The Animate Objects spell in DnD is thematically great. You are in the middle of a fight in a workshop, and you cause the bench, a couple of crowbars, and a table to rise up and bash away at your enemies. You could also use it to help carry people, break stuff, or accomplish other tasks. Awhile ago MattInTheHat came up with a *fantastic* plan for the spell - he threw some coins at his enemies, telling them to buy some better insults, then animated the coins and bashed them with them.
This was a great dramatic moment. The coins were marvellously effective. I eventually picked up the spell myself and paid for a bunch of small metal pieces with my character's initials on them so I could toss them at my enemies and do similar things. This is all well and good, except that it is hideously unbalanced.
The way the spell works is that you get 10 slots of objects. The bigger the object, the more slots it takes up, but the more damage it does. However, tiny objects are a huge outlier in terms of their damage per slot. Consider the chart below, written against AC 16.
Size Slots Damage Hit Total Damage Dam/Slot/Round
Tiny 1 1d4+4 +8 4.225 4.225
Small 1 1d8+2 +6 3.575 3.575
Med 2 2d6+1 +5 4 2
Lrg 4 2d10+2 +6 7.15 1.789
Huge 8 2d12+4 +8 11.05 1.381
The problem is obvious. The thing that really matters is the damage per slot, and tiny things utterly dominate that metric. Large things hit hard, but there are so few of them that they do terrible damage. It feels to me like you ought to want to animate big stuff if you can, but the opposite is true. You might think that coins are perhaps too small to work, and that is reasonable. (The spell does not specify.) However, you could always just have 10 daggers on a bandolier or somesuch, if need be.
The real thing we ought to figure out is how good *should* the spell be? I will use the spell Disintegrate to benchmark just how absurd Animate Objects is. Disintegrate is a single target 6th level spell that does 75 damage with a save to avoid. Animate Objects, if up levelled from 5th to 6th and used on Tiny objects does 78 damage with attack rolls - quite similar. However, Disintegrate is a single action, and Animate Objects does that damage every round! Also Animate Objects uses many attacks that can all smash enemy concentration and also will take attacks of opportunity if they enemy tries to move.
It is clear to me that Animate Objects on tiny objects is completely busted. It is the best single target attack, and is as powerful as a fighter, but the spellcaster can cast other spells while the objects beat down.
So how do we fix this? There are two basic approaches - first, to restrict how often you can use it, and second to change the numbers. The first one would entail insisting that tiny objects be of highly specific sizes. You could insist that they be the size of a sword, for example, so that having 10 of them on your person is extremely difficult, and thus you could only use Animate Objects under specific circumstances. Unfortunately there are ways around that - I would probably have a summoned minion carry around a box of swords for me to animate in that case. This approach also doesn't fix the issue that large objects are terrible.
The other approach is to fix the numbers. Generally small things have the problem that they have low strength so they do little damage, but these small things have massive dexterity and use dexterity for their damage rolls. I don't see any reason why we need to shackle ourselves to the listed strength and dexterity numbers. The tiny object get many attacks, which is especially powerful against casters, so their damage should be the weakest overall. Large things are harder to come by and are often restricted by their size, so they should hit hard. Here are my suggested new values:
Size Slots Damage Hit Total Damage Dam/Slot/Round
Tiny 1 1d4+1 +5 1.75 1.75
Small 1 1d8 +4 2.025 2.025
Med 2 2d6+2 +6 4.95 2.475
Lrg 4 2d12+3 +7 9.6 2.4
Huge 8 4d12+5 +9 21.7 2.713
These new values look a lot better. If you have a bunch of small things they are still fantastic at bonking spellcasters many times to disrupt casting. Their damage is still good, and definitely worth casting. If you animate big stuff it is worse at disruption, but hits very hard. (But still not nearly as hard as the base version of the spell on tiny objects.) Tossing coins at people is a fine thing to do, animating swords does better damage, and finding chairs or tables or anvils to punch people with is better yet. That feels way more appropriate thematically, and stops this spell from being quite so brutal.
Having some spells be better than others is fine, but you have to keep the best ones from dominating everything. Fireball, for example, is so overpowered that it is often the best thing to cast in a single target situation, even though it is obviously designed for AOE. That is a problem. Animate Objects, as written, is similar. It is supposed to be a spell you maintain over many turns, but it is actually the best one shot single target attack.... and then it keeps doing that every turn.
Next I may tackle Conjure Animals, which has many of the same problems that Animate Objects does. Summoning a horde of wolves or bears delivers absurd damage in the same way, because the game is designed around the idea that 4 attacks for 10 each is about as good as 1 attack for 20.
No comments:
Post a Comment