Grease: Not So Slick
Spell Level: 1
School: Conjuration
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 60 feet
Duration: 1 minute
Components: V, S, M (a bit of pork rind or butter)
Slick grease covers the ground in a 10-foot square centered on a point within range and turns it into difficult terrain for the duration.
When the grease appears, each creature standing in its area must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw or fall prone. A creature that enters the area or ends its turn there must also succeed on a Dexterity saving throw or fall prone.
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Oh, Grease. You may be the silliest first level spell in Dungeons & Dragons. This is the banana peel gag from slapstick comedy of the past mixed with some weird butter or pork rind material components combining the flavor and feel into a middlingly useful 1st level spell that probably isn’t worth it at most tables, but a few wizards can find themselves eager to cast it.
A ten foot wide square of grease, rules as written, won’t have any other outstanding effects beyond the knocking people prone bit. With a flexible DM and a creative mind, a giant area of fat can be used in a lot of, lets call them creative, ideas that can result in improve slip and slides, fuel for a fast burn, or greasy lubrication (for cogs and gears, keep it PG people!).
Grease’s saving grace is how often it asks for saves. Creatures make the save on cast, if they enter the area, and if they end their turn in the area. With a party composed of a few martial melee characters, prone can be a major boon that reliably turns on sneak attack, offers advantage to tons of attack rolls, and in turn, turns up the quantity of critical hits the team’s making. These characters often will have tools to keep enemies from fleeing, with attacks of opportunity acting as a baseline feature that requires an enemy spend their action disengaging or suffer a continuous beatdown. This can position Grease as a tool to repeatedly knock a large target prone, and occasionally two baddies prone at once.
Now, if you DON’T have a few party members eagerly smashing maces or stabbing daggers into people, Grease is near unusable. Eating half of enemy movement sometimes isn’t going to get you very far for a 1st level spell slot. For this to flourish, enemies really need to be staying in the spot for a few rounds. It helps a lot that it doesn’t eat your concentration, meaning especially in the upper tiers this is very inexpensive to use, but if you aren’t in situations where allies are getting a lot of bonuses from, it's going to act as a non-damaging Ray of Frost, or maybe a small hiccup clogging a tight corridor. That probably doesn’t justify its spot on your sheet by itself.
If you’ve got multiple melee allies who can use the prone condition to its fullest, Grease is a great tool to have during all points of the game. Keep in mind that the prone condition is a double edged sword, hindering ranged allies attack rolls, so you do really need multiple melee allies to justify it. If in the mid to upper tiers you’re looking for something cheap that occasionally will aid in niche, tight environments in slowing down baddies, Grease fits the bill. If neither of those is the case, but the silliness still appeals to you, it's still a really low cost to include, and should your DM reward creative spell uses and bend the rules a bit, Grease can be a blast to play with.
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