In the campaign I'm running, I have a wizard PC who saves his spells mostly for RP and utility purposes. He enjoys spells like Legend Lore, Misty Step, Find Familiar etc. So, he falls back on cantrips a lot after he burns through his few spell slots with combat spells.
While I'm fine with this, I feel like he's getting the short end of the stick when he's reduced to a Ray of Frost that does 1d8 (they're all level 3 right now, fairly new campaign) damage and slows someone each turn. This is even more important because it's a "numbers over power" campaign where the enemy often arrives in armies of dozens, where slowing one NPC has no real impact. I'm having a similar problem in another campaign with a warlock who, after using his invocations, has nothing to do but spam Eldritch Blast all day to deal damage to anyone.
My question is thus: What is the proper way to calculate cantrip/spell damage, and how can they boost it to be more in line with the other players?
From what I understand spells work like this: if it's not a saving throw or an AOE, or if it states to use one, you have to make a ranged attack check, which is 1d20 + prof + modifier.
Then damage is calculated as spell damage +…nothing? This hardly seems fair when all physical classes get to throw in str, dex, and con to all sorts of modifiers when they fight. Am I missing something here? Maybe it's more balanced than it seems and we're missing the obvious.
Best Answer
You're right. It's only base dice, no modifiers.
This probably sounds terrible, however, there is a good reason:
It's more balanced than it seems.
It's hard to tell sometimes; believe me I know. But, until you get more hands-on experience with the game, you have to give the game you're playing a "grace period" where you trust that the designers made the correct decisions, even if it seems like they didn't at first. Every campaign you play or DM is going to be different. If you change players or DM, then the campaign will be completely different. Some of those games, you will have players that built weak casters, and experienced grognards that built martial types. Although it is a roleplaying game, the "player skill" of the game comes in with decision-making during game time, and character building during creation.
That said, if you GM a game and you consistently encounter the same balance issues across encounters, then yeah, you should feel confident that houseruling whatever the issue is will improve your experience.
Your Wizard's spell slots are pretty big.
Bear with me a moment and imagine that the Wizard class is actually Batman. The biggest strength of the Wizard is that they have a tool ready for every situation -- at least, if they're a good Wizard. That's the player-skill-decision-making part. The spells your Wizard picked aren't bad, they just make him very good at things that aren't combat. Your Wizard has a ton of tools for dealing with non-combat situations. Imagine if Batman didn't bring his Batarangs when he went out on a mission. He's still the best detective on the planet, but now he isn't as effective as he would be in a fight. Spells are really, really good at solving specific problems.
That said, given the nature of the encounters you described, you might try throwing your Wizard a bone if you haven't already. D&D is more than just combat, and if you aren't giving your non-combat specialist Wizard any non-combat to specialize in, he'll feel like a useless player. If your player is concerned about his build, then you can allow him to switch out a cantrip, or give him a couple of good AOE scrolls in the next loot pile to scribe.
In addition, cantrips scale at certain levels. It's not immediately, but you can be sure that the cantrip will be a good standby at later levels.