Power Word Kill: Not the Last Four-Letter-Word You’ll be Saying

Usable By: Bard, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard

Spell Level: 9

School: Enchantment

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: 60 feet

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V

You utter a word of power that can compel one creature you can see within range to die instantly. If the creature you choose has 100 hit points or fewer, it dies. Otherwise, the spell has no effect.

Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

A now ancient wizard, having practiced in the arcane arts for decades, reaches the pinnacle of magic. They could choose to stop time, they could choose to grant wishes, they could choose to level cities with a snap of their fingers, but instead, for god knows only why, they pick a spell that can kill any person… so long as they’re shit. That is the logic behind Power Word Kill.

Uttering a spell to instantly kill something in big set piece encounters often looks like something that temporarily removes a threat. Banishment and Polymorph both functionally remove an enemy combatant, as does Maze, Irresistible Dance, and Hold Monster. Each of these have unique caveats that make them messy. When they work, though, they’re in function as good as Power Word Kill when it manages to kill a thing.

HOWEVER. Power Word Kill has a nifty little restriction on it: it doesn’t work against creatures with 101 or more hit points. Are you facing something higher than CR 3? Welp, Power Word Kill might not do anything! That CR 4 Earth Elemental you can summon with a 5th level spell slot is unaffected by Power Word Kill. You can find this out the hard way if you don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of a creature's hit points, or your DM has altered their stats to up their challenge leading to you wasting your most powerful resource!

The best case scenario for the spell is to shave off exactly 100 hit points from a big bad that couldn’t be dealt with by other spells. No save spells like Irresistible Dance and Maze exist to bypass legendary resistance; by the time you go to use Power Word Kill on something with legendary resistances, you’ve likely needed to shave off 100+ hit points from it anyway, and both of the spells are far more useful in facilitating said damage. Once its down to that hit point threshold, damage spells seem like they could handle the target instead, leaving your 9th level slot open to reshape reality instead of murdering something already nearly dead.

I don’t think there is an iteration of this spell that should exist. A huge part of D&D is the battle; having something designed to end a single entity requires either outside magical intervention making the spell unusable or the spell be so bad it can’t affect meaningful targets. There just can’t be a spell that kills the big bad without any counterplay, there can’t be a spell that removes a final fight entirely. Power Word Kill would need to be that good for it to be worth taking over the world changing other options available, and it’s not.

If you’re ever casting your 9th level spell and it doesn’t radically alter a fight, you’re doing it wrong. Power Word Kill compared to Wish, Meteor Swarm, Time Stop, Shapechange, and even something like True Polymorph is sad. Killing one thing with already 100 HP or less versus raining 70-140 damage worth of meteors in four massive areas? I’ll take the meteors, thanks.

5e Spells

Power Word Kill: Not the Last Four-Letter-Word You’ll be Saying