Summary
Sorcerers are some of the most powerful spellcasters inDungeons & Dragons.They don’t have the same versatility in spell choices as a wizard, but they compensate for that with their famous Metamagic, which gives them unique ways to cast their spells, along with a nice charisma score, making them amazing party faces.
Still, dealing with a sorcerer player as the Dungeon Master isn’t too different compared to other spellcasters, as there are many ways you can break their concentration, annul their casting, and challenge their skills. From challenging them in battle or through dialogue, you can provide a nice challenge to your sorcerers.
We’re not here to kill your player character. These tips, while useful for elevating the game’s challenge, can also make things too stressful for your player if you use these tricks constantly or if you use too many at once. Be careful not to exaggerate during the game.
6Focus Your Attacks On Them
Cause Damage And Break Concentration
Along with wizards, sorcerers have the lowest hit dice in the game, so their health bar will be quite low. What this means is that taking them down is not a particular challenge. You can focus on them with your attacks and take them with relative ease.
At low levels, surrounding them with melee enemies or casting spells on them will probably have the situation covered, but as the sorcerer levels up, they’ll get teleportation methods and things like Counterspell. So, having enemies that can attack them from afar or also teleport to their location — maybe through legendary actions so they can’t counter the teleport — is an efficient way to chase them and fight.
Keep note of if the player has any powerful spells that require concentration — hitting them is the best way to end such a spell.
5Prepare Spell Counters
There’s More To It Than Counterspell
Like all spellcasters, you can prepare yourself with abilities such as Counterspell and Dispel Magic to fight sorcerers — at best, you annul their spell, and at worst, you force them to waste more resources as they Counterspell your Counterspell on them. You can have more than one enemy who can use it to ensure you have options (though not many because that can unbalance the fight).
you may also use other spells, such as Silvery Barbs, or create antimagic areas on the battlefield to make things harder. A creature that can control this area, like a Beholder, is also a perfect challenge.
Lastly, you may simplymake your monsters tougherwhen it comes to magic. They can resist magical damage, have an advantage on spell Saving Throws and Legendary Resistance, or be immune to spells if their levels are too low, among others.
4Have Them Waste Metamagic
Make Them Manage Their Resources
One of the best features in D&D is Metamagic, making sorcerers a unique option in the game. From the DM’s perspective, there isn’t much you can do to stop a sorcerer from using their Metamagic; it’s one of their features, and as long as they have sorcery points, they can use it.
That’s why you need to think about the long game. You can’t stop them from using it, but you can have them waste resources in difficult fights to have them unprepared for future encounters.
Sorcery points are only recovered during long rests or wasting spell slots to do it, so the player will either waste it all and not be as powerful during big fights or keep them for as long as possible, making them not as powerful during the fights that anticipate a boss during a dungeon. Either way, their power will be controlled to an extent this way.
3Pay Attention To Their Subclass
Their Playstyle Will Change Quite A Bit
While the basic sorcerer features don’t wander too far off Metamagic, their subclasses can make things very different for you — handling wild magic and divine soul are very different, for example. Whether the class is more aggressive, more defensive, or supportive, learn their strengths and weaknesses so you can use them to your advantage.
you’re able to always use easier encounters during the game to test how the player fights and what features they have so you can think about ways to counter them later on. A few examples would be avoiding the damage type they’re resistant to thanks to draconic ancestry, getting resistance to lightning damage to fight storm sorcery, or letting them take advantage of Tides of Chaos by having wild magic activate constantly, for better or worse.
2Analyze Their Spell Choices
Resist Their Power
Another thing you can learn from easier encounters is what spells your sorcerer constantly uses, and then you can prepare strategies for those. This can go from being resistant or immune to damage types to counters for whenever spells hit you — you can homebrew your own features here.
Metamagic can change certain spells' damage type, so enemies that are immune to fire damage can take a ‘Coldball’ rather than a Fireball, thanks to Transmuted Spell. That’s still a good way to have them waste Sorcery points, however.
you’re able to also have enemies immune to certain conditions, such as paralyzed, stunned, or frightened, among others, since high-level spells can cause these conditions in enemies.
1Make Dialogues Challenging
Put Their Charisma In Check
Along with making their spells stronger, Charisma is also the default method to get away with things through conversation, as it makes you better at persuading, deceiving, and intimidating. So, it’s important to ensure that not every character can be persuaded into doing anything, and some requests should also be harder to get than others.
Depending on how difficult of a request they are making, such as asking a high-level NPC for help, feel free to give these ability checks a difficulty of 15, 20, 25, or more, depending on what level your party is at. You can adjust fixed difficulties for when they’re making simple or hard requests or create characters with a high Charisma or Wisdom ability score and roll against their checks.
Lastly, if they’re trying something too outrageous, such as asking the endgame boss to spare them for no reason, you can just say ‘no’ and have no rolls involved.
