The most HORRIFYING spell in Dungeons and Dragons 

The most horrendous spell in DnD. I really hope it's just there for villains and VERY evil campaigns, no "hero" can keep that title if they use that spell.

Lol, I feel that 😅 at least I can percieve all the necromancy bullshit. The moment I start having to doubt my own senses is when it becomes REALLY scary

I do think that Detect Magic would work during, but debatable after. Probably depends on how generously the DM interprets it :P Totally! There certainly are some troubling necromancy spells, but taken as a whole, the enchantment catalog is much more terrifying imo. Really, the only necromancy spells that I consider on par are ones that force a soul to do something, take away it's free will, which is basically the baseline for enchantment!

@@MegaphoneMan0 Baseline is probably _charm person,_ which in every edition only makes people "like" you. That said, in 3.5, at least, it did allow for you to force people to do things with opposed Charisma checks, which I think represented wheedling and cajoling your "friend" into doing things for you. So, which of the Enchantment school spells (in any edition that you know of) do you think is actually the most horrifying?

I think that any sort of influence is at least modifying their free will, which is still quite the scary concept to me. I'm a 5e baby, it was my first ttrpg ever the year it come out! I've gotten the chance to play 3.5 and even AD&D since, as well as Blades in the Dark and pathfinder 2e, but I'm not experienced enough to really know. Outside of TTRPGs, I personally think that Kilgrave from marvel is an intensely scary villain, and even though Prof X is a good guy his powers are still pretty worrying. I like the arc in the comics where people push back on his "hero" status after he gets a bit too flippant with his mind control.

@@MegaphoneMan0 YEah, I personally found the scene in the 2nd or 3rd X-Men movie where Prof. X had that conversation with Wolverine by controlling different people as Wolverine passed them to be _awesome,_ but also terrifying and o_O for an alleged good guy. I think it'd make for a really cool gray zone "hero" or for a villain, though. Or for an alternate concept, instead of it being a mind controller, it being a hive mind of multiple bodies with one unified sense of self. Not "We are Borg," but rather, "I am myself, and these are but many fingers." (Horrifying if it takes over the bodies of otherwise free-willed individuals; less so if the bodies were always this being's own.) The trouble with making enchanters that scary, I think, in D&D lies in the way their spells work, the difficulty of landing them without being caught, and the fact that they're of limited use in adventuring at low level. The key thing I think a lot of players miss and DMs make harder than it should be is the ability to hire henchmen to go adventuring with you. The enchanter, in particular, really needs to be able to "recruit" humanoid guards and agents who'll do the work of handling non-humanoid monsters. Especially the sorcerers, who have nearly no room for spell variety to cover a variety of situations. And "that's what the other PCs are for" doesn't cut it: the other PCs are expecting the enchanter to pull his own weight, after all.

It definitely is more than a bit played up for camera ^_^ I don't have a problem with any sort of use of enchantment magic in my games, but as a DM my NPCs probably are more harsh than at other tables when it comes to being enchanted or witnessing it. In terms of canon, it's definitely debatable and fully modifiable by the DM. However, I do think that there are some examples that prove what is implied. For example, the friends cantrip specificially says that they are aware that you used magic to influence them, in my mind implying that they would be wholly unaware of the effect of charm person after the fact. Some other spells do seem to contradict this though, like Geas directly dealing damage to creatures that disobey you. So are the aware during but then forget? Certainly murky imo. Yeah, feeblemind is nightmare fuel 😅 Just power word kill them, it's a much, MUCH kinder fate. I'm convinced that spells like that are only there for DMs to have villains use.

@@MegaphoneMan0 "jjust power word kill them" Which is also an enchantment spell 😬

@@juliamavroidi8601 there is no escape🙃

_Suggestion_ does make it "seem like a good idea," so if the target never realizes he was whammied, he'll always think that whatever suggestion he followed was something he agreed to. _Suggestion_ is also a hard one to strike the right balance with. I recently had a PC flub a Wisdom save (with advantage, 'cause he's an elf) against a _suggestion_ to go with the obvious kidnapper to "people who can answer his questions," because my character wasn't going to go without a fight, probably could flee if he wanted, but was trying to wheedle more info about who was after him out of the kidnapper. Since this sounded like an excellent suggestion, what with the failed save, my PC went willingly along with him to the fancy part of town, to the big mansion. That's when the NPC tried to get him to disarm and wear armor he assumed would seal my PC's ability to use somatic component spells. My PC balked at that; he was definitely going to go inside and let the man lead him to the people who could answer his questions, but he wasn't going to disarm himself. He sneaked around, scouted the place out, and, once he was sure he had his escape planned, he revealed to the man that he'd managed to get inside while fully attired. The man led him to the big bad evil boss of the place, and the _suggestion_ was fulfilled. (It was still a tense scene thereafter.) My PC at no point realized he'd been whammied, because he failed the save. He contextualized the great idea to get his questions answered as something he agreed to because it WAS a great idea. It became a driving goal until he met with the boss. But at no point did the _suggestion_ say he had to do so powerlessly or anything, so he did it on his own terms.