So fun thing about AD&D spells is that there's the player-facing rules in the PHB, but there's also the spell's description in the DMG as well which hides additional rules about a spell. This is to not "spoil" creative uses of the spell which Erase does have! If you don't care about the spoiler, Erase removes Glyph of warding as a first level spell which makes it a tool for higher level casters to remove Glyphs of Warding from trapped spell books or a trapped dungeon that you have the ability to leave and come back to. Is it great in general or for level 1 wizards? No. Is it way cheaper than preparing dispel magic if you know there's a glyph of warding in your way? Absolutely.
@@zeebashew you might have gotten mixed up due to 5e combining the two into one spell for no discernable reason. 5e's glyph of warding is explosive runes unless the explosion is overwritten with a different spell.
Well according to erase, you need to "touch" any magical writing you want to erase and what is the most common trigger for activating glyths of warding? At least explosive runes you have to read them first.
That line alone is inspirational enough to make a whole series about a shit wizard trying in vain to get spells that are even slightly helpful with a power creep structured like a shonen anime but a snail-like rate of actual power increase.
That's unironically the entire old D&D wizard experience. Learning new spells becomes part of why you're adventuring. You're not just going in that hole for gold and glory, you want those delicious scrolls. So your characterization is pretty much set in stone, you're on a quest for knowledge.
That's unironically the entire old D&D wizard experience. Learning new spells becomes part of why you're adventuring. You're not just going in that hole for gold and glory, you want those delicious scrolls. So your characterization is pretty much set in stone, you're on a quest for knowledge.
Robbing the living shit out of other wizards to get new spells was A Thing, in lore and in play. The backstory of every single spellbook in the old "Pages From the Mages" articles was a litany of theft and stabbing.
Welcome to old school D&D! I've had a Wizard die from a glancing blow on a backswing, and I've defeated two Liches almost single-handedly with two different Wizards, one at level 11 and another at like level 3 or 4 with a first level spell that went wrong.
If your lucky your useful once per day. Other than that your worse than a NPC farmer with 1-4 HP and an attack that misses 90% the time that deals like 1-3dmg. Honestly till you get the likes of Fireball your pretty useless, even then it's still a once per day usefulness factor for a long time.
I like to imagine Elminster or some old-ass dragons live on in 5e still knowing some of these "ancient" spells and reflect on "...how easy the scholars of today have it." and how back in their day, you had to "ferry everything on your floating disc both ways through the dungeon! And may the gods HELP you if you forgot your ladder for the pit traps!"
I like the NetHack approach to grapple: "Why, yes, we did copy or rip off practically every single mechanic in all of AD&D, except Vancian casting because we don't have rests, and yes we did also steal a huge chunk of the Monster Manual as well, but... no, we're not doing grappling."
I don't know what deal you can make that helps you while you're still within 3 inches* of the paper, but when I find it I'll be ready! *Ok wait good news, I actually read the rules; I believe they used (") as a stand in for either feet when inside, or yards when outside. Truly an artist that Gygax.
@@Day-eb9po I encourage you to keep exploring. In AD&D, (") means inches on the tabletop, and the scale is going to be 10 feet per " indoors and underground, and 10 yards per " outdoors. Importantly, this is STRICTLY for RANGE AND MOVEMENT ONLY. EVER. I don't wanna see anybody thinking Fireball is bigger outside. You never triple the area of effect for anything. Why the indoor/outdoor difference? Outdoors, there's no ceiling height, so arrows can arc higher and shoot farther. Hard to shoot the full distance possible when you have to aim straight ahead in a hallway of 10 feet height. And outdoors there are better sight lines, more open space, and fewer obstructions, so you can more freely move at your top speed. Essentially, you have to slow down when you're in a dungeon for the same reason you take longer to go around your bed and down the hall into the bathroom vs. being on a hike striding along the straight line distance between those two points. The outdoor movement rate much more closely approximates a marching speed for a human with medieval equipment through the wilderness. Next you're going to wonder, if a hallway 10 feet across is represented by a 1-inch square on the table, how do we fit 2 miniatures into that 1-inch square? I'll bake your noodle with a note from the beginning of the DMG that 3 characters can walk abreast in a 10' hallway. Whether they can all fight at the same time depends on their weapon "Space Required" (two longswords only, but if they have spears or daggers they can all three fight at once as a front rank). I'm assuming the early gamers weren't using 10mm / 12mm figures which would be the size needed for that space on the table. Many early D&D groups didn't even use miniatures. What I can tell you is, when I draw a DM's map of a dungeon, I use a 10' per square scale. This lets me pack a LOT more dungeon into a graph paper page. When I draw it on the gridded vinyl mat, where people put their figures, I draw 1 square = 5' and draw just what we need for that fight and then erase it. The players are responsible for making a map. What I used to do was to draw the public mat dungeon as we went, 1 square = 10' like my private map, which meant one dungeon level fit on one mat at a time. This worked great because I used the One Page Dungeon format for my dungeons, so I could always fit the dungeon level on the mat at once. But with my current project, there's no way to make that work. See the Undermountain map for another example where it just doesn't work. In this scale, I needed to represent the adventuring party on the mat with one 25mm figure at the lead (its base is 1 inch square), with everyone else invisibly trailing behind according to the marching order list. A wonderful alternative would be buying and painting up a bunch of 12mm figures, including a few donkeys or whatever, and then mounting them onto 1 inch square bases, 4 per base. This would be a super-miniature unit of the adventuring party. But it would be just for the visual effect, since I wouldn't have a whole slew of monster figures in 12mm, so we couldn't run combats like that. Anyway, as I said, I left that process behind in favor of only publicly drawing the immediate battle area as needed.
Hahaha. Gygax:"Lock down identify! It will break the game! Player:"Huh, if you don't wear armor, you can be a wrestling god". Gygax:"The rules are fine, save more ink for meandering asides!"
In AD&D every grapple attempt is preceded by a weapon attack from the defender which can prevent the attempt. If you aren't wearing armour the defender will hit more often than not. It is balanced within the system.
AD&D 1st edition did have cantrips, as far back as 1982 (Dragon Magazine #52, article by E. Gary Gygax), added fully officially in Unearthed Arcana (1985). You could substitute up to four for a 1st level spell slot. You automatically know as many of the 20 "Useful" cantrips as you have points of Intelligence and get to choose from the list, and you know 2-8 (2d4) from each of Person (person-affecting), Personal (handy little tricks, e.g. Firefinger is a short little jet of flame up to 6 inches long sufficient to light a candle or ignite kindling, Spider summons a random type of normal-sized spider native to the area (which *will* be irritated and isn't under the caster's control, etc), and Reversed (reversed versions of Useful cantrips, such as Tarnish vs Polish, or Spill vs Gather), and 2-5 (1d4+1) Legerdemain (minor "magic trick" style effects like Change (an alteration that can make a small object or creature be another of roughly the same size for up to about 10 minutes, within the same kingdom of animal or general type of material -- for instance, make a sheet of paper into a linen handkerchief, or a mouse into a bat) and Haunting (makes real or illusory sounds useful for simulating haunting or the presence of someone unseen, like Footfall, Tap, Groan, etc). So, you could potentially have a 1st-level Wizard with 15 Intelligence know up to 15 Useful cantrips, 8 Person, Personal, and Reversed, and 5 Legerdemain and Haunting, for a total of 49 cantrips. They could could only cast 4 of them per 1st-level spell slot they allotted for cantrips, though, but 4 handy little "0-level" spells would be handy during downtime. It was a pretty common house rule to add the cantrips at 4 per 1st-level spell slot, so if you could cast two 1st-level spells per day, you could also cast 8 cantrips per day, instead of having to trade. Most of them were handy for roleplaying and hard to abuse.
You ever wonder why spells like this exist in the first place? Like what was going on in their heads that they were thinking: "yes this is a spell that someone would want to use resources on casting."
Part of it I guess is that when they were making AD&D most of this stuff had only been tested by a few groups of people, and if those people found a use for it or one person who used the spell all the time vehemently defended its inclusion in the module.
@@joelwhite2361 Made worse then by the one person who found a way to completely abuse the spell in one very specific and unusual circumstance, leading to an already mediocre spell gaining a bunch of caveats and a fail chance.
I think at a base level it makes sense. There's a lot of potential in magic! Even if sometimes it can get a bit specific. Though imagine being able to just erase an entire library of stored knowledge. The issue is more an overcompensation of balancing, which may have been done due to some edge case someone thought of, like erasing the Declaration of Independence. Perhaps forgetting they could've probably just tossed it into a camp fire for similar effect.
You also have to take into account that the primary goal in constructing 1E and AD&D was to add flavor to system and systematize flavor, and that this is a bunch of folks (male nerds, really) who’ve been scrabbling in pencil on paper all day. The idea of a magic spell that just wipes the slate clean (perhaps when your third character of the day dies horribly and you need to start a fourth one on a fourth new sheet) would appeal to both the player AND the scrawny, lazy wizard who doesn’t have the carrying capacity to haul much more than what they absolutely need.
When youre talking about the spell prep process for wizards, its important to remember that they were Vancian magic. The spells were concepts that took time and space in a trained brain to hold onto
I legitimately gaffawed at "you desperately need that spellbook" I mean i might be higher than a storm giant's nut sack but still that was a solid joke/accurate observation
So, to clarify. Erase allows a magic user to spend a very valuable limited resource to, if they are lucky, do the same thing that a match would do reliably.
2nd edition was similar, and it has 4 books that cover basically every spell printed for the edition along with some optional rules. They range from very cool to very WEIRD!
More generous than the DM's I played with. I believe it was something like you got 1 spell per level you just know, and can pick anything. Some classes like specialist got an extra spell per level in their specialty. Other than that it was up to random spell scrolls or books you found along the way and transcribed into your spell book... Oh and all wizards started off with Read magic. The real fun begins if you lose your spell book for some reason. You can no longer cast read magic to read other wizards books, so you can't even transcribe it again to memorize. You have to actually pay the thousands of gold to "research" the spell and basically create it again. Moral of the story, always have a back up spell book. Too bad it also takes like a day per spell level to transcribe spells I think in Ad&D.
That's a cantrip, and all cantrips in 1e are about that powerful. Also you get to sting someone with the bee, it's not just "oh hey now there's a bee here".
There is no set of spells i could have that would be so good that i wouldnt steal/copy another wizard's spell book given the opportunity. Quantity of spells has a quality all it's own.
Better idea: everyone plays different specialty wizards and share your spellbooks. Try not to learn the same spells so everyone can have as many options as possible.
@@Zanarthis That doesn't really work in an AD&D/OSR game because of how fragile magic users are. you only get a d4 hit die, and you require 2-3 times as much xp per level as other classes depending on the class. At first level, you only get one spell per day. You are only proficient with daggers and maybe staves, and you have to use STR for melee regardless. All of that is to say that the game is hard enough on even a balanced party that keeping more than a couple of magic users alive until they become self sufficient in mid levels isn't really feasible. Besides, in most AD&D/OSR games, different "specialty wizards" are different classes with different spell lists. Magic User, Illusionist, and Necromancer are all separate things. They aren't just subclasses of wizard. Sharing spells between them requires expensive and time consuming magical research.
@@nunyabidness8870 I mostly agree, but I should point out that hiring a bunch of mercenaries with staves and crossbows to protect the all-wizard party through a dungeon until they level up enough COULD work. It might even make Charisma a useful stat (there were explicit rules for hirelings). Of course, things would less cut-and-dry in actual play, surviving contact with the enemy and all that, but that’s what makes the game fun.
Interesting. This immediately recalls to me one of the original inspirations for the magic system: Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" setting. For a wizard who's generally acting as a solo adventurer exploring the lost ruins of an ancient civilization. and who's so very limited in both access to spells and the ability to have them ready to cast that any sane wizard will train in physical combat just to reduce how often they'll need to save precious mental space for an attack spell, a near-certain bypass for any inscribed spell would be a vital tool.
I love hilariously limited magic systems like this. Especially when most of the spells are absolutely terrible and no reasonable person would want to spend years of their life learning how to cast this garbage. 😆
@@leyrua I'm rather fond of the old setting, simply because while it does tend to make wizards overpowered it also forces them to think carefully and prioritize gathering intelligence and planning, often paying more resource and effort into working out how they can accomplish a goal than to getting the use of what they need but don't already have to actually do it. That said, the setting isn't well suited to group play where most of an adventuring party should have something to do most of the time.
Watching these made me realize that without knowing it, my first DnD experience was with AD&D: as a wee bab, I watched my parents play Baldurs Gate I and II and when I was old enough for my chubby little hands to maneuver the mouse and keys, I played it too. I can rattle off Irenicus' opening monologue by heart to this day, at 30, and sometimes the chanting of Alaundo's prophecies outside of Candlekeep bounce around my skull like a commercial jingle when I least expect it. To this day, I don't understand the magic system. Half of the spell descriptions mean absolutely nothing to me. Might as well be written in cuniform for all the comprehension I have. Horrid Wilting? Laroch's Minor Drain? What does it do? Who knows? I certainly don't!
The spells in AD&D (both 1E and 2E) had ridiculous restrictions. Take Hold Portal, for example. The purpose of Hold Portal is to secure a door in the dungeon. For example your party is on the run from a monster, and want to bar the door, but don't have the time to do so. But the duration is so short, it won't help your party bar the door. A high level NPC Magic User might get use out of it to escape the PCs and their hirelings, bur a low level party might need to be immensely creative to get any use out of it. Fun fact: Hold Portal made it into 3.5 edition. I only remember that because Rich Burlew made fun of the spell in Order of the Stick. By 4E the game designers saw no utility in Hold Person, and I am pretty sure its not in 5E either.
There is no Hold Portal spell in 5e, but there is Arcane Lock, which holds much of the intended use, but much better. For one, its duration is "until dispelled", which already puts it leagues ahead of the ADD version. It also increases the DC to break down the object (it also works on chest, windows, etc.) by ten, and any creatures of your choice can still open it. It is also a level two spell, though, so there is a bit of a trade-off.
@@badideagenerator2315 Not really if I'm honest, because wizards don't use their spellbooks for spellcasting. They use it for spell preparation. Which does not happen during combat. You'd be wasting your turn while they nuke you on theirs.
@@kylestanley7843 that's why it's great for the finale of the fight, when that opposing wizard is down, barely conscious, and can't fight back, you walk over, open their spellbook and smirk as you systematically erase *all* of their hard work, two pages at a time, then you just leave, leaving them to pick up the pieces of their shattered life's work,
Erased basically takes the place of a potentially useful spell and costs a resource to maybe use, True strike if nothing else, only wastes a cantrip spot (not great).
As someone who plays wizards alot in 5e, this entire segment both hurts my soul, and resonates with that cry of 'you need that spellbook'... Especially as Order of Scribes. That 14th level feature can eat through so many spells...
i looked up what the14th level feature is and just out curiosity why would you use it unless it was a last ditch effort like "I just need to reduce the damage enough to survive then my contingency will trigger a dimension door or something to get me to safety" since coping spells to the spellbook costs gold and higher level spells cost more gold to copy so the amount of coin needed to copy even "junk" spells to use for that feature seems like it might be better spent on magic items or something?
@@wolfyblackknight8321 I mean, the effect is just that, meant as an emergency measure to reduce damage to zero once a day. Whilst something like contingency combined with Dimension Door is nice, it doesn't stop effects like the 'you are turned into a pile of dust if you're left at 0 from disintegrate', or certain monster effects that outright kill you if it reduces you to zero, or zombifies you, or many other effects. And bear in mind that you lose the spells in question for 1-6 long rests, which means you could lose up to 18 levels of spells for nearly a week. And if you have to use that, say, two or three times during said cooldown period... I don't know about you, but when you consider the cost and niche nature of some other magic items that does something similar, but even then only does it against one type of damage (Fire Absorbing tattoo, let's say) - that costs at minimum 20k gold (using Xanathar's guide 'buying magic item' downtime calculation) up to 50k gold pieces. Compare that to, say, the 10k gold pieces you'd probably spend to get ahold of a shit ton of 'junk' 1st/2nd/3rd level spells and copy them into your book?
The spell says “paper, parchment, or similar surfaces”". So going as written it could be used on anything with a similar SURFACE. Like a thin wooden floor (like tiles). But not ceramic. Also, glyph of warding is EXPLICITLY affected by Erase (DMG pg41/44). Wizard marks can also be explicitly targeted regardless of surface (UA pg53). So it would be reasonable to rule that any similar magic etc. would be affected regardless of what it's on.
Yeah but sadly Gygax and crew had an insipid approach to metagaming back in the day. You weren't supposed to read the DMG and thus know all the features of your class/spells. Even though it would be idiotic that no wizard would know that Erase works on Glyph of Warding except through trial and error. That's probably one of the first things that comes to mind for someone whose entire career is research into magic.
I started with AD&D, and ya wizards at the start are just awful. My wizards would always just carry a crap ton of darts and throw them. But once you get to ~level 5 wizards become so damn powerful. You gotta cover chain lightning at some point for AD&D
Mechanical "Game Balance" was NOT really a thing in 1st Edition AD&D (nor in Basic D&D) My table royally mishandled stuff like this back in the day. My 1st EVER character (a magic user from Basic D&D) started with only ONE spell in his book (ventriloquism) & got Floating disk when he leveled up! (random rolls each time) It wasn't until YEARS later (when I READ the DMs guide) I learned that he was SUPPOSED to automatically get Read magic (or maybe Detect magic), an offensive or defensive spell & a utility spell! But he DIED before he could hit 3rd level (& scribe the Web scroll he found)!
Legit the only use I see for Erase is altering the terms and conditions on a magical contract with a demon or something. 'Sure, sure, I'll sign.' _erase the part of selling my soul_ 'There you go.
Struggle, plead, compromise, and grovel until you survive long enough to reach level 3. Then cast Erase on the cover and title page of the Dungeon Master's Guide. Since it's no longer the Dungeon Master's Guide, there's no reason that you, as a player, are forbidden to read it.
Well a very limited use for Erase is Spell books are expensive and heavy to carry around. I believe traveling spell books had 50 pages and Spells took something like 1d4-1 plus the level of the spell in pages. So unless you get your hands on a bag of holding carting around several spell books is not very likely for a wizard and their general encumbrance limits. So a very niche use would be to cast Erase on your own spell books to remove spells you either don't want any more, or have other wise copied to new spell books. I know most my wizards started off with any spell they knew all in one book, then I'd eventually move on to "useful spells", all spells by level etc to make organization easier. Funny enough an absolutely insanely powerful spell though is Copy. As you can imagine it's a first level spell that lets you basically instantly copy spells you know into spell books, I believe the number of pages per cast limited by your level.
I used to think the spell was useless until it saved my party…also had the spell forget which also seemed useless until I countered a suggestion spell by making the player forget the suggestion…also works with command spell.
erase is one of those spells, that you give to an NPC so they can try to erase something the players want, forcing the players to counter or disrupt the spell. if i saw a PC actively take it, i would probably call their spouse to ask if everything was okay at home.
1:13 Interesting that the material components for Identify are so similar between here and 5e. We kept the pearl (even the minimum price) and owl feather, but we don't need to steep the feather in wine and drink the result, nor swallow a live miniature carp.
Which means YOU DESPERATELY NEED THAT SPELL BOOK!!! Ah, I've been in that situation before; admittedly at least once by my own dimwitted and boisterous ways 😛
My understanding (as someone who started out in 5e and tried 1e after finding my dad's old copy) is that the min/max spells are NOT the ones you know, but basically the ones you have the potential to learn. You are meant to have a few spells your character can just never understand, regardless if they come across it. I imagined it as the spells your teacher taught you/prepped you to know eventually, so I would rule as a GM that the magic user can learn those spells if they have a specific teacher and significant time.
To be fair, I can think of a handful of ways that Erase could be useful. Maybe the BBEG has a scroll with a powerful spell or ritual that he plans on using to do something evil with. The scroll can't be destroyed, and he has some form of magic on it that lets him know where it is at all times. So, you could Erase the text of the scroll, leaving it unharmed and letting the BBEG think things are fine until he uses it. Combine it with a spell like Explosive Runes, and you can literally have the villain's plans blow up in his face.
i.e. the GM needs to set up a highly specific situation where the spell would be useful and not accept any other creative ideas players come up with so that the wizard can feel like they're helping
@@tuomasronnberg5244 But some of the most incredible moments in Web TTRPG history, like Dimension 20 and Critical Role, come from unexpected uses of seemingly minor spells. An eldritch knight casting Knock on a locked door in "A Crown Of Candy" took the DM completely by surprise, as an example. It isn't "The DM needs to craft a specific setup so this spell is useful", it's "The DM forgot that I have this niche spell that will allow me to use it in a creative way and change the situation in my favor". That is the heart of a RPG.
@@FirstLast-cg2nk Exactly my point. Those moments are amazing because they rise organically from a player using a real spell creatively, not because the GM goes out of his way to craft a scenario so that the player finally has some reason to cast their useless spell (which could be better solved with a real spell but cannot due to artificial constraints set by the GM).
They were user friendly back in the day. It was common in the 70s and 80s for groups to play d&d daily. Now you are lucky if it is weekly, and even that is a part time job for a DM. 5e is so user unfriendly to DMs that people are insisting on getting paid to do it now.
Hearing all these old school AD&D misadventures is reminding me of my childhood reading dragonlance. Keep it up, I love this period period of RPGs, even for all it's flaws, especially the flaws even.
Why though? Why would a Wizard, who spent years studying, start with random spells? Was his schools Major(dumpster diving) Minor(panhandling)? Makes no sense.
Ok, I know you glossed over how utterly knee capped identify is in ADnD, but we *really* need to talk about just HOW knee capped identify is in ADnD. Erase is a mostly useless spell that might have some very niche downtime uses, but it doesn't kill you. Attempting to cast identify, on the other hand, will probably outright KILL you. 1. As you mentioned, you take 8 points of temporary constitution damage for casting it. If this damage takes you to 1 or 2 CON, you fall unconscious and can't move again for 24 hours, at which point you have your constitution fully restored. This is already pretty awful, and if you're in anything other than a 100% safe, padded cell, this will likely lead to your untimely (or very timely because you tried to cast ADnD identify and you deserve to die for thinking this was a good idea) demise. 2. I cannot find any explicit clause that says you die when you hit 0 CON, but I did find this rule: "If a character's Constitution changes during the course of adventuring, his hit points may be adjusted up or down to reflect the change. The difference between the character's current hit point bonus (if any) and the new bonus is multiplied by the character's level (up to 10) and added to or subtracted from the character's total." Looking at table 3 (the constitution stat adjustments table), there is no entry for CON 0, and from this omission I have to infer that a character cannot exist with a CON score of 0, meaning if your CON score hits 0, you die. All of this is to say that if your magic user has 8 or fewer CON when you cast identify, you are spending your first level spell slot to off yourself, and you don't even get to suplex someone for your troubles. 3. Identify arguably gets *even worse* if you have a CON score of 11 or higher. In exchange for not immediately being knocked unconscious, you have to take *waaaaaay* longer to restore your lost constitution. It takes 6 hours of rest to restore 1 point of constitution. So if you lock yourself in that same padded cell as your 10 CON magic user friend, it will take 2 full days of rest to restore your CON score, a full day longer than your 10 CON friendo. Oh but you're still conscious, so clearly that means you can keep adventuring. Good for you! Now, assuming a normal sleep schedule, it'll take you a full *eight days* to get your con back, with the first couple having you in literal 1 shot range. At this point, you can make a very real argument that you'd be better off unconscious. 4. I'M NOT DONE! Renting yourself a padded cell to coma in for a day *could* be worth it to identify a magical item that has the potential to make or break your entire campaign, but even assuming that we're in a setting where such identify padded cells were easily available, good luck getting to one in time. You have a 1 hour time limit between picking up the item you want to identify before identify just will not work. This means you're not getting that padded cell to coma in. At best you might be able to make it back to camp with a couple of loyal friends to watch over you while you recover. 5. Did I mention that identify has expensive material components that are consumed on casting? Yeah you need to drink an "infusion of Pearl at least 100 gp in value" (whatever the heck that means, but it sounds like you're trying to drink a pearl), which of course you need to have on hand because once again, you only have an hour to cast this spell so you don't have time to visit the local market for your expensive pearl infused drink. Even ignoring the logistical nonsense having something like this on hand, that's ONE HUNDRED GP to cast a first level spell that threatens to KILL YOU. 6. Ok, so we picked up a magic item, made it to a well defended camp in the span of an hour, magic user drank their weird, expensive pearl drink and is still alive and has 10 CON, allowing us to spend the next day recovering so we can resume our adventure. Surely with all this prep work, we can identify the magic item now, right? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA no. When casting identify, you have a percentage chance of 15 + 5*level to discern one property of the item. That's right, at first level, you have only a 20% chance of successfully identifying an item, and if you're 1 point short, you get false information instead, which is arguably worse than knowing nothing. 7. Ok, so you got the item, made it back to safety where your expensive pearl drink is waiting, cast identify, made the roll, magic user is happily in a coma for the next day. We know what the item does now right? Weeeeeeeeeell... y'know how in the last section I mentioned you get to discern ONE property on a successful casting of identify? Yeah the properties you can get are pretty limited. The properties you may attempt to discern include, though are not necessarily limited to: Whether or not the item is not enchanted/is falsely enchanted (ie cursed). Whether or not the item has a high bonus or a low bonus (identify will not reveal the exact bonus of an item). Whether or not a weapon has additional effects on its attack. The primary takeaway is that you can choose to learn whether or not the item you're trying to identify is cursed (which is one of the main purposes you'd want to bother with this spell in the first place, as many cursed items can outright kill a character), OR you can attempt to learn what the item ACTUALLY DOES. You cannot learn both in a single casting. 8. "Oh but what if I chain cast identify?" Yeah between the 8 CON damage and the 1 hour time limit you're not getting multiple casts off with a single magic user, even higher level ones, and even if you did have multiple first level magic users, all of them willing to risk their very lives to be on standby for your party to MAYBE discover a magic item (as you generally don't know ahead of time whether or not the dungeon in question actually contains a magic item), a first level magic user only has a TWENTY percent chance of actually identifying anything! And remember, each casting will cost you a pretty ONE HUNDRED GP! 9. As one, final screw you, as a part of casting identify, the "caster engages some item, using it and experimenting with it to discern its magical enchantment, if any." Wanna guess what the trigger condition is for most cursed items? If you said "attempting to use the magic item", you're absolutely correct! One of the primary uses of identify, one of the prime reasons to go through ALL this trouble, is to try and protect your party from getting whammied by a cursed item, AND IT DOESN'T EVEN DO THAT! If you try to identify a cursed item, you will likely wind up in the same exact position as actually triggering said cursed item, except you also have 8 points of CON damage from the casting to make it just that much harder to survive whatever the cursed item is gonna do to you. And that last point is really the final nail in the coffin. You go through a bunch of steps, spend a minimum of 100 GP, and gimp your magic user only to accomplish something that any ole PC can accomplish non-magically: figuring out what an item does by using it. You are quite literally better off just taking the risk and using the magic item then you are trying to cast identify. You would basically need a kingdom's army to get any use out of this spell at all...
The best (craziest) AD&D spell I’ve seen is called ease labour. Seems straightforward at first; it helps a woman give birth easily with no complications. But we’re getting interesting is the fact that it’s reversible. Instead of easing a delivery, you can give anyone the effects of a very bad pregnancy. It immediately keeps them from moving, stops them from attacking, and eventually makes them pass out. Extremely overpowered lol
The 1e DMG has guidelines for the DM to determine your starting spells… different from the ones you can possibly know, these are the ones your mentor puts in your book. Usually Read Magic and up to 3 others. My best character, eventually an archmage after about 5 years of weekly play, started with Read Magic, Detect Magic, Jump and Push. DM was pretty stingy.
Dudes HATED wizards early on. If you played a wizard it was a constant fight to survive the most basic things... BUT if you made it more than a few levels in you started to get really powerful, IF you made it that far.
The way you did what spells you know is slightly wrong! Like other comments have mentioned, theres more rules hidden in the DMG. What you did was partially correct. You used the list and ran through the spells to figure out what spells you COULD know. Now you had to go out and actually try to find those spells. The other ones are beyond your comprehension until your intelligence changes. So what do you actually start with? 3 spells. Rolled from a tiny table in the dmg. 3 d10s. One for an offense spell, one for defense, and one utility. And plus you always know the opposite to erase, you know Write magic so you can actually record more spells in your spellbook. Yes, thats right. It takes a prepped spell to actually learn a new spell in addition to every other stipulation youve already run through. Crazy. Imagine how much worse grammacy is supposed to be knowing you only should have 3 actual spells at first level? Oh and cantrips exist, but theyre in the unearthed arcana. And theyre GARBAGE. Definitely worth a video in themselves. Not free, take 1/4 of a spell slot, and half of them are just the parts of prestigitation split apart and nerfed down! Except for spider and bee, of course lol
In page 39 of the Dungeon Master's Guide is says that you start with "a total of 4 - count them - 4 spells". READ MAGIC and one offensive spell, one defensive spell and one miscellaneous spell. Erase is a miscellaneous spell, so you really, really should have access to something slightly more useful besides that.
I get around lemon spells by combining similarly themed spells. Feather fall is great *when you need it* which is fine but honestly, hasn't come up in any game I've played. Jump is meh but theoretically impractical unless you notice a lot, and I mean a lot, of impassible vertical obstacles in the adventure/battles. *But what happens when you combine the two?* Suddenly, your team can crouching tiger hidden dragon (or maybe just the wizard or maybe just do it for one jumps worth depending on exactly how you rule) but it's way cooler and more likely to actually be used rather than just be an RNG tax/safety tax/spellbook filler.
You actually can use it on glyphs, it’s in the DMG notes on the erase spell. Plus it wouldn’t make sense if you couldn’t, the spell erases writing and a glyph is writing.
I started playing midway through 3.5 and everything I've ever heard about AD&D makes it a real wonder that the game lived long enough to get there. 😂 It always sounds complicated and punishing to the point of masochism.
The identify spell controls for anyone curious Explanation/Description: When an identify spell is cast, one item may be touched and handled by the magic-user in order that he or she may possibly find what dweomer it possesses. The item in question must be held or worn as would be normal for any such object, ie, a bracelet must be placed on the spell caster's wrist, a helm on his or her head, boots on the feet, a cloak wom, a dagger held, and so on. Note that any consequences of this use of the item fall fully upon the magic user, although any saving throw normally allowed is still the privilege of the magic-user. For each segment the spell is in force, it is 15% + 5% per level of the magic-user probable that 1 property of the object touched can become known possibly that the item has no properties and is merely a ruse (the presence of Nystul's magic aura or a magic mouth being detected). Each time a property can be known, the referee will secretly roll to see if the magic-user made his or her saving throw versus magic. If the save was successful, the property is known; if is 1 point short, a false power will be revealed, and if it is lower than I under the required score no information will be gained. The item will never reveal its exact plusses to hit or its damage bonuses, although the fact that it has few or many such plusses can be discovered. If it has charges, the object will never reveal the exact number, but it will give information which is +/-25% of actual, ie a wand with 40 charges could feel as if it had 30, or 50, or any number in between. The item to be identified must be examined by the magic-user within 1 hour per level of experience of the examiner after it has been discovered, or all readable impressions will have been blended into those of the characters who have possessed it since. After casting the spell and determining what can be learned from it, the magic user loses 8 points of constitution. He or she must rest for 6 turns per 1 point in order to regain them. If the 8 point loss drops the spell caster below a constitution of 3, he or she will fall unconscious, and consciousness will not be regained until full constitution is restored 24 hours later. The material components of this spell are a pearl (of at least 100 g.p. value) and an owi feather steeped in wine, with the infusion drunk and a live miniature carp swallowed whole prior to spell casting. If a luckstone is powdered and added to the infusion, probability increases 25% and all saving throws are made at +4.
The fact it has a fail chance vs a piece of paper that says "you suck" So you're just left there. Staring at a inanimate piece of paper that has survived your magical prowess. I love how there is no reason to use this in any situation. I understand that conventional lead/graphite pencils and rubberized erasers are incomprehensibly rare and/or homebrew only. But fr?????
Sounds like my campaign flawed spells ("magic research rolled bad, but I am still granting a spell. Roll research to see if you know what the flaw is"). The flawed spell that would solve riddles, but if you cast it it erases itself from the spellbook and casts the spell learned just before it as a side effect, whatever that spell is. So the player solved a riddle and...disintegrated the riddle reward.
As a general heads up, cantrips (and the divine equivalent, orisons) were a thing in both 1e and 2e AD&D, they just weren't in the core books for either edition.
It's only up to the DM in that its always up to the DM. Having zero con is istantly and irrevocably fatal unless you're a constroct and just don'thave a con score at all. Sorry.
Great video Zee, love the animations as always. I also really like the background song too and it seems like I'm not the only one. Could you put it in the description or make a comment with it or reply to someone with it? Thanks.
Currently in the game I’m dming for I had two wizards in the party who have been uncovering “ancient” spell books that had 5e conversions of AD&D spells. Erase was one of the spells the creative wizard latch onto and attempted to find every corner case use for. It has been great watching him learn to disarm every magical trap/puzzle I’ve thrown their way. The best of course was erasing billboard signs of businesses that “crossed” the party in some fashion or another.
And I thought the 5E spell slot system was painful at times, being so used to mana systems rather than limited casts. AD&D sounds like a nightmare for castors.
As a player of 1st ed why spells like erase are good is because we broke the game and played something like we could have everything available so you look at erase knowing how cool it will be when the niche chance it's useful OK it was never useful but It could have been and I loved it for that
2:17 This is just for me so that I can immediately go back to the best part of this video instantly. I've been laughing my ass off for 5 minutes and counting!
I actually like the erase spell as a concept, having small convienience spells makes a whole lot of sense, the execution could have been better though.
No no no you don't use Erase on an enemy spellbook, you use it as part of a heist to destroy documentation of some sort that you don't want to exist without resorting to arson (so the previous owner won't know it's destroyed until they actually open it).
I remember that there were cantrips in ad&d but they were basically one specific use case spells that were non damaging that was eventually rolled into one spell of prestidigitation. Cantrips like color, salt, polish and a few others.
Good grief. The amount of factors making this spell trash is insane. A dm in 5th edition might rule that you could use prestidigitation for create a symbol (being a blank space) on top of a page, as a cantrip, with no ability check, while the cantrip can also do plenty of other things. A first level, specifically prepared, 48% fail chance spell to do practically the same is certainly far worse.
i can see exactly one use for this, your party notices a wanted poster looking for them in a tavern, you attempt to erase it before anyone can check it and recognize you
@tuomasronnberg5244 Tearing it off with your fingers would still have a chance to fail. It would be loud, and it's more difficult than you might think. Meanwhile, the spell could give you the chance to make some subtractive edits.
@@robintheviking8990 Erase has both vocal and somatic components, and a range of a whole 3 inches. You don't think a guy chanting and gesturing right in front of a wanted poster wouldn't be noticeable? Also, I am fairly confident that an average person would have more than 54% chance of tearing down a poster off the wall with their hands unlike the spell, wouldn't you agree?
@tuomasronnberg5244 Rules about how obvious spellcasting is were much more flexible at the time, and people who didn't know magic might not realize that what they're seeing is a spell being cast. Also, no, I wouldn't agree. Have you ever tried to remove a flier stuck to a wall with wheat paste? It ain't as easy as it looks.
