So I play an Ancients Paladin in one of my games and have the 7th lvl feature, which is resistance to magic damage caused by spells. Sounds great on paper.
The issue is that in the 2+ years I’ve had this feature, I’ve never once gotten to use it because any damage that we’ve taken is from a creature feature, not a spell, even if it functions like a spell. As we all know with Monsters of the Multiverse, this is going to be becoming the standard way of stat blocking monsters in the future, so the situation is just going to be exacerbated in the coming years of playing the character.
I’ve talked with my DM and we both agree that this is an issue as anyone having a character feature that’s essentially dead is a problem. However, we don’t really know what to do to fix it in a way that makes it satisfying and not overpowered or pandering (ie: artificially adding in spellcasters and say they’re casting spells just so I get to use the feature). And since this isn’t the main paladin subclass, we likely won’t see if WotC decided to address it until next year when PHB 2024 comes out… which is another year of feeling like there’s a dead feature in my character.
Now, it is possible that the feature only exists to deal with friendly fire. Fortunately or unfortunately, my group is very good at avoiding friendly fire by having an evoker wizard who negates all AOE damage for us, a Bearbarian as the other front liner, and good tactical positioning of spells from the other spellcasters (one of whom is a moon druid and often in melee). If this is the case, it still feels bad as it just isn’t something that occurs in our game.
I have tried doing some searching, but most discussion on this topic tends to be about what the feature actually affects (just damage from spells). Does anyone have any thoughts on how to adjust the feature so that it can actually be utilized against creatures going forward, but not be so overpowered that it just turns into resistance against magic damage.
Thanks in advance for any help. We’re quite stumped on this one.
If I were the DM I would just rule that monster abilities that resemble spells are spells. Would involve some adjudication but seems workable. Have you discussed this?
there are precedents for things interacting with “magical damage”, such as heavy armor master. That’s what removing the “from spells” portion of the ability would do, though “magical damage” is a little bit vague and requires the DM to make judgement calls pretty often.
Well it doesn’t have to be all magical damage. Just the ones that are clearly spells but WotC is refusing to label them as such.
This is the one we’ve tossed around the most. To us, it feels overpowered as then everyone gets the resistance to everything within the aura. We feel it could lead either encounters where everything is too easy because the party isn’t taking damage, thus threat level is too low, or overtuned encounters where if you’re not within the aura, then you basically die, which isn’t really fair to the other players or that fun to play in.
There’s also a concern regarding counterspelling of such abilities and the impact that would cause to the game.
I’ve got an Oath of the Ancients paladin in my group. I play it as if the thing behaves like a spell, we treat it as a spell for the purposes of this feature.
I think this mismatch will likely be fixed in OneD&D, as the Ancients Paladin is revised to have a more broadly applicable feature.
My suggested fix would be to make it resistance to all the common draconic damage types. Fire, Cold, Lightning, Poison, and Acid.
This feature really is lackluster, especially given how it initially looks pretty strong.
How about something like the Nature Cleric’s 6th level ability, Dampen Elements, reworked into an Aura?
Starting at 7th level, when you or a creature within 10 feet of you takes acid, cold, fire, lightning, or thunder damage, you can use your reaction to grant resistance to creatures of your choice within 10 feet of you against that instance of damage.
So, it’s more limited in range than the cleric’s (10’ vs 30’), but you have the option of applying it to multiple people if they all get hit by the same elemental damage, so it should still work for spells. Shame it won’t work against Magic Missile or other force / bludgeoning damage spells anymore though. Maybe you could put “force” in there as another option…but that could probably lead to cheese, since on-demand resistance to force is likely to open up some abusive interactions (like make Staff of the Magi a much less suicidal nuke).
It’s also balanced somewhat by the fact that a paladin’s reaction is more useful than a cleric’s usually.
Hey! I feel you a lot here, I have an ancients paladin that’s up to level 18 at this stage, and it’s only pretty recently with a shift in adversary type (fighting the men behind the monsters) that that feature has really come into its own. While I haven’t implemented it, I’d be curious if adding a house rule of reducing taken damage by [proficiency]d8 in the aura for spell-like creature features would work. Having said that, just having the conversation with your DM should help, hopefully they’ll be thinking of you during their encounter designs and add spellcasters or creatures that can cast into encounters where it fits.
Yeah, I’ve had the conversation with my DM and we both agree that it feels bad, but neither of us are able to come up with something that feels workable.
Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll bring it up to my DM and add it into our workshopping. :)
The simplest “patch” would be replacing it with resistance to some relevant type of damage like poison or something for example. Not as unique of a feature but a lot simpler and requires less ambiguity.
The simplest answer is probably just that the DM is more generous with what it works against. It doesn’t have to apply to all damage that’s magical, like magical weapon damage, but I think it’s pretty easy to reasonably say “This enemy mage is using the ‘ball of fire’ action in their statblock, sure that counts as a spell.” If it still feels underpowered, be more generous with it. If it feels overpowered, be less generous with it. Might take a little tweaking but there’s a sweet spot in there somewhere.
