-rex now i have solved this problem where my players were fighting a dragon and they used this spell and i allowed them to cast the spell the pixies turned them all into flying t-rexes and then i put down a mini to represent the pixies and then the dragon on their next turn breathed fire and killed all the pixies and the spell was undone bye-bye tinkerbell so there are solutions but it is still a slightly problematic spell to deal with there is another soft band that happens with this spell and this actually leads to our next spell that we're going to talk about and that is the soft ban on polymorph now the soft band on polymorph there's two instances and i actually disagree with both of them when i run it at my table and that is number one people make the argument that you can only turn into a creature that you have seen yourself where i like to rule it more you can turn into a creature that you have knowledge about and in this world most people have read about giant apes or heard folklore about it or perhaps even when i was a kid i read every book i could find on dinosaurs so i know what it is fantasy world you can you can argue it i think i personally think that the argument that maybe dinosaurs don't exist in this world is legitimate that's fair if you're saying dinosaurs don't exist in this world just to nerf polymorph like fine no but if you are running a game where dinosaurs aren't a thing that you want in there then yeah but there's still the giant ape option there is there is the second soft ban is this argument that people have about well you take on the intelligence wisdom and charisma score of the beast so now you're a t-rex and you're going to attack your fellow players and you can't follow directions what i think is really important to note is that intelligence wisdom and charisma are all mental stats wisdom is an extremely valuable skill for knowledge and also i think you're under-appreciating what animals are capable of because a t-rex has the same stats as a mastiff and a raven which includes a wisdom score of 12. not only that but polymorph also states that you retain your personality the the argument is basically that if you polymorph into a t-rex you lose control of your character and become an enraged carnivore but it ignores the fact that yeah ravens and mastiffs have the same effectively the same mental ability scores as a t-rex and nobody would cause you to lose control of your character if you turned into a raven so maybe yes your mental capacity is lowered while you're under the effects of the polymorph spell but if the polymorph spell wanted you to lose control of yourself it would say that in the spell description polymorph is a very strong spell especially at level seven and eight when it comes online and i'll know that the giant ape has an intelligence of seven we've seen the spell be incredibly powerful in our games we've also had many instances where a player character polymorphed into something and it got dispelled around later or it got or they got their concentration broken around later it is this totally surmountable spell to deal with and i think that for me personally polymorph has led to more fun than more problems i will say though that again we come back to a similar thing as good berry where if we are talking about why people ban this spell the implications that it has on survival and travel if this is negatively impacting some of the elements of your world and the adventures you want to tell then perhaps that is the reason why you do ban it but in our experience you're gaining nothing from polymorph that you don't already have access to in other capacities it can also be a really useful spell for cases like oh no my fighter's at two hit points i polymorph him into a giant ape and now he has a hundred and something hit points or whatever the giant ape has but to me that's the fun of polymorph and every instance that i've seen polymorph used at my table has been memorable and rewarding for the players yeah undoubtedly like counterspell it is a very strong spell but one of the best spells in the game hands down no argument is it so good that it should be banned i don't think so next we come to a spell that i've restricted in my games and that's entirely for world building reasons and that's plane shift in my worlds um i find planar travel is rare and in my worlds the the planes of existence do exist but they are very poorly understood by mortals and the means for mortals to travel beyond the material world are just not common and so i've ruled that player characters can't take the plane shift spell unless they learn it from somebody else and that the material components the tuning fork tuned to different planes for existence are effectively very rare or in some cases legendary magic items and this takes those two elements that we talked about before both you need to learn the spell from somebody else in the world who knows it and you need an important material component that instigates a quest and by adding these two elements you're not banning the spell but you're making it more interesting if your players need to get to the plane of fire and one of your players takes the plane shift spell you can still have part of the campaign being about acquiring the tuning fork from the appropriate place it's in a temple in a long forgotten land where the wizards actually had a collection of tuning forks to go to the various elemental planes if that is your quest then they still need to acquire that tuning fork in order to use the spell taking the spell isn't a bad idea as a matter of fact they either need to take it or they need to find somebody who knows it but by adding these little elements you're making it more interesting yeah i think overall um the cosmological elements of dnd worlds really need to take more lessons from how uh other planes of existence in other worlds are often depicted in again things like the witcher and the dresden files where these things are or or even uh the elder scrolls games where the other worlds that exist are really esoteric and the everyday people that inhabit this world don't understand them like the the universe is like a piece of clockwork in the great wheel settings where it seems like everybody and their brother can just it's like oh you need a tuning fork to go to hell oh here you go and and no i i don't i don't like that at all i think it it it makes those the the infinite realms um far more knowable than they should be it should feel like something that is truly beyond now we come to some of the most powerful spells in the game and there are reasons why these ones are banned in my opinion because their power level has implications that can shatter your world building or your game design and the one that we're going to talk about next is simulacrum i love simulacrum but i have to say from all my experiences as a dm it's such a cool spell to use i love using it for my villains it creates interesting story elements i've see there are several simulacrums that appear in various published adventures and there always is a cool story behind it but you know it is not fun dming a game for four 17th level spellcasters who all have simulacrums and that party of four characters is now a party of eight characters and the game just comes to a grinding halt not only does it come to a grinding halt but your encounter balance goes out the window because you're essentially adding another player character to the battle and it does feel a little unfair as a dm to be like all my players have simulacrum well now i'm gonna make this balanced for eight player characters yeah so you're riding this line where you're throwing game balance out the window and kind of breaking your own game and it's even worse when one player has simulacrum because that player then gets twice as many actions in combat and stuff like that cinelacrum can be less of a balance problem when other player characters in the party do things like maybe recruit followers or summon uh and use planar binding spells to have minions of their own or use necromancy and again other summoning spells and then the simulacrum is just one in the midst of a great menagerie of followers that are helping the player characters i think this speaks to the general problem of all of those things in that once the player characters are follow have a small army following around them you do end up with this big slowdown as the whole baggage train comes to every dungeon and so my way of just addressing it is that i do tell my players yeah if you have permanent summons if you have followers if you have simulacrums i'm going to factor that into my encounter balance like that's just going to be the way it goes and you kind of have to otherwise your your players are just going to destroy everything because they're adding very very capable bodies to the battle yeah and and i think the capability is is the key thing like it's not like a beast masters companion or it's not like a spell like the new uh summon spells and tashas where a player is concentrating on it and it might poof go away if their concentration is broken or if it's dispelled these spell the spells like simulacrum are putting a body on the board in a much more permanent and tangible um that yeah it just really tosses a bunch of stuff out of whack so i gotta say that this is one of those cases where i love this spell i love using it as a dm it allows me to introduce my villain in a way that the player characters can fight and kill before actually facing the final boss and i love that but putting it in the hands of the player characters i totally understand why this spell is occasionally banned at tables i don't even have like a strong argument against those that do ban it i say i get it i mean for me again in my world i just say it's one of the secret spells like there's a handful of people that know the spell and no they're not gonna teach it to you like you'll get the recipe for making it out of their cold dead hands and so a simulacrum that is viewed like when simulacrum and the knowledge of that spell is treated as the equivalent of like a legendary magic item or an artifact it can still play in your world it can still be an interesting things villains can use um because again i think it's fine like dungeon masters use simulacrum in ways that are usually fine and then also the final spell that we come to the ninth level spell wish this is another spell that has major implications because not only can it do game breaking things but even the before mentioned simulacrum you can cast that you can make a clone that's how i ended up dming for an entire party that was similacrums because it wasn't four wizards it was a wizard a bard who got wish through magical secrets a sorcerer and an arcana cleric who got wish through their class feature so they'd all so the characters that didn't get simulacrum innately had used wish to wish their simulacrums into being yeah now wish falls into that category where um i love this spell and i think it's one of the best spells in the game and very simply we follow the same guidelines that there are the most powerful spellcasters in the world who know wish but it is not a spell that the player characters can just choose they need to seek it out and learn it as part of their adventure i mean a wish is an amazing plot device and and i think that the fact that wish exists as a spell means that i see a lot of d d campaigns don't use the idea of having your wishes granted as a plot device in the way that wishes being granted as plot devices like think of things like dragon ball think of things like aladdin think of even things like the witcher which has a wish as part of it like there's so many stories where getting your wishes granted is a huge part of like the conflict of the world and yet we don't see that very often in dnd published adventures and i think it's because wish is a spell because it just doesn't seem it like why like i'm gonna get wish because i get the 70th level i don't need to go on a quest for wish yeah and i think like even uh one of my favorite games here is legend of zelda it's all about gaining the triforce so that you can use your one wish to save the land and and that's that's it if if you're trying to design a campaign around saving the land from evil but then you get to 17th level and there are the caveats on wish like you can't necessarily be like i want my main villain to die but that also feels like a weird limitation on on wishes where i do think that by having this spell we're actually limiting the potential for what a wish could mean yeah i i totally agree and and there's always to be careful what you wish for and there's the soft banning of wish that is inherent in fifth edition because of course every time you cast wish you have a chance of never being able to cast again and there's the um idea that you know a dm could always twist the wish or make it fail and like that is a reminder for all dungeon masters is that you're the one that interprets the wish and even if you have a player that shows up with like their clever legal wording you can still always say the wish just fails so the dungeon master always has that safeguard there in that there's nothing the players can do with wish that the dm can't decide no but i think i think really what would be much more interesting is in previous editions of the game there used to be this spell called any spell and it allowed you to do that function of which that lets you replicate another spell from another class's spell list and i feel that that should be the ninth level spell in dnd 5e any spell with maybe a couple more restrictions on it um and then let's make the wishes block devices so this has been a look at our top 10 most banned spells in dungeons and dragons 5th edition tell us about some of the spells that you ban or why you think these spells shouldn't be banned in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you like the work that we do please consider joining our community by following the links in the description below and don't forget to check out our live play shadows of drakenheim which airs tuesday nights at 6 pm eastern on twitch you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we have plenty more takes on the spells of dnd 5e 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 in the dungeon

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

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Length: 34min 58sec (2098 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021