Talk:Temporal Wand (5e Equipment)

Looking at This Item

So I really like the idea of having more unique time themed options and in particular I love this item, but do have some grievances with a few of its properties. The last two properties you can use with this wand frankly need a decent bit of work to be usable. Lets go over their issues.

• For the time stop bubble, the two issues with this property are its simply absurd power and how the exact mechanics of how this property works are left unexplained. In comparison to the 9th level spell time stop, this property seems completely overpowered as you can affect a number of creatures/aoe and damage them/do other things to them while they can do nothing for 1 minute. Besides that, although just saying that a creature's time is stopped may be fine, for almost every other effect in 5e, the mechanics of how a spell, feature, ect. works is clearly explained to prevent any ambiguity(for example do ranged attacks or spells even work against creatures in the bubble? Would the attacks just be stopped until you lose concertation? Ect.). Really, I believe that perhaps changing this property to a slowing effect would be better. The slowing aoe could have effects such as giving disadvantage on attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks to creatures in the area in addition to them not being able to take reactions and having their movement speed cut in half if a creature starts its turn in the area. Alternately, if the idea of a time stop effect is kept, perhaps it can only target a single creature who has their time stopped say for 1 turn/until the start of your next turn. But really, the single target idea doesn't sound that fun and is effectively just a re-flavored stun.
• As for the last property, it looks like a fun and interesting property, but in actual play this property will cause absolute chaos and confusion. In order for this property to actually function and not cause the game to come to a halt for 10+ minutes(or just cause a DM to hand waive the effect of the property) players and the DM would need to keep track of what features/spells are used every turn, where creatures have moved to every turn, creature's hit point amounts and other things just so you can rewind time and likely do most of those things over again. The idea of actually having a player have an item with this property is a nightmare. Because of that, I really think the property needs to be reworked. The idea could possibly be kept, but scaled back to something far more reasonable. For example, "when a creature you can see ends its turn, as a reaction you may rewind the creature's time until the start of its turn. All actions and movement the target took during its turn are considered to have not happened. The target regains all features, spell slots, item charges, or other things they have used, and other creatures regain any loss of hit points caused by the target and are unaffected by whatever other actions the target has taken during their turn."

Besides all of those things, the item could possibly use some other tweaks, mainly by increasing the charges regained daily to something much higher say 1d6/8 +3/4 and increasing the item's rarity to legendary? I believe that is all the thoughts I have on the item for now, feel free to reach out if you have any questions and/or thoughts on my look through of the item.--Blobby383b (talk) 19:16, 31 March 2021 (MDT)

Ah, yes, this was an unrated item I had for a campaign I was running and slapped onto the wiki as an example of an item with a specific type of property someone on Discord was looking for. Except for one situation where a villain used it on a NPC, I never had to flesh out exactly how the bubble worked, since the PCs promptly forgot they even had this item until they nearly died and thought "Oh, wait, we have this thing!" Anyways, yeah, I am perfectly aware that there are major concerns (however, the thing about damaging them without them being able to do anything in return is completely absurd: everything that is in the bubble's area is supposed to be stopped, including anything that enters the area (; ) with the properties, and I might actually just vote to delete this since I've added better time-related items anyways that don't have all this complexity.

As for the rewinding property, since I was the one who was dealing with it anyways, I didn't mind (especially since I was keeping an exact record of everything that was happening every turn anyways) having to remember every location and every effect that was happening. This property, however, was used once, and to great effect as it saved the party from a TPK. But, as I said before, these latter two properties have way too much power and too much going on to be reasonable or even workable, and it might be better to just make it into something else. Plus, "Temporal" is an overrated name for a time item. XD --IntellectMaster (talk) 20:57, 31 March 2021 (MDT)

I will try and go ahead and rework several parts of the item to see if I can get it to be more balanced/usable state. If you believe the item needs a rename as well, I am all for it, though "Temporal" does seem fitting if maybe indicating that the item is extremally powerful.--Blobby383b (talk) 16:32, 1 April 2021 (MDT)