C/2

Cloudkill

One of the more infamous D&D spells because, like its little brother Stinking Cloud, it has been inspiring nerds to make fart jokes for fifty years. And, like a fart, it is inescapable and travels along with its creator. But, in the words of TV knife celebrity Doug Marcaida, will it kill? You bet your beans it will. It lasts for ten minutes, too! This is actually a pretty effective spell, and even has the advantage of ease, cheapness, and mobility over its technological equivalent (presumably a canister of mustard gas or some such). 

Real-World Rating 8 (Very Effective)

Color Spray

Kind of a confusing debuff, this causes blindness in opponents based on their number of hit points for some reason. Look, folks, I'm going to level with you: This spell is extremely gay. It's so gay that its main utility would be renting it out for use at discos.  It's a rainbow that you shoot out of your fingers, causing people to be dazzled in directly inverse proportion to how butch they are! How this hate crime makes it all the way to 5th edition is beyond me.

Real-World Rating:  3 (Pretty Ineffectual)

Command

The first accessible low-level spell that gives you something like mind control. It has its limits; it doesn't last very long, your opponent gets a save, and you're limited to one word. But true mind control is a unicorn in the D&D world (well, that and actual unicorns), and even with those restrictions in place, it's pretty solid for a 1st-level spell. Excellent for bards, given that it's got more use value depending on how big a vocabulary you have.

Real-World Rating: 6 (Pretty Okay)

Commune

Sadly, this has nothing to do with hippies or communism, but it's actually a very useful spell, depending on two factors. Basically, the spell lets you ask your deity three questions, which they must answer correctly, usually in a yes-or-no format. They can't lie to you or answer wrongly, but they can give you an ambiguous answer, depending on the nature of the question.  They also can't answer anything they don't know.  

So your first factor is: How smart is your god? The spell description notes that "divine beings aren't necessarily omniscient", an indicator that if your deity of choice flounders around on the questions you ask them, it might be worth upgrading your worship to one that does something more than just binge-watch Netflix all day. The second one is: How watertight a question can you construct? The less room for ambiguity in the question, the less there will be in the answer. For a clever player, this could be the functional equivalent to having omnisciency yourself; for a less clever one, it's probably a dud. 

Real-World Rating: 5 (Effective But Limited)

Commune with Nature

Nonfunctional in a town or building, limited to three miles in the wilderness, and capable only of telling you about local water sources, common plant and animal life forms, and the presence of woo-woo which doesn't exist in the real world, this is a total wash. You could blow a 5th-level spell on this or you could just buy a map.

Real-World Rating: 1 (Worthless)

Compelled Duel

I don't get this one at all. It might be useful, or at least kind of cool, if it made two of your opponents fight each other, but instead, what it does is make one of them fight you.  Which, why would you want to do that? Even if it imposes a penalty on them for doing so (and it does), the desired outcome in almost any situation I can think of is to not be attacked by an enemy, especially if you're, oh, say, a 1st-level spellcaster who still has a decent chance of getting wrecked by an opponent in a physical fight even if they're at a disadvantage. This is just making extra trouble for yourself!  What a dumb spell. 

Real-World Rating: 1 (Worthless)

Comprehend Languages

A classic example of a spell that's still slightly better than its technological equivalent, insofar as it's just a bit faster than using Google Translate, and tossing a little soot and salt at a foreigner is probably less of a headache, if possibly more offensive, than fiddling around with your cell phone at him.

Real-World Rating: 5 (Effective But Limited)

Compulsion

This spell is based on the 1959 Richard Fleischer movie, in which Leopold and Loeb used their magical powers to make a young boy's head smash itself repeatedly into a chisel. Compulsion essentially lets you draw a magical line on the ground, and your opponents have to move as quickly as possible along that line. You can't make them do anything cool like jump off a cliff or into an active volcano, but it's still pretty good at making people run away from you.

Real-World Rating: 5 (Effective But Limited)

Cone of Cold

As with last week, we have to measure any kind of big-damage, multiple-target offensive spell against the gold standard that is Lightning Bolt. I almost never see people using Cone of Cold, but it's pretty solid -- less damage (a respectable but not eye-popping 8d8), but more range (all targets in a 60-cone, with the added advantage of making your Dungeon Master do math). Best of all: "A creature killed by this spell becomes a frozen statue until it thaws." Now we're talking.

Real-World Rating: 8 (Very Effective)

Confusion

A holdover from the Gygaxian era when about half your spells had a more or less random effect, something I kind of miss about throwback RPGs and their period fantasy-inspired credo that magic is dangerously unpredictable. This spell "assaults and twists creatures' minds, spawning delusions and provoking uncontrolled action". Okay, settle down, there, Hasbro copywriter.  What does it actually do?

Here's what: for one minute, you roll a d10 each new turn. There's a 10% chance the target will just run off in some random direction, probably a net positive for you. There's a 50% chance -- a coin flip -- that it will stand around doing nothing. But there's a 20% chance it will randomly attack whoever is nearby -- which might include you -- and a 20% chance the spell just won't work that turn and it will do whatever it was it was going to do in the first place, which probably works out to 'fuck with you in some way or another'. So, given that this is a 4th-level spell that has at least a 40% chance of working out badly for the caster, I'm gonna have to call it a dud*, regardless of my love of crazy random magic effects.

Real-World Rating: 4 (More Trouble Than It's Worth)

Conjure Animals

Conjuration spells, as we will learn in the next installment of this spectacularly pointless blog, are generally pretty good, but this one is a complete snore. Why? Let's find out!

1. It summons fey creatures, which then take on the form of normal animals, instead of something cool and possibly terrifying, like, say, fey creatures. 

2. Once they appear, you have to actively tell them what to do or else they just wander around pissing in the corner and looking for snacks or whatever it is that normal animals do, so they take up all your attention, thus losing any value they might have as a distraction while you are forced to play zookeeper.

3. The summoning works by Challenge Rating, so the most you could summon is a single animal of CR 2 (a rhino, saber-toothed tiger, or polar bear, say), and the least would be eight animals of CR ¼ or less (a horse, dog, or goat).  Most of these are going to be inconveniences more than menaces, and none are bulletproof. 

3a. The CR system in D&D 5e is totally out of whack. A giant elk, which is really more big and weird than dangerous is a 2 (as is a hunter shark, which would literally just lay there and die), while a crocodile, one of the most dangerous animals on Earth, is a ½; a "diseased giant rat", which the average bank guard probably sees three or four times in a typical work day, is worth 1/8th, while a hyena -- a huge, fierce, silent, fast-moving carnivore with bone-crushing jaws and a tendency to eat human faces -- is a zero, meaning the game considers it to be the same level of threat as a frog, a lizard, or a house cat. Ridiculous.

Real-World Rating: 4 (More Trouble Than It's Worth)

*: You know what would make it better? If you could focus or target it a little more precisely -- say, into some sort of ball. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HjUxggPd6E