Regenerate: ‘Tis but a Scratch

Usable By: Bard, Cleric, Druid

Spell Level: 7

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 minute

Range: Touch

Duration: 1 hour

Components: V, S, M (a prayer wheel and holy water)

You touch a creature and stimulate its natural healing ability. The target regains 4d8 + 15 hit points. For the duration of the spell, the target regains 1 hit point at the start of each of its turns (10 hit points each minute).

The target’s severed body members (fingers, legs, tails, and so on), if any, are restored after 2 minutes. If you have the severed part and hold it to the stump, the spell instantaneously causes the limb to knit to the stump.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

In D&D, you can get stabbed, burned, frozen, paralyzed, blighted, and nearly disintegrated, pop down a bedroll and sleep in a cold, damp, rocky cave, and by the next morning you’ll look right as rain with no scratches on you. Few damaging elements are permanent; limb loss or other major maiming elements pop up rarely as being permanently damaged can feel terrible. Regenerate, then, exists as a solution to a problem most games will never face, and lands itself where most healing spells land: stuck forever in the book and never being worth your time.

A cast time of a minute paired with a burst of hit points makes Regeneration worse than just up-casting Cure Wounds (a truly awful spell in its own right). For you to get the most out of it, if you’re just looking for raw healing, you need to have time for the passive HP regeneration to occur. If you get the full hour’s worth of healing, you’re functionally healing to your HP maximum at the cost of a 7th level slot. The cases where you’d actually find a difference between just taking a short rest and spending hit dice or getting a decent chunk of healing from Regenerate are few. Then you have to consider how worth it was casting Regeneration when you only get one 7th level slot?

If you do find yourself missing a limb, high fantasy games are ripe for amazing ways to circumnavigate this problem. Phantasmal quasi-real limbs made of arcane force, steam-punk styled mechanical arms mixing magic with metal, or simply telekinetic forces can all replace what this spell is doing in arguably a cooler method. A peg-leg is a classic pirate trope, and while not the most efficient thing in the world, can juice up the life your characters have. If you’re at a table where you lose a limb and have access to 7th level spells, you can prepare Regenerate and grow it back over downtime; alternatively, why not spend your downtime to shape bark and root into a wooden appendage you control, or through wild shape and druidic magic, transmute a wolf or bear arm in its place?

This spell COULD have been awesome; giving an ally a feature like a troll’s regeneration could make combat interesting, and pose unique questions to your enemies. Instead, in combat it gives a glorious 1 hit point a round. Woo. How exciting. Now if a character with Regenerate goes down, the monsters just have to kill it, making it so the suspension of disbelief many accept when not being outright murdered while down all the more apparent, and pushes you further down away from verasimilitude. If your DM doesn’t want to be a dick and murder a character before healing is an option for them, Regenerate just keeps a person alive for an hour, regardless of incoming damage. The DM becomes stuck between a rock and a hard place, making this “healing” spell more likely to lead to player death than it is to prevent it.

There just aren’t many practical uses for Regenerate. It suffers majorly from the current rest system, and doesn’t really have a home with any specific character. It’s an answer to a niche problem you probably will never face, and even if you do, the flexibility of this kind of system I would think pushes you towards cooler options than “spend slot, fix problem”. Like the bulk of the rest of the healing spells, ignore Regenerate.

5e Spells

Regenerate: ‘Tis but a Scratch