 So I'm gonna take a page from xp to level 3's book and just say counter spell is dumb. It's a ridiculously broken spell that manages to completely piss off whoever ends up on the other end of the barrel 100% of the time. And as a DM, it makes me never want to bring spellcasters into my game. A situation usually goes like this. Players walk into a dungeon, spellcaster gives off a maniacal laugh, starts to cast a spell, and before I can even get through the description of what's happening, I get cut off with an uncast counter spell. Or the players will be in a tough bind, the cleric will triumphantly announce that they're casting a heal to bring the party back from the brink, and boop. Nope. It's gone. Your spell's gone. Better luck next time. It's stupid. There should never be a spell that wincast basically ruins a player's entire turn no barrier required. It's the no fun allowed button that you don't want to admit is busted when your party is using it, and then feel completely screwed over on when it ends up happening to you. And I'm the DM. It happens to me a lot. Like wizards are supposed to be the ultimate powers in the history of the cosmos, weaving the fabric of reality together to accomplish their goals. But because this showed with a blue pointy hat made it to 5th level, suddenly Morkadeth, the Grand Master of Evil, can't cast spells anymore. The only recourse is for both wizards to take counter spell, but then they're just burning reactions and spell slots for nothing. And if you're playing a class that doesn't have counter spell, or you just don't want counter spell, then sorry bud, you just don't get to play D&D. I can't have just a random wizard in a group of bad guys, even though they're supposed to be rare, because the whole game becomes about who stacked the most wizards on their team at once. If I have two casters and the adventuring party only has one counter-speller, then the spellcaster in that group doesn't get to play. They may as well just flip on their phone and check out mentally because whenever it gets to their turn, they'll just look up from their screen, open their mouth, and I'll shove a counter spell right in there so they can go back to watching their YouTube video. Now, there's three main arguments that I see about why counter spell is all good and bound and should allow it to be the shield against any and all magical consequences that you run into during your adventure. So let me just address them. First, counter spell requires a spellcasting ability check if you cast it at a lower level than the spell that you're countering. This is the most amount of restraint that the spell has, and it's the most reasonable argument. Too bad it sucks! A lot of the spells that players cast will be lower levels because they just don't know right away when they're gonna need to whip out the big cock. Or, more often, the spell that they want to cast just happens to be a lower level spell that either is impossible or isn't feasible to scale. It's almost a safe bet to just cast counter spell at base to fifth level and call it a day, especially when the party is at lower levels and can't cast higher level spells, because even if you're wrong, you just have to make an ability check and you might just get lucky and pop the spell anyway. This is especially true against half-casters or multi-class players because they're not gonna cast at a high level anyway. They're just not built for it. It's like you're playing rock, paper, scissors, but instead it's rock, paper, oh, oh, you picked rock? Cool, let me just see if I can change mine real quick. Yeah, it's something, but most of the time it's not a big enough factor and a lot of the time it doesn't happen. The second argument is the caster can just counter spell the counter spell. Now I've mentioned it before and this only applies to classes that can even cast counter spell because the other guys are shit out of luck, but this just adds so much more annoyance to the turn because it's just two people going, gotcha, at each other until the reactions stop. It burns spell slots, it takes away both caster's reactions and for what? To guarantee a stop to something that guarantees a stop, effectively making counter spell as it was meant to be used, completely spur of luis as you're stuck constantly casting an extra spell just to be able to play the game. Casters will run out of spells astonishingly quickly, although that doesn't mean much since they're cantrips ensure that they'll always play on par with the rest of the team at bare minimum, but whatever. And if either side happens to have two people with counter spells then it's game over. Suddenly not only will your counter spell not counter the actual spell, but it won't even be able to save you from losing your place in the game because the other guy's friend will just have an uno reverse card as well. Welcome to the game of oh shit, there are two guys in robes and wizard hats, gotcha, I'll go make lunch. Third, the caster can just stand 60 feet away and this is totally true until it's not because sometimes you don't get the luxury of where a fight breaks out or how or win or even who gets to be in it because the truth is a lot of dungeons don't like to respect the wizard's personal space and if it does then you can bet that the other guy is taking advantage of being far away too and at that point the spell just becomes useless. This is the prime example of my gripe with the spell which is that it either works too well or it does not work at all, like me when I'm trying to write a video. If you and your opponent both have counter spells then you're either using it to drain each other's spell slots or you're minding each other's privacy because both of you would like to play the game. If one of you does not have counter spell then the other caster gets to just push you away as far as they'd like or else you run the serious case of no fun allowed and if you're a caster that prefers to get in physical like a ranger, a paladin, an eldritch knight, half of the cleric subclasses, half of the bard subclasses, or the blade lock then you don't get the luxury of falling back anyway. You have to charge forward and kill that wizard who has if they're following basic party combat structure annoyingly placed themselves behind all the things that would love for you to distance yourself from the rest of the party. Effectively the world revolves around counter spell and all of you versions without counter spell are powerless to stop it but it doesn't have to be that way. Using the dangerous and volatile powers of homebrew you can change the way that counter spell operates mechanically so that you give more of a chance to the target. My fix is when counter spell is cast you can have both players roll a d20 and add their spellcasting mod. If the caster wins then spell goes off, if the target wins then they manage to harness their focus and push the offending mages magic away from their spell. Alternatively you can have the caster roll against the target save dc or if you really want to change the spell as little as possible just remove the note about counter spell being an insta win completely and make the caster roll every time and as a thing that you can add to any of these options if you want to make the spell even more flavorful you can give the caster a modifier equal to the difference in spell level so if the counter spell is level three and the spell is only level one then the caster would get a plus two bonus on the roll on account of the counter spell being an inherently stronger spell but if the spell is level five and the counter spell is only level three then they would get a minus two because they're trying to use weaker magics to try and unweave a more complicated one. These changes to counter spell help evoke the feeling of opposing mages using inner strength and understandings of the flow of magic to defeat another skilled spell caster. They help weaker or less practice mages stand a chance against mages who have the benefit of long bouts of training and I hope that this video gives you a new perspective on the dangers of adding a fail knot mechanic in a system where random chance and dice rolling make up the cornerstone of the game but that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video be sure to leave a like comment subscribe bring the bell check out my social media in the description below and maybe support me on patreon so that I can continue complaining about things that I don't like with the benefit of hindsight to make it seem like I have a good understanding of game mechanics when really I'm just a loud voice on the internet. But yeah, Davy out.