Homebrew Attack Cantrip with High Dispersion Rate

[JRutterbush]

I've been wanting to develop an attack cantrip with a high dispersion rate for a while now, but I've been having trouble trying to find a good way to do it. I had an idea, and I figured I'd run it by you lot to see what people think. The idea is to have a cantrip with the chance to roll very high damage (compared to other cantrips at the same level), but also a chance to roll very low damage... or no damage at all.


[Spell Name to be Determined], Evocation Cantrip
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Touch
Components: V, S
Duration: Instantaneous
Make a spell attack against the target, dealing 3d6 force damage on a hit. Discard any damage dice that roll an odd number (a roll of 2, 3 and 4, for example, would deal 6 damage).
Special: This spell deals 4d8 damage at 5th level, 5d10 damage at 11th level, and 6d12 damage at 17th level.

Overall, the average damage is comparable to a single-target eldritch blast with the Agonizing Blast invocation (slightly higher average at 2nd level, then slightly lower average damage starting at 5th level), but that's not counting the fact that odd dice are discarded, and this spell is also touch as opposed to ranged. I think that makes for a decent comparison, but I'd love to get other peoples' thoughts on the matter.

Edit: To be clear, I'm looking for thoughts on the balance and mechanics of the ability, not whether or not you personally would want to use it.

[Kane0]

Its not a bad idea, but why would you want to do that? I cant think of any player that would want to discard damage dice, and few that would accept such a swingy roll.

A 1d6 force damage melee cantrip with a knock prone effect sounds alright, call it force punch or something. That would be a cantrip i'd consider taking.

[JRutterbush]

Its not a bad idea, but why would you want to do that? I cant think of any player that would want to discard damage dice, and few that would accept such a swingy roll.Because randomness can be fun? I understand if it's not your thing, but some people like swingy abilities.

[Giant2005]

Although your numbers are actually pretty balanced when it comes to average damage, personally I think this is a terrible idea. By adding such a massive variation, eventually you are going to run into one of two problems:
1. Your players get lucky and one-shot big bads, turning supposedly difficult encounters into trivialities.
2. your players are extremely unlucky and end up being wiped out by a supposedly trivial encounter.


The more control you put in the dice, the less control anyone at the table (Including the DM) has over any given situation. More emphasis should be put on the actions and decisions of the people at the game table than the dice.

[pibby]

Edit: To be clear, I'm looking for thoughts on the balance and mechanics of the ability, not whether or not you personally would want to use it.

Considering that the ability is clearly just damage, you'll need to need to make a table of all the possible results for the final damage output and then take the average from there. From there you can then properly compare average damage with the other cantrips.

If I made a cantrip that did variance damage I would have the player roll a d4 that determined the size of the damage dice before rolling for damage. 1 would be d4s, 2 would be d6s, 3 would be d8s, and 4 would be d10s. The average would be less than the average for d8s but you could also roll a dice to determine a secondary effect. Like one result would do shocking grasp's secondary effect and another result would do chill touch's secondary effect.

[aceynn88]

So you have 2 ways to make this something I would use, the thing holding me back right now is as some people pointed out, the chance you get all odds.

First, you could add in some side effect. Con save vs. stun, a knock back, some sort of CC effect to make it worth while even if its all odd numbers.

Second would be to make any odd roll into a 1. This way the ability is still doing damage, although poor damage.

[JRutterbush]

Second would be to make any odd roll into a 1. This way the ability is still doing damage, although poor damage.Hmm, this would probably work okay. I'll go ahead and add that bit in, thanks.

[Rilak]

3d6 drop odd=0..18, 6 average
4d8 drop odd=0..32, 10 average
5d10 drop odd=0..50, 15 average
6d12 drop odd=0..72, 21 average

1d10=1..10, 5.5 average
2d10=2..20, 11 average
3d10=3..30, 16.5 average
4d10=4..40, 22 average

There is pretty much no downside to using the cantrip as you can take both it and a reliable spell. Melee cantrips are also pretty rare, making it even better. Allowing it to be of "force" type makes it stronger than it should be; but if it was of an elemental type, elemental adept would make it ridiculous at the lower levels. If it is allowed as a Wizard spell, everyone would use it together with Overchannel for 72 damage on a cantrip (this is similar damage to Disintegrate on a failed save). Maybe add a few Sorcerer levels to quicken it.

[JRutterbush]

Mathy stuff.Thanks for that, it'll be useful information to keep in mind.


There is pretty much no downside to using the cantrip as you can take both it and a reliable spell.You could also say that there's no downside to taking a ranged spell because you can also take a melee spell. The downside comes from which spell you use at any given time, not which spells you know. The downside to this spell is that if you use it to try for high damage, you might get low damage instead. The fact that you might also take a reliable spell doesn't matter, since if you use this spell, you're not using the reliable spell.

[/quote]Melee cantrips are also pretty rare, making it even better.[/quote]It's not better just because it's melee. A type of spell being rare doesn't make it more powerful. At the most, it's equivalent to a ranged spell because it trades range for the ability to be used in melee without disadvantage. Personally, I'd say that it's weaker for being melee (it's a lot easier to just stand 100 feet away and never have to get into melee at all), but I'm treating them as equivalent just to err on the side of caution.

And I think the lack of melee spells is an oversight, anyway. It's one of the things I'm trying to fix with some of the cantrips I'm putting together.


Allowing it to be of "force" type makes it stronger than it should be; but if it was of an elemental type, elemental adept would make it ridiculous at the lower levels.I was thinking bludgeoning as an alternate type, actually. I don't see why it's stronger than it should be, though. Again, comparing it to eldritch blast, which is also force damage, they seem fairly equivalent: melee vs. ranged, average damage is comparable while low and high damage varies, and eldritch blast even has the distinct advantage of multiple targets at higher levels.


If it is allowed as a Wizard spell, everyone would use it together with Overchannel for 72 damage on a cantrip (this is similar damage to Disintegrate on a failed save).It's going to be a Sorcerer spell, meant to help the flavor of Wild Magic Sorcerers. I've also been trying to develop a few Sorcerer only spells to help them out so their spell list isn't just a less versatile Wizard list.

[Oscredwin]

I don't think eldritch blast is a good balance point for cantrips. It's the primary attack option for a class that is much more reliant on cantrips than any other class. It's also the most powerful attack cantrip, even without agonizing blast (even with the good damage type and ability to split up the damage).

What classes are going to get this? I think that matters a bit for the balance.

[Once a Fool]

Personally, I'd graft it to the Wild Mage subclass as a class feature instead of as a spell in order to avoid shenanigans like multiclassing evoker for overchannel to shoot the damage skyward for little to no cost (depending on the DM's ruling on overchannel + cantrip).

The class feature would look like this: even damage dice for all spells (and cantrips) are maximized. Odd damage dice are minimized. This keeps your maximum, minimum, and average the same, but makes your spells way more swingy.

[pwykersotz]

If used by a Wizard, they could maximize it and get vastly superior damage. Perhaps you could change it to be discarding even numbers.

A sorcerer using Empowered Spell has a very good chance to greatly increase the damage. But this is using a Sorcery Point, so maybe it's working as you intended.

[JRutterbush]

I don't think eldritch blast is a good balance point for cantrips.I only used eldritch blast to compare because of Agonizing Blast, since it was easier to compare the spell without its drawback to a spell with extra power than to compare the spell with the drawback to other spells, since I couldn't figure out an easy way to account for dropping dice. Thanks to Rilak, I now know that the average damage after accounting for discarding odd damage dice is still comparable to the damage of a spell like firebolt, which is a ranged attack spell. And I feel that making it melee only more than accounts for dealing force damage instead of fire damage.


...in order to avoid shenanigans like multiclassing evoker for overchannel to shoot the damage skyward for little to no cost...


If used by a Wizard, they could maximize it and get vastly superior damage. Perhaps you could change it to be discarding even numbers.

Overchannel very specifically only works on Wizard spells. As stated, this would be a Sorcerer-only cantrip.

[pwykersotz]

Overchannel very specifically only works on Wizard spells. As stated, this would be a Sorcerer-only cantrip.

Sorry about that, it wasn't in the initial post so I didn't notice it. :smallredface:

[Saffellbot]

While I'm not adverse to high variability abilities, there is the game concerns the other poster brought up (one shot a big bad, fail to kill a goblin) are valid. I did have a lot of fun with lightning abilities in D2 though.

The one aspect that I dislike most about "drop odd" is that it seems like it would add a lot of time. In my experience the players who enjoy big number high variance attacks also tend to be the players that roll the slowest. This will standout even more in 5e.

To achieve high variance I would tend to just use a bigger die, if the player really likes high variance attacks let the class feature support it. Rolling a d100 at level 15 would probably be pretty sweet. I liked the multiplier die someone else described as well. Roll 1d4*1d6. Minimum of 1, maximum of 24, average of something that's hopefully not too high.

[Rilak]

Roll 1d4*1d6. Minimum of 1, maximum of 24, average of something that's hopefully not too high.

Interesting...
sum(i*j for i in 1:6, j in 1:4)/(4*6) = 8.75

d4*d4 ~ 2d6 (just use 1d8 at first level)
d4*d6 ~ 2d8
d6*d6 ~ 1d6+2d8
d8*d8 ~ 2d8+2d10

However, being a sorcerer with empowered spell can really ramp up the damage. Usually, a Sorcerer can re-roll up to 5d6. Let's say they were all 1's; get turned to average 3.5 (12.5 damage).
Roll a 1*7 or 1*8, re-roll a single die for on average 3.5*8=28 damage worth for 1 sorcery point.

[Saffellbot]

As it turns out it's impossible to balance a high variance ability with the option to maximize dice. High variance abilities also make re-rolling dice significantly stronger. Abilities that maximize or re-roll dice would probably need to be restricted in some manner.