Freedom of Movement: Move Free or Get Hard

Usable By: Artificer, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Ranger

Spell Level: 4

School: Abjuration

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: Touch

Duration: 1 hour

Components: V, S, M (A leather strap, bound around the arm or a similar appendage)

You touch a willing creature. For the duration, the target’s movement is unaffected by difficult terrain, and spells and other magical effects can neither reduce the target’s speed nor cause the target to be paralyzed or restrained.

The target can also spend 5 feet of movement to automatically escape from nonmagical restraints, such as manacles or a creature that has it grappled. Finally, being underwater imposes no penalties on the target’s movement or attacks.

Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

I have always wanted to like Freedom of Movement. All of the words together seem like they should be doing a powerful thing. Not once have I personally prepared the spell, nor have I ever DMed for a player that cast it for a spell slot. This leads me ultimately to conclude it's bad, and you probably shouldn’t take it.

Effects that last an hour tend to be at their best when dungeon crawling. Dungeons also tend to have numerous kinds of traps and monsters that fight with different methods. A preparatory Freedom of Movement should be a reasonable thing to do, especially given the immunities to restrained and paralyzing effects.

The issue lies in these effects alone aren’t enough to justify expending the resource. Each little bit adds together to be overall still too niche to be worth having. It strictly cares about specific conditions, and most of those conditions have an abundance of alternate solutions to them. Of those solutions, most don’t even have resource costs this steep.

Underwater combat is rare as is, and only a handful of spells and monsters paralyze. Restraint is a bit more common to see with the Grappler feat, and grappling generally speaking is commonplace. Difficult terrain has so many ways to be ignored a lot of tables just forget it entirely, and those that don’t, it often makes little to no major impact on the players, especially by the time you’re casting 4th level spells. All together these effects add up to too small of an advantage in any of the circumstances to merit the cast; you really need more than one of these effects to matter at any given time for it to be worth using.

If you do take Freedom of Movement, take it with specific encounters coming up in mind. If you know you’re delving into a shipwreck and nobody has better water navigation spells, consider it. Otherwise, I’d just spend your spell slots on an effect that leaves a bigger impact when you use it.

5e Spells

Freedom of Movement: Move Free or Get Hard