Rulings and house rules—Spells

This page contains rulings and house rules regarding spells and spellcasting.

Spellcasting

Verbal components

Unless a spell’s description states or heavily implies otherwise, as in the case of e.g. message or suggestion, the verbal component of a spell must be spoken in a strong voice.

Banned and restricted spells

The following spells are banned. They may not be used. If a class or subclass feature would grant one of these spells, replace it with another similar spell after discussion with your DM.

• No spells are banned at present.

The following spells are restricted. See below what that means for each spell in question.

• Silvery Barbs: This spell is available only to primary-class bards. It may not be learned via the Fey Touched feat or similar features unless the character has bard as their primary class. It is removed from all spell lists other than the bard spell list.

Updated spells

Several spells have been updated to make them more useful. See the Spells page for more details; updated spells are marked with .

Booming Blade, Green-Flame Blade, &c.

Spells that require a weapon as a material component and have you make a weapon attack as part of their effect (such as booming blade), are compatible with spells that create weapons, such as shadow blade, but are not with spells that only emulate weapons, such as flame blade. This ignores the provision that such a weapon must have a certain value. All natural weapons gained from Dominant class features, such as Bahamut and Ifrit’s bite attacks or Garuda’s claws, are also compatible with them.

Flaming Sphere

The sphere can be created in the air, though it will immediately fall to the ground. The sphere cannot fly, though it can be rammed into a creature up to 10 feet above the ground.

Magic Missile

Because all three darts strike simultaneously, you only make one damage roll, in exactly the same way Fireball works (Jeremy Crawford tweet). For consistency, this is ruled to apply whether the darts all target the same creature or not.

Notably, if one were to make a separate damage roll per dart, the Wizard’s School of Evocation feature Empowered Evocation, the Elemental Empowerment option of the Dominant’s Primordial Conduit feature, and some other class features, would only apply to one of the darts instead of all three.

Updated smite spells

The spells banishing smite, blinding smite, branding smite, searing smite, staggering smite, thunderous smite, and wrathful smite have been updated. See their new descriptions on the Spells page for more details.

This change aims to make these spells more usable for dominants, paladins, Hexblade warlocks, and Stone sorcerers.

Suggestion and Mass Suggestion

The following notes apply to these spells:

• The wording of the action to-be-performed has to be “reasonable”, but any non-immediate consequences of that action are generally irrelevant.
  • “Reasonable” here means essentially what the spell specifies: not obviously suicidal, or similar. “Kill yourself” is clearly unreasonable; “give me everything you’re carrying”, meanwhile, is fine, even if it would leave the victim naked in a snowstorm.
• The casting of the spell is clearly obvious to onlookers (unless cast using e.g. Subtle Spell), but not to the victims.