Home » Ancient Posts » The 20 Most Useless Spells? Only If You Lack Imagination.    
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JB

I agree with your sentiment but, like Professor Oats, I don't feel like writing a comment/rebuttal on the other guy's site. Just not worth the time.

However, I find it strange that the majority of those on the list are spells I've never heard of.

How could hold portal be deemed "useless?" Only if you've never been chased through a dungeon by a monster more dangerous than your party can handle. Guy must play a game consisting only of set-piece encounters.

porphyre77

Also; useless if you disregard certain elements of the old school play . Like encumberance rules.
If you write that a backpack can conveniently replace the 5000cn-capacity Floating disk, you obviously dont play the encumberance rules.

Holly Oats

Aw, I thought you were going to provide examples of how each spell could be useful. That would've been an interesting read (and better than simply saying to author lacked imagination). Still, thanks for the link. Don't forget, the OSR does this stuff too. I don't know how many times I've heard people complain about spells being perfectly reliable, despite a number of them having potentially disastrous results, and do so in a way I find much more satisfying than some roll for fizzing out or a critical failure

That site wants me to make an account to comment, which I'm not doing, so I'll just post my response here instead:

Does Depth Warning only work in the ocean? ‘Cause otherwise that’d be a great counter to the ol’ gently sloping hallway trick

Detect Undead would be great in that abandoned monastary from the DMG

Who hasn’t needed to hide a body every now-and-then? That’s how you avoid detection!

Waterbane sounds perfect for protecting scrolls and material components