Feeblemind: So Much Worse Than Death

Usable By: Bard, Druid, Warlock, Wizard

Spell Level: 8

School: Enchantment

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: 150 feet

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V, S, M (A handful of clay, crystal, glass, or mineral spheres)

You blast the mind of a creature that you can see within range, attempting to shatter its intellect and personality. The target takes 4d6 psychic damage and must make an Intelligence saving throw.

On a failed save, the creature’s Intelligence and Charisma scores become 1. The creature can’t cast spells, activate magic items, understand language, or communicate in any intelligible way. The creature can, however, identify its friends, follow them, and even protect them.

At the end of every 30 days, the creature can repeat its saving throw against this spell. If it succeeds on its saving throw, the spell ends. The spell can also be ended by Greater Restoration, Heal, or Wish.

Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

There aren’t a lot of literal instances of “a fate worse than death” in Dungeons and Dragons. Dying is brutal, and expensive to reverse; Feeblemind is way worse than dying in nearly every way, and as a general rule probably shouldn’t be used against players, because hot damn does it suck to have your favorite cleric you’ve played for fifteen levels irreversibly turned into a potato.

Feeblemind can be undone in four ways; a repeated save after a MONTH of in game waiting, Greater Restoration, a 5th level spell exclusive to Clerics, Druids, and Bards, Heal, a 6th level spell exclusive to Clerics and Druids, and Wish, a 9th level spell exclusive to Sorcerers and Wizards. This means if you’re in a party lacking a Cleric, Druid, or Bard at least 9th level or higher, you have no means of mitigating the condition until level 17 assuming you have an arcanist. If you do have one of those options, best hope they weren’t the one to succumb to the spell, which 90% of the time will be aimed at them specifically for this reason.

Comparatively, death can be undone by 5th level characters with access to Revivify, and both Reincarnate and Raise Dead are accessible to 9th level characters. In addition, dying typically requires a bunch of hoops to jump through before it sets in permanently. Outside of Power Word: Kill (which still is bound to affect creatures with less than 100 HP), player characters will get death saves to buy time for allies to keep them alive. With Feeblemind, it's one save or you’re screwed for a minimum of a month, save other divine intervention.

Waiting thirty days isn’t a reasonable option. By the time players are facing foes with access to this tier of magic, they are likely in a time sensitive event with high stakes. Casually taking a month off from adventuring to nurture the once brilliant wizard with the brain of a cow isn’t realistic. Instead, they’ll end up just getting dragged along silently wishing they could do anything, but alas, they can’t. It has to be one of the worst cases of game design out there when it hits players.

What truly sucks about it is in the players hands, it's terrible. The prime enemy targets for it are high CR casters which nearly always have access to powerful counterspells and legendary resistances built to prevent this effect from reasonably working. By the time you and your friends chew through the three legendary resistances a lich has, you’re probably just as well off killing it with a reasonable damage spell over forcing it to make an intelligence save with its massive intellect. Why bother using it one a Pit Fiend, when the bulk of its power comes down to smashing you to itty bitty pieces anyway? So it can’t cast fireball anymore, big deal, you could have literally banished it to another plane of existence with a spell half the level instead.

Feeblemind takes an exciting, horrific fantasy of lobotomizing a foe and handles it in the worst possible way. As an 8th level spell, either a group builds an entire encounter around landing it successfully once, or it ceases to function against meaningful enemies. Against the players, there are few ways to deny a player the basic ability to play the game how Feeblemind does. If they die, at least they could roll up a new character. If you are DMing and do Feeblemind a player, please put them out of their misery and let them bring some new PC to play with, else they’ll just be miserable.

5e Spells

Feeblemind: So Much Worse Than Death