Slay the Spire – The Defect

Let’s talk about the character that I played this last time. And keep in mind that these are not fully unlocked characters when you see how poorly it went. But I played The Defect, maybe my 2nd favorite character to play. The defect basically managed different slots for powers like lightning or ice or others which give them abilities.

Basically, at the end of the turn, each slot activates. If it’s lightning, it randomly hits a bad guy. If it’s ice, it gives you some shield. So you can build your turn around trying to set-up the right amount of defense so that you don’t over play cards, or the right amount of attack that someone can get finished off.

The other thing I really like about the Defect are their power cards. The Defect has more power cards than most other ones. And they can help charge up slots, activate them more, or a lot of different things. Draw additional cards and I’m forgetting because there are so many. So I like to build out my system where it’s a ton of powers and otherwise a pretty lean deck. All the while putting out more lightning so that even if I don’t attack I’m still dealing out a good amount of damage.

Upcoming Streams

So let’s tackle this again and hopefully next Wednesday I’ll be playing Chronicles of Drunagor. I think I know which characters I am playing, but because it’s delayed by a week, pick who you think I should play in the poll below.

And on Monday, after taking Halloween off, which was a good call with timing of everything, I am getting back to my Top 100 Games (of all time) 2022 Edition. And it is going to be 40 through 31. All the games on my list I really enjoy, but as I get closer and closer to the top the more excited I get to play them. So click that notification bell to know when I’m going live next.

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Last time, if you remember, our Bokken player was missing because he was feeling under the weather, so Assendial had tasked them all with figuring out who had stolen the scarab amulet/relic/thing from Tormin’s desk. He wasn’t supposed to have it there, but he’d been studying it. The group, minus Bokken, searched Tormin’s office finding the secret spot where he most likely would have stored it, but they didn’t really find any clues and were instead attacked by a mimic that was in one of the drawers to be security. They also created a list of suspects in the 2nd year students who were also around the school at the time as well as Parrag and Addruss having been seen there.

In this session they continued that investigation. They waited for all of the 2nd year students to leave as they filled Bokken in on everything that was happening and what they’d been tasked to do. Once the 2nd years left, they went to the second year barracks. Unlike there which are open communal sleeping areas, the 2nd year students have their own rooms. Barrai, who last time decided to see what second years stood out, starts them down the path of looking for a few rooms, one that looks like it has Flink the Tabaxi in it, rooms for the twin dwarves Snickle and Fritz, a room where the giant Nafitl is using, and the room of the half-orc Lisanial.

They push open a few doors and find one that has bunk beds in it, which they decide must be the room of Snickle and Fritz. Going through that room, they find that it does appear to be their room and that either Snickle or Fritz has a girlfriend and the other one doesn’t. Besides that everything in the room, for either Snickle or Fritz is a mirror image of the other, so if one has their shirts going from left to right dark to light, the other is flipped so the room is very symmetrical. Barrai finds the picture that seems out of place and then a pile of letter held together with a ribbon which he takes two of the letters at random. Thrain moves around two pairs of shoes so that the room is no longer symmetrical, but there’s nothing else of interest.

Next they find Flink’s room, they can tell where she’s been sharpening her claws. While her bed and dresser also fail to lead any interesting clues, they do check on the three suitcases that Flink has set by her dresser. The top one appears to have several brown paper packages tied up with string that have a smoky and salty smell to them. They guess that it is a smoked/preserved fish, and don’t bother opening them. The next one is full of climbing gear and the bottom one is empty. Not that interested in the suitcases, Barrai looks for loose floor boards and finds one that is slightly loose. He pulls on it, but nothing happens, Thrain gives it a go, nothing happens. Bokken steps in and has no problem breaking the board to get it up, but reveals just a solid floor beneath it, not even enough room to hide any of the fish. Bokken puts the board back and Thrain casts mending on it.

They next come across Lisanial the Half-Orcs room. This room is a mess, but it is jam packed with tossed down piles of weapons, a lot of them, multiple suits of armor, boxes, a dresser, and a bed. Barrai starts going around the room, putting in a little effort, sorting stuff as he looks through it to see if there are any clues. Bokken finds a pile of shortswords which Lisanial has labeled “throwing sword” and one longsword, “throwing longsword”, and takes one of the short swords. Thrain decides to grab one of the breastplates to get it to a black smith to get turned into his size. And then he goes through the drawers of the dresser. He finds a lot of messy clothes in there, and six bags with money in them. He grabs a couple of coins from all of them but stops at the sixth one because he can tell there is only a thin layer of coins on top, inside it is a scarab.

Bokken takes a moment and inspects the scarab and realizes that while similar, the metal looks a different color and the body of the scarab is different. Then Kip grabs it and looks it over to see if it looks magical. He thinks it might be magical so Barrai casts detect magic on it, he can tell that it’s magical and some sort beacon or something, but doesn’t fully understand the spell. Bokken grabs it back and takes off running with a siren noise and lights blinking that Kip has cast on him. Thrain takes this moment to grab five of the six money bags and another set of armor. Barrai and Kip rush over to the window and try and get the best vantage point possible to see if a dragon is coming from the tower. Barrai is pushed out of the way by Kip who sees what looks like a dragon. And Thrain using Thaumaturgy, amplifies his voice so Bokken can hear him over the siren noise that Bokken needs to ditch the scarab because a dragon is coming.

Bokken instead, being extremely obvious, rushes towards the watch tower where Sanphire is on watch, and passes him the scarab. Linken the one remaining teacher on campus comes out of the teachers quarters and is passed the scarab as well. No one knows what to do after Linken tries to dispel magic on the scarab and it doesn’t work, he does turn off the siren and lights on Bokken. Bokken grabs the scarab back again and throws it as far back towards the dragon as possible, which causes it to land and clink nicely onto the top of the barracks that Barrai, Kip and Thrain are coming out of. They book it towards the watch tower and towards the mess hall grabbing Bokken who is assuming that the dragon will deal with the scarab and then leave like last time. Turns out that Bokken is basically right, but doesn’t count in how long a stream of acid the dragon is letting out, and Kip, Thrain, and Bokken get caught in it.

They take a rest in the cellar with the other first year students before, as always, getting curious again. Linken comes and gives them all the update that the dragon has in fact left after one pass over the second years barracks but that the students should stay in the cellar until he comes back to get them. For Barrai that wasn’t soon enough, so he goes over to Dorin who looks like he’s in the midst of a panic attack, and causes him to panic even more, using an ability to seed doubt and fear into Dorin’s mind so that he turns against and is afraid of Cordin, the Dragonborn for an hour. Dorin screams about how Cordin is in league with the dragons and takes off running up the stairs. Thrain casts darkness over the rest of the students causing in more panic, and they all head out, Barrai, Thrain, and Kip through the secret tunnel and Bokken through the main entrance with him saying he was going to get Dorin back.

Once outside they go and find the scarab and go back to Lisanial’s room. Grabbing the scarab with mage hand Barrai and Kip determine it is likely not active anymore, though they do almost lose it to Kip’s squirrel Karl thinking the scarab was food when Barrai tossed it to kip. Back down in the room, they start going through everything, but it’s hard to keep track of it all because of the mess, so once they start to clear an area, Bokken dumps the stuff out of the window, and they continue to tear apart the room.

That’s where we ended the session. Normally we’d play in two weeks, but that’s on the 24th of December, so that’s not happening, and one of the players is gone leading up to Christmas, so another longer break.

So as always a little behind the DM’s screen.

I think it’s important with an investigation to try and not lock people into too much of what they have to do. This was a light planning session for me because of that. I knew that they’d find something in one of the rooms, hadn’t decided on what it was until in the moment. And I also hadn’t decided on whose room it was going to be. I actually used the dice to help decide that, not how well the players rolled, but some random roll behind the screen.

That’s it, that’s about all for the session, I hope it offers some interesting ideas.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

So a quick refresher on boss battles, it is going to be one half of the level book that has the battles in it, so when you flip open a page, one part will be the level itself with all of the level actions and artwork, and any restrictions for the level, anything like that. The other side is going to be the map for the boss battle. This map will tell you some about the terrain, but not about the boss whom you’ll be facing, you’ll find that out by talking to information brokers, NPCs, and PCs. When all the players are done taking actions on a level, that’s when the players decide together to jump into battle.

When fighting monsters, it was just going to be a do or don’t you hit sort of thing to defeat them, but bosses are going to be different. Bosses will track hit points like the characters. And bosses are going to have their hit point track split into multiple parts. This is how the boss is going to change up their attack as time goes on. But a boss will attack in a predictable pattern, like video game monsters do.

Let’s do a fake boss fight: Glorglor the Minotaur stands menacingly in the room.

First Attack: Rush Forward, attack everyone directly in front of him and to the front left and right spots on the grid for 10 damage.

Second Attack: Move to the nearest character do a power blow for 15 damage and push them back two.

Third Attack: Attack any enemy adjacent to you for 10 and dodge, add +2 to Minotaur’s defense.

Something along those lines. Those three attacks would repeat 1 through 3 over and over again until one of the health bars is completely empty, then between Two and Three the Minotaur would add in a new attack.

New Attack: Leap 5 spaces, attack all adjacent squares for 10.

This would change up the battle so that you can’t, as players, complete your puzzle and just let it auto play itself out based off of what the monster is doing. The added card is probably going to be a card the players haven’t researched before as part of learning about the boss monster, so it should mess up their plans.

Finally for the boss, they are going to have their standard targeting. It is going to target whomever is the closest to them. If there are two or more heroes close to them, it will target in a way that it can hit the most, if it can only hit one, it’ll target clockwise from the direction it’s facing. There are going to be a few exceptions to this rule, mainly if an attack can hit multiple player characters and there is a grouping like that in range, it will move to attack them. So like the jump ability, say there are three archers off to one side of the board, it’ll jump over to them to hit them all if it can, instead of focusing on the tank in front of it.

So as for the players, what are they doing on their turn?

Players are always going to have two things on their turn that they’ll do, and players can actually go all at once, doesn’t matter turn order. It seems like it might if they are placing a weakness on the boss or a buff on everyone else, but generally those are going to stick around, which means that you don’t get it for that turn, but you’ll get it in upcoming ones. I wanted to create as little downtime for the players as possible. So everyone decides what to do, and then players move and attack/buff/weaken accordingly.

The move is going to be simple, but there is one thing to pay attention to, if a player has a faster speed than someone else and they are both moving to the same spot on the board, ideally, the faster character will get there first. So I guess, when I say everyone is going at once, the movement will be based off of speed. And your speed/movement is also going to determine how far you can move. In this, there is no walking, it is just assumed that everyone is going all out, as you would in a game where you could die, and therefore there won’t be boosts to movement.

The next thing is an attack, buff or weaken, but I’ll start with an attack. An attack is going to be something the players can always do, if they are within range. The players will have a choice though with their attack how to do it. They will always have a basic attack, so a basic long sword might be 4 basic damage, plus strength, plus one modifier flip. But they can also augment an attack with a skill, so maybe they play “Furious Strike” that would have a cool down of one, add 2 to the damage and give another modifier flip. Or maybe they augmented the sword with poison and it’d add in 8 poison damage. The augment would always do it’s extra damage, but the skill would then go into it’s spot on the cool down track and then after the monster goes, everything in the cool down track would shift down one.

Let’s talk a bit more about the cool down track. It would have up to six spots on it, there would be a 5 down to 1, plus a 0 spot. That means that any skill you play, such as Furious Strike, with a cool down of 1, would always be out of your hand for a turn. If it’s at 5, it’s going to be out of your hand for 5 turns. Skills are placed in this track face down, just because of the upcoming mechanic to differentiate.

To build off of that, some skills might use the cool down track in a different way, it would be used as a powering up track. So let’s say I have the skill, I don’t know, let’s call it “Lightning Sword”. That would go face up into spot 3. And I’d draw a modifier card. So why would I draw a modifier card, the example text for Lightning Sword would be something like: Place in Spot 3 on the Cool Down Track face up, draw up to 2 modifier cards per attack action. Threshold: Modifier total less than 6, no damage. 6 to 10 – add 10 damage to basic attack lightning damage, 10+ add 15 lightning damage to basic attack and two modifier flips ignoring cancel attack. Then that card would get flipped and would go back onto the cooldown track. So basically, it’s a skill that is probably going to knock the socks of damage wise which is why you would build up to it. This probably isn’t going to be something that you do early, but when you know that you’re doing, you set it up to try and take down the bad guy in a blow. When using an ability that charges up like this, you can still move, but can’t attack.

With buffs and weakens. These are played instead of an attack and they have to be done at the right range. Almost always these will go onto spot 5 in the cool down track and you will have the whole time that buff or weaken is in the cool down track that it is active. These will go face up like the power up just so you remember that they are active. Buffs and weakens are also going to always just be a plus or a minus to a total. These will take up your attack for the turn you play them.

That’s the vast majority of how combat is going to work. To recap how the modifiers work quickly, there will be modifiers that you can add to your deck or swap in for other modifiers that will allow your fellow players to draw more modifiers. The cool thing with drawing a new modifier is if you draw that additional one via a boost like that, and it’s a cancel the attack, it is just discarded, but you don’t get to draw a new one. If you draw a cancel the attack on your own draw, that will kill the attack. That is going to be a required card that can’t be removed from the deck. But you’ll start out with some pluses, some minuses, and some zeros, and you’ll work on building up your pluses or removing minuses through questing, skills, and stuff like that.

So we have two things left with boss fights, the first is the part your guild plays in a boss battle. Before the boss battle starts, you’ll decide how many guild members you are going to take into the battle with you, they are basically going to keep minions off of you. Minions are meant to be annoying, so if you have 0 guild members with you, a minion will hit you for a small amount of damage, let’s say on level one it’s 1 damage, but they’ll do that every round, and you don’t calculate defense against minions, it just always is pinging you. So you want to bring in guild member. There are going to be a few different levels that you check on the minion card. Let’s do an example minion cards.

“Annoying Kobolds”

< 3 – All guild members brought in die, 2 damage per turn, lose 2 morale

3 to 5 – All guild members brought in die, 1 damage per turn

5 to 7 – 2 guild members die, 0 damage per turn

7 to 9 – No guild members die, 0 damage per turn, gain 1 morale

10 or more – No guild members die, lose 1 morale

This basically is the chart that you’d check the number of guild members you picked against. The last one is probably going to have some questions with it, why would you lose morale if you bring in too many guild members? Well, first you’ll lose morale for every two guild members who die, so it’s better to have too many than too few, or just barely too few, but if you bring too many in, you are putting too many people at risk, and that disheartens them.

So then finally, the most important thing, what do you get for loot? If the boss has a signature weapon, that will be dropped, it might drop some skills or augments as well, and then of course currency. On the bosses main card it will tell what loot pack to open as well as how much currency and XP that you’d get coming out of that fight. I want with the bosses in general and the loot pack for them to be sealed things, so before getting to a level and researching the boss, you won’t know what that boss looks like. As you research you find out more and more. This is an idea that I really like from Oathsworn and am borrowing because of that. I don’t want people to be able to open up the box and see all the bosses. Instead, I want to give them something to explore and discover.

So that’s a lot of information, but hopefully boss fights sound found. I want to give players lots of different options for solving the puzzles of a boss fight.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Now, this one is going to be a little bit less about how they’ll work in the game, instead I’m going to be talking about why I am considering both in the game.

Cards

I think the biggest advantage to cards is that cards remember. It’s an interesting concept that was brought up in Oathsworn Kickstarter campaign that I hadn’t thought about it, but cards remember what you’ve drawn before. You have a discard pile, so say you want it to be like a six sided die, you roll the die, you could get a one six times in a row. But if you use six cards to match that and you have a discard pile, drawing from it six times will always get you the one and always get you the six, in fact always get you every number. So you know that you’ll do average sometimes, but if you get the one and two out of the way with your first two draws, you know that you’ll have only good and average draws left.

Dice

On the flip side of this, dice don’t have that memory. In my example above, I say that you could roll a one six times in a row. Well, you could roll a six six times in a row as well, which is something that the cards can’t do if you have six cards. So while the dice might be unlucky, they can also be lucky and give you options to push for something better with knowing that you always have a shot at a six, not that a six is already sitting in the discard pile.

Now, a game like Oathsworn actually has both. And you can do a blend of both of them, if you are “rolling six dice” you could roll three dice and draw three cards. So if you know that the deck is just going to be average, you could get your few successes that way, and then push for some critical successes while risking more the other way.

So what is going to work the best for my game, is it dice, cards, a hybrid, what is it?

I’m thinking of doing a hybrid, but probably not like you’d think. I’m not going to pull straight from Oathsworn and copy that people can pick one way or another. I’m going to keep the dice and cards separate but I’m thinking that I’ll use them for different things.

In the boss battles, I want to use combat modifiers like they have in Gloomhaven. But I want to build upon that. In boss battles, which I’ll talk about soon, I want to build up this massive pool of damage and have people work and attack at the same time. On their (all players) turn, each player, separately of the others decides what move/skill they’ll use. They all move and do their thing, and you flip X number of modifier cards based off of your skill. But you can build up in your deck modifier cards that can trigger more cards to be drawn by other players if they are using a certain type of attack or skill.

The other option would be to use dice for combat modification. You’d still use your skills and get some damage and successes based off of that, but there’d be a symbol on the dice, so let’s say you’d have a 3+ on one side of the die. The 3 would be your modifier and you’d give an extra die to another player for their modification of their attack. This would be simpler to implement, I think, but I like the idea that you can customize your modifier deck more than you can customize the dice that you can roll, at least at a reasonable cost.

Instead, I want to use dice for the level events and for the players using their skills to complete the level part of the game. If player X goes on a quest and they have to face a challenge, they look at their stat and get their base number, they look at their skills and use any keywords on those skills, and that builds their die pool and you roll that to determine how well you do on that quest. Or you might be talking with an NPC or another PC and have to persuade them of something.

But, I actually am now moving away from this idea as I put it down on paper because, I want there to feel like there’s more tension in what you’re doing and I also want to reward buffing up stats and having a weak stat. My plan has been to limit the number of events on a floor, let’s say that’s seven, and you can stay for ten rounds, but no new events will come up, before you have to fight the boss, I want to do something different. I want to, now that I’m thinking about it, have players draw a hand of modifier cards, seven in fact, to spend throughout their time on the floor. You will still get your base stat total, and you will get bonuses of +1 per keyword based on the skills your character has, but you can, if you choose to, modify it with a card from your hand. However, those cards you spend will not be in your modifier deck when it comes to the boss battle. And sometimes you’ll know the number that you have to beat, farming for XP by killing monsters, you’ll know your target number, of maybe you have an agility of 8 plus a piercing bow and silver arrows that give you +2, and you can kill the werewolf with a 7, so you don’t need to spend a modifier card, but if you have a -2 in your hand, you’d spend it, reduce your success to a 8, which is greater than 7 and now you don’t have that negative. But maybe you want to get the fabled Sword of the Unending Flame as you know that’ll help boost your damage and you need to get a 14, so you spend a two +2’s to get there, now those are out of your deck for this floor, but now you have a sword that might do 2 more base damage than your previous sword in fire damage for the rest of the game, so it might have been worth it to spend those two +2’s.

The reason for moving away from the dice there is that while dice build tension of a good roll versus a bad roll, you need some resource or something to mitigate them. I’m looking to build a better tension than just that, I want players to be able to specialize some in what they’ll do on a floor, but I want to keep some of that puzzle feel, resource management that is more interesting than just rolling some dice. It has a whole new tension when knowing that you’re spending a good modifier or maybe even a modifier that can combo for another player to get something done. And I’ve given examples where the player knows their target, talking to an NPC who might have a skill for you, for all that you know, you might not know your target number that you’re shooting for, so you have a 5 in charisma, and you know that lore and silver are the keywords, do you’re at a 7, the person handling the book then tells that you can modify it if you want, what do you do, does it matter that much for you, or are you still looking for something in particular. And you’ll have some idea that with a 9, you’ve seen some really good thing things happen, but you can possibly go down to a 5 and still get a quest, so do you risk it.

I think that by now you’ve noticed a key for what I’m going for when creating this game. I want all the decisions to feel meaningful, I want all of them to have some tension to them. Fighting a rabbit might not have that much tension, but spending a card to beat it, that might. And the decision to go to the forest to fight the rabbit, that means you gave up a chance to do something else.

So, in the end, I guess the answer is cards. Do you like the idea of using the modifier cards are both a draw and flip from the top for a boss combat as well as then a more determined resource from your hand on the level?

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Tainted Grail Expansions

So, I already have the base game for Tainted Grail and you can find my thoughts on that here. It’s a game that I really enjoy that has a very interesting story. When the pandemic hit, though, that kind of put a lot of gaming for me on the back burner, which is odd because I was playing Tainted Grail solo, then we are moving, so that makes it even trickier to get to the table and stream. So what’s coming exactly.

There’s a big chunk of stuff coming, there are two big box expansions that are basically the time of the first game, so probably 150 hours worth of game play when it’s all said and done, plus a side expansion that you can do after any of the other expansions, plus a mini-character expansion that basically adds more to the characters and you can go through more of a journey with them with getting certain goals done. I’m really excited for more story, but it also might me that even post move, I put my game of this on pause since shipping should be in November and I have more I can stream in the meantime, so I could wait for the character expansion to add to what I already have going on.

I’m also curious to know what the new mechanics will be in the expansions. I know that it adds in new things for both of them which is cool. I also find it interesting that the expansions do not go in chronological order. The first expansion takes place after the base game, but the second expansion takes place before both of them as kind of a prelude for events to come, so I’m going to be curious to see how they can do the branching storyline with that one.

Excitement Meter: 9 of 10

Dice Throne Adventure + Ninja vs Treant

Dice Throne Adventures is a game where you can take the Dice Throne characters you’ve been battling against each other in a tournament on a quest to take down the Emperor who sits on the Dice Throne, but first you need to find your way through the twisted lands and face off against past competitors who have been twisted by the powers of the Emperor.

One of the cool things is that the main mechanics of the game don’t change. You’re still chucking dice in order to attack and put up a defense, but now it’s a cooperative adventure where you’re all working together. You get loot, level up not just your character but your decks as well, which is awesome, and if you can make it through, you’ll get a chance to face off against the Emperor at the end. I like the idea of the leveling up, and while the game doesn’t seem overly complex, I think it’s going to be a fun addition to everything else that I have for Dice Throne, and I have all the other characters.

Well, I have almost all the other characters, I’m missing two, because the Treant, I believe, was in Season 1 of the Kickstarter. The Treant and Ninja give me 16 total characters that I can play between the two seasons in a massive tournament if I want, or I can add them into Dice Throne Adventure as well. I can imagine doing a massive tournament with a few people, go through all 16, and then the final four would end up being taken through Dice Throne Adventures, and that would just be an epic event.

Dice Throne Adventures: Excitement Meter – 7.5 out of 10

Treant vs Ninja: Excitement Meter 8.5 out of 10

So, two more down. Do either of these interest you. My interest level is really high for both, and it sounds like both should be delivering later in the year. I just have to update my mailing address so they get to the right place when they do ship.

Share questions, ideas for articles, or comments with us!

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Spells have a lot of different components to them, and if it wasn’t hard enough to already have extra things to track, now you need to figure out which spells you want to take with you into combat.

With spells for most casters, you have a few different things to keep track of. The first is the number of spell slots that you have. If you are a Wizard, and this will be my standard example throughout the post, and you are at 3rd level, you will know 3 cantrips, and a number of spells in your spell book, generally to start that is going to be level plus intelligence modifier So let’s say your intelligence is 3 and your level is 3, you’d have at least 6 spells known. Then you have spells that you have prepared for the day. Again, intelligence plus your level, so you’d be able to prepare at least 6 spells for the day. Finally, you have your spell slots, that’s how many non-cantrip spells you can cast each day, which is 4 first level and 2 second level spells.

Now, as a Wizard, that doesn’t mean that you can cast each of the six spells you prepared once, and you need two second level spells ready to cast. You can cast the same spell all six times as long as it’s a first level spell. Spells can be cast at a higher level, so you can cast first level spells at second level, and you generally get some sort of bonus. So maybe you only use a few spells all the time, but you can prepare more so that you have the utility if you want.

Finally, cantrips are different. Those can be used as many times as you wanted throughout the day. But these spells tend to be weaker spells. It might do less damage or be an easier save, but more likely, if it has a save, it simply won’t do any damage if the person saves against it. These spells, though, sometimes do scale with level, because the spell slots, even at 20th level are still somewhat limited.

But that’s just about preparing your spells for the day for a Wizard. It’s similar for a lot of the other spell casting classes, with Warlock being the biggest exception, I’ll write about the Warlock specifically later. The other question with spells is what does the information mean on the spell itself?

Spells are going to have a handful of basic components. I’m going to be using the spell Thunderwave (found here on DnD Beyond). The first thing we see is the level. Thunderwave is a first level spell. That information isn’t extremely important, you’ll have that noted down on your spell list based off of where you put it. There are a few other things that can be useful, but not always. The school is useful if you are that type of Wizard because it makes it easier for you to learn. The same can sometimes be said for the damage type. Especially at low levels most monsters won’t resist much damage.

The next part is extremely important though, and that’s the casting time. For combat, casting time needs to be like Thunderwave and be an action. There are others that are bonus actions which can be used in combat, but you’re probably not going to be want to cast a spell that takes 1 minute to 1 hour to cast. You’ll be stabbed well before that. Then onto the duration of the spell. In the case of Thunderwave it’s instantaneous, so it’s a one off attack. There will be other spells that last a longer period of time. And the area of the spell, some of them will have a range to them, such as fireball does a sphere of damage at up to a distance away from you. Finally in the spell header information, we have the components for the spell. It might be an actual material or it might mean that you need to do a gesture and say something when you cast the spell. Most spells are going to have a verbal piece to them, but not all of them will.

Then we come to the main body of the spell. This tells you the affect of the spell and what sort of save people need to make against the spell. A lot of that information can be gotten from the header of the spell, but this makes it clearer and spells it out in order of how things will happen. It also tells you how much damage is being dealt and if it’s an attack spell, because not all spells get a save, some you need to make an attack roll for them. And beyond the damage, for a spell like Thunderwave, it tells you more flavor of what is happening, so it makes a loud noise that can be heard for a distance. Finally at the bottom, it tells you what it does if you cast it at a higher level. In the case of Thunderwave, for each higher level, you get an extra die eight of damage (1D8).

Now, this is a pretty dry read, I realize that. I’m really going through and breaking down a spell in detail. Most all spells are going to work like this and most casters are going to work like this. The Warlock is an exception, and some of the other classes, as compared to a Wizard, might not know more spells or have more that their disposal to pick from. I’ll actually give some advice for picking spells in a later article. Let me know what you think of spell casting, is it easy enough to understand, did I help make things clearer?

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