My summary: You can’t use a bonus action to allow the casting of two spells on the same turn. Cantrips don’t count towards this limit.



If this rule didn’t exist, the following things WOULD be legal:
Sorcerer with Quick Spell casts quickened fireball, then fireball.
Druid casts a level 2 healing word then a level 2 cure wounds.

Both of these are forbidden by that rule.

I bring this up because I may have said “only one leveled spell per turn” which is NOT the rule. (“leveled spell” meaning “non-cantrip spell”) For example:
Sorcerer casts fireball, then steps on a loose board and begins falling; he reacts by casting feather fall. Both of these are levelled, and this is totally allowed.
Bladesinger 6 / Fighter 2 casts fireball, then uses his action surge to cast fireball. Because this is casting a spell with an action and then casting another spell with an action (no bonus actions), this is also allowed.

Note: this is all the important and semirelevant studf. Rambling begins now!

By the rules the following exchange is legal, but I think I’m going to disallow it by saying “You can’t react to a reaction”. Is there something really awful I’m missing with that kind of houserule?
Disco casts fireball (using his action). Elbow the Evil Wizard perceives an enemy casting a spell (the fireball), which allows him to react with counterspell, which he does. Disco perceives an enemy casting a spell (counterspell), which allows him to react with counterspell, which he does. Disco has then cast two levelled spells on his turn, but my beef is with the reaction chain. Hypothetically, an enemy minion could counter Disco’s counter, and then Geddreng could counter the minion’s counter- this has three weird things, the chain of reactions being arbitrarily long, the fact that in the example Disco is casting two spells simultaneously, and the fact that any model of spellcasting becomes incoherent for any amount of casting time / manifestation time / reaction time you choose to try to select and graph.

Regardless of whatever rule I end up using for this game, the above exchange is legal by the rules of D&D, and is definitely an example of two levelled spells in a turn.


5.5 trivia: In 5.5, which we aren’t playing now and which I will never ever run has different rules than 5.0 here. The 5.5 rules are that you cannot cast more than one spell using a spell slot on your turn. This is a simpler thing to remember than the bonus action turned out to be, but it has other weird effects. First, my example with the sorcerer falling and casting featherfall stops working. Second, players can get around this by using items to cast spells (or features that prevent the expenditure of a spell slot), so that a sorcerer can quicken a fireball then use a scroll of fireball on the same turn. Third, many 5.5 monster statblocks have like “counterspell 2/day” instead of spell slots, which are the standard way of writing statblocks for casters in 5.0, meaning that this rule doesn’t affect them normally.

Ok, I was confused until I saw that Featherfall has a casting time of a reaction, not bonus action. I think that all makes sense to me.

But I also love that if Skittles trips over a tree root and happens to be within 60 feet of me, I can cast Featherfall on the satyr, for example.

Oh, and fuck counterspell.

Hm... upon further reflection, considering air ships and all of that. You will need to define "when a creature falls." If that is the initialization of a fall, then it means that when we all fall off the air ship, I can only cast it on one person because that is the only way to cast it. But if "when a creature falls" can be applied to the continuous process of falling, then we will need to determine how many needlessly complex units of time it takes for us to fall the needlessly complex units of distance. It only takes a reaction, but we only get one of those a round.


This is unlikely to come up, of course. Not because I don't anticipate all of us falling off an air ship, but rather the odds of my character being alive, not a goldfish, and having featherfall at that particular time seem low.

I'm gonna define "falls" for featherfall as "falling in a fashion that will deal damage or travel further than 10 feet". "Falling" I'm going to just assume means a creature in the process of a fall.

Note that in my diffs document, under rulings and changes, I have this section for falling:


This means that if someone who is out of range of feather fall does indeed fall, he is 100 feet down and you could, for instance, jump down yourself and grab the both of you in a feather fall.

The PHB rules have the character fall an infinite distance instantly. The XGtE optional rule makes it something like 500 feet. I've divided it into 100 feet of initial movement and then 770 additional feet at the start of his round, which he can interrupt if, for instance, he can cast fly on himself.

The XGtE value is a rounded down version of 577 feet in a vacuum free fall on Earth- rounded down to some degree because of air resistance, and I guess the rest is the fact that if you run to the edge of the airship and stab and ogre and then he punts you off the edge on his turn, you didn't fall that entire round. It was obviously unsuitable here- the gravity is slightly less, but the more salient feature is the combat round, which I always try to make bigger than 6 seconds for the sake of realism. But I wanted something else- I wanted someone falling when it isn't their turn to only fall a fraction of the distance if it's a whole lot, because the idea of freezing the world and falling infinity (or even just 500 feet) seems like a bad way to do that.
So I just arrest the fall at 100 feet and then have logic for 770 feet for full rounds after that. This means if it is Aaron's turn, and he blasts Billy off a 400 foot cliff, Billy falls 100 feet. Then it's your turn (Clyde?), and you jump off the cliff, you'll beat Billy to the ground! This seems fine to me- you have more control over the time spent on the round when it is your turn, and initiative order doesn't represent strict ordering in time, it represents which effects have priority in combat. This was a round where you were running to the edge of the cliff and jumping off, and Billy was trying not to get blown off the cliff and failed at that, so he ends up hitting the ground a bit after you (or maybe he casts fly on his next turn- he's still 300 feet off the ground at the end of that turn), regardless of turn order within the round.

Ok, but why 770 feet? Bistern II exerts gravitic acceleration of 9.426 cubits per square mikarc. Since there's 10 mikarcs in a combat round (7.306 seconds), you fall 0.5 * (9.43 * (10*10)) = 471.3 cubits in a round of freefall. Since a cubit is about 1.64 feet, you get about 773 feet in a round, which is why on subsequent rounds there's about 770 feet of falling.

That all very delightful. But my "definition" is more that we are all blown off an airship together. We are falling at the same speed, just hanging out as we fall to our deaths.

The question is entirely on "1 reaction, which you take when you or a creature within 60 feet of you falls". The problem is "falls," but not the distance.

It is given that when we first fall off the airship, a Wizard Jim can use a reaction (if he has one) to cast Featherfall on someone. The question is the next round when we're all 770 feet or whatever further down from the burning airship but have not yet hit the ground. Can Wizard Jim use another reaction to something that has been happening continuously for 6-10 seconds?

I would say clarity would be to pick between these two:
...When a creature falls or continues the process of falling. (Yes, Wizard Jim can react)
...When a creature initiates the process of falling. (No, Wizard Jim cannot react and all but one dies unless someone can turn into a T-Rex)


I really do love this sort of bullshit.

As a note, one of the designers (for a time the lead designer) at some point said in an interview that the bonus action spell thing was more about keeping complexity down than anything else. This in turn got a lot of people around that time discussing whether the rule should exist at all, or whether quicken spell should get around it (this was 2019 and the sorcerer hadn't gotten a bunch of the optional buffs it got later in 5.0). While this was an interesting discussion point, I definitely recall it coming up on almost any search- you'd find the rule but there would be a bunch of guys in the comments bringing up this interview and claiming only mean DMs enforce that restriction or whatever. Googling it now produces cleaner results for sure, but it was definitely something that I remember rolling my eyes at.

I do believe that it is important from a balance perspective, whatever anyone says. Being able to whip out a bonus action spell and an action spell in the same turn is unquestionably more powerful than not being able to do that, and working around those limits would be a pretty big caster buff- it would also buff the main part that casters shouldn't have buffed, which is being able to fire off multiple long-rest resources in a short window. I already know that my game will not have the "intended" amounts of encounters per day or combat rounds per day or whatever, so any "nova" option is going to be very strong already; plus I like adding burst as something that isn't entirely under the control of the player, such as with lustrate stars having spelldie results, versus something that is a reliable and sound strategy such as "drop a ground aoe and a wall in the same round". If an encounter is easier because the attack rolls and spelldice go aces for the players, or hard because they don't, that all seems well within an engaging and good combat.

I did answer this! I said:



Featherfall's trigger is: "1 reaction, which you take when you or a creature within 60 feet of you falls"
So using my definition, if everyone is "falling in a fashion that will deal damage or travel further than 10 feet", then that fulfils the trigger for "falls"

So of your options, the first would be in place.

Note: I could edit the description or the casting time of feather fall to make this clearer.

Ok, sure. I guess that works.

I really thought we did Quicken Spell to get two spells off in a round. Maybe not, but I guess it doesn't matter. Given it was 4 spell slots higher, it was quite a high cost to do that.

In 3.5, there were three main ways to do this (and more if you allowed even crazier stuff).

"Quicken Spell" was a metamagic feat. If you took it, you could, at the beginning of the day, choose to memorize any of your 4th or higher spell slots as quickened versions of things 4 levels less (so a 4th level would be a cantrip, a 5th level would be a 1st level spell, etc.). At high levels this allowed for stunts like, "Quickened Teleport" as a 9th level escape, or "Quickened Dispel" as a pretty reliable 7th level counterspell. As 3.5 moved forward, they introduced "swift actions", and somewhere that I can't recall had an optional rule to make Quickened Spell into one of these. This was actually a nerf, because swift actions can't be taken when it isn't your turn, but the original text was a free action, with a restriction about using two of them.





The current version in the SRD reflects this nerf:
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/feats.htm#quickenSpell



We totally played with the original unnerfed version for years; I don't actually recall if we ever switched to the nerfed version. Pathfinder uses the nerfed version only, but the only Pathfinder game I ran was E6 so no one was messing with that.

There were other ways to Quicken Spells in 3.5, because as powerful as the PHB version is, it at least doesn't turn on at all until 7th level, and not usefully until around 11th, and it always requires preparation and high level slots to fuel.
The two most alluring were a metamagic rod of Quicken Spell:
https://www.d20srd.org/srd/magicItems/rods.htm
Which allowed you to quciken up to three spells per day (if you want more, craft more rods!), without raising their level. I definitely handed out metamagic rods as loot, but I don't know if I ever handed out any of the quicken ones.

Finally, there was a feat chain that was, overall, underpowered:



This is a powerful feat, but the prerequisite feats- SEVEN of them- make it ridiculous for the investment, especially Sudden Extend and the baseline Quicken Spell (this line was aimed at sorcerers, who had to extend their casting times to cast it- Quicken Spell is totally dead to them). Frankly, outside of Sudden Empower and Sudden Maximize, this chain was dumb. I definitely think that some player with a plan to sudden silent and sudden still some spell has strong merit, but that character isn't doing this feat chain and someone who wants sudden quicken probably doesn't want those two.

Ok so back to 5e:

Quicken Spell is metamagic, available to any sorcerer who wants it and also available to anyone via the Metamagic Adept feat. It allows you to change the casting time to a bonus action, which saves your action for something more important. While this could be something like "cast a cantrip" and can't be something like "cast fireball", it can certainly be something like "use eyebite", "use sunbeam", "use enervate"- any of the spells that give you a new action to spam each round. We have never seen this at any of our 5e tables; we've only had one sorcerer, and he took different metamagic (you'll be shocked to know that the sorcerer has almost no metamagic selection picks), and this is the first game where Metamagic Adept (optional content from some splatbook) is even on the table.