Not too long ago, I finally had a reason to pay closer attention to the spell Alter Self. I’m talking about the 2014 version; I have no foreknowledge of whether it’ll see meaningful change in 2024’s revised Player’s Handbook. Anyway, this spell is pretty underwhelming, along a bunch of vectors. A spell that gives you a partial bodily transformation is a definitive transmutation effect and iconic in fantasy and comics, so I’d like to see if I can salvage this.
The Baseline
Alter Self
2nd-level transmutation (artificer, sorcerer, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Components: V, S
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 hour
You assume a different form. When you cast the spell, choose one of the following options, the effects of which last for the duration of the spell. While the spell lasts, you can end one option as an action to gain the benefits of a different one.
Aquatic Adaptation. You adapt your body to an aquatic environment, sprouting gills and growing webbing between your fingers. You can breathe underwater and gain a swimming speed equal to your walking speed.
Change Appearance. You transform your appearance. You decide what you look like, including your height, weight, facial features, sound of your voice, hair length, coloration, and distinguishing characteristics, if any. You can make yourself appear as a member of another race, though none of your statistics change. You also can’t appear as a creature of a different size than you, and your basic shape stays the same; if you’re bipedal, you can’t use this spell to become quadrupedal, for instance. At any time for the duration of the spell, you can use your action to change your appearance in this way again.
Natural Weapons. You grow claws, fangs, spines, horns, or a different natural weapon of your choice. Your unarmed strikes deal 1d6 bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage, as appropriate to the natural weapon you chose, and you are proficient with your unarmed strikes. Finally, the natural weapon is magic and you have a +1 bonus to the attack and damage rolls you make using it.
The Problem(s)
Okay, right off the bat, that Duration is a bad problem, and you can do this spell a huge favor just by cutting Concentration and changing that to Duration: 1 hour. (Even Duration: 8 hours is within reason.) The spell we see here has three situational uses, and all three are seriously impeded with a Concentration duration. I do like that you can switch between the spell’s three applications, and switch between appearances, constantly for the duration of the spell.
Aquatic Adaptation? Yeah, uh, if you have a combat underwater and a single hit causes you to lose your ability to breathe water, then you can’t really use this spell to have fun underwater exploration scenes. Also, if only artificers, sorcerers, and wizards get this and it’s self-only, they can’t bring the rest of the party along on the underwater portion. They’ve got to wait for a Water Breathing spell, which does cover the whole party and doesn’t require Concentration.
Change Appearance. Other than the ability to keep changing your appearance (the super benefit of a Hat of Disguise), this is Disguise Self with Concentration bolted on, but unable to affect your clothing at all. The disguise does stand up to tactile examination (unlike Disguise Self, which explicitly doesn’t), but I probably don’t need to explain to you that if someone is touching your clothing to find out that it’s a disguise spell, that’s such a violation of social norms that your cover is already blown anyway.
Natural Weapons. The use case for these is extremely hard to find for artificers, sorcerers, and wizards. Do you even cantrip, bro? A few specific Artificer subclasses notwithstanding, why in heaven’s name are you closing to melee? And once you do, you’re going to get hit and you’re going to lose Concentration. Assuming you picked even one (1) damaging cantrip, it deals magical damage, so it’s already a better use of your time than using claws. Even without the Concentration duration, this is a bad bet.
Since as I’ve said I see the spell as an iconic transmutation spell, I also think that giving it no At Higher Levels improvement is a disappointing choice. I’d love to see some form of improvement – if nothing else, we can talk about AC scaling (that’s a pun) (because scales) (oh, you’re too good for puns now?) and increasing claw damage with higher spell slot levels. I’m personally comfortable with making its At Higher Levels section more involved than most spells, but that doesn’t fit WotC’s apparent style in 2014.
History
So I went back to earlier editions, to see if the spell is a more compelling choice there. I’ve got versions of this spell (and a contrasting Change Self or Disguise Self spell) in 1e, 2e, 3.5e, and 4e. I am not breaking out my 3.0 books for this because they are stored less-than-conveniently on top of my kitchen cabinets. It’s probably very similar to 3.5, in any case.
1e: Change Self is an Illusionist spell (Illusion/Phantasm school) found in the Player’s Handbook. Alter Self is an Illusionist (Alteration/Illusion school) spell found in Unearthed Arcana. The spells are quite similar and textually brief. What jumps out at me is the brevity of their durations – 2d6 + 2/level rounds for Change Self, 3d4 + 2/level rounds for Alter Self. It gets you past short encounters, rather than prolonged observation. (What were you gonna do, prepare all of your paltry spell slots with these spells?)
Anyway, Alter Self offers greater changes to the appearance than Change Self: 50% up or down in size, rather than 1 ft up or down. In keeping with both the school listing and the general trend of Illusionist spells, it’s quasi-real rather than fully illusory. You can also choose a form with wings or gills; the wings work only poorly, with reduced speed and maneuverability. “Using alter self to change into a larger creature does not permit additional attacks or damage unless the illusionist is accustomed to this form.” That’s a lot of space for DM ruling and negotiation, then.
Movement mode differences are a huge deal in every edition of D&D – even slow flight is a vast improvement over none, in non-combat traversal challenges.
2e: These are both Wizard spells now, since the Illusionist is just a form of specialist Wizard. Change Self is an Illusion/Phantasm spell, while Alter Self is now entirely Alteration. The only significant change to Change Self is people viewing you might get a saving throw to disbelieve. Also it’s explicit here that you can’t use this spell to appear as a specific person.
Alter Self is also nearly the same; the significant change is that you get slightly more flight speed and there’s no hedging about gaining additional attacks or damage values – you definitely don’t, and you also don’t gain AC or other special abilities or defenses. The emphasis on what this doesn’t do undermines the sense of its usefulness, but flight, gills, and changing your size and appearance are meaningful. The duration is still pretty low, though I’ll remind readers that 1e and 2e rounds are minutes rather than 6-second intervals.
3.5e: Change Self is now Disguise Self, and goes to bards, sorcerers, wizards, and Trickery domain clerics. (Historical note: 2e bards used the wizard spell list.) Since nonmagical disguises now have specific rules, Disguise Self can interact with them, granting a +10 bonus to the check. It’s part of the Illusion school with the Glamer type (3.5 divides illusions into five types.) The amount of change you can bring about is about the same, but now the duration is 10 minutes per caster level, so it doesn’t take much for it to last up to a whole adventure.
Alter Self is a transmutation spell available to bards, sorcerers, and wizards, and its mechanical description is almost two full columns on this three-column page. Here again, its duration has increases to 10 minutes per level, so that’s starting at 30 minutes. To summarize: your new form has to match the type of your normal form (humanoid to humanoid, almost certainly), you keep almost all of the same stats, which the spell details exhaustively. You do gain movement modes, size, natural armor (that makes this spell amazing, but also pushes players to hunt through every monster book for a humanoid with a high natural armor), natural weapons, racial skill bonuses, racial bonus feats… followed by a detailed list of everything you can’t possibly gain.
Whoo boy is this a lot of words of limitation. Honestly, there are so many limitations that it’s overwhelming to figure out what it can do. This might have something to do with why I never saw it used in 3.5e games.
4e: Disguise Self is a level 6 Wizard daily utility spell. Here you definitely can take on the appearance of a specific individual, and the duration is one hour. 4e doesn’t have a lot of interest in spells that could circumvent combat entirely if used well, but that could definitely happen with clever use here. The one major limitation is that you only have a +5 bonus to your Bluff checks vs Insight checks to see through your disguise, and it’s not like Cha is going to be an amazing score for most 4e wizards.
There is no Alter Self in 4e that I can find.
Solutions
I’ve already mentioned one: cut Concentration. This moves the spell from incredibly bad, basically no uses to a Disguise Self that can pivot into a self-only Water Breathing and back (plus swimming speed). In the right situation, that’s a completely amazing content-skipping spell. The claws are still bad, but I don’t think it’s necessary for every piece of every spell to be amazing.
Let’s give this a go.
Alter Self (Mk 2)
Level 2 transmutation (artificer, sorcerer, warlock, wizard)
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: Self
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 hour
You assume a different form. When you cast the spell, choose one of the following options, the effects of which last for the duration of the spell. While the spell lasts, you can end one option as an action to gain the benefits of a different one.
Aquatic Adaptation. You adapt your body to an aquatic environment, sprouting gills and growing webbing between your fingers. You can breathe underwater and gain a swimming speed equal to your walking speed.
Change Appearance. You transform your appearance. You decide what you look like, including your height, weight, facial features, sound of your voice, hair length, coloration, and distinguishing characteristics, if any. You can make yourself appear as a member of another race, though none of your statistics change. You also can’t appear as a creature of a different size than you, and your basic shape stays the same; if you’re bipedal, you can’t use this spell to become quadrupedal, for instance. At any time for the duration of the spell, you can use your action to change your appearance in this way again.
Natural Weapons and Armor. You transform your flesh to have scales or other natural armor, and you gain claws, fangs, spines, horns, or a different natural weapon of your choice. Your AC is 10 + the level of the spell slot you expend + your Dexterity modifier, your unarmed strikes deal 1d6 bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing damage, as appropriate to the natural weapon you chose, and you are proficient with your unarmed strikes. You can use your spellcasting ability modifier in place of Strength for attack and damage rolls with this unarmed strike.
At Higher Levels. If you cast this spell using a spell slot of 3rd level or higher, you can choose the following option.
Aerial Adaptation. You adapt your body to flight, gaining wings (feathered or batlike). You gain a flying speed equal to your walking speed.
If you cast this spell using a spell slot of 4th level or higher, you gain Multiattack when you choose Natural Weapons and Armor.
Multiattack. When you use the Attack action to make unarmed strikes, you can make a number of attacks equal to half the level of the spell slot you expended to cast this spell.
Additionally, you can choose the following transformation option.
Echolocation. You gain blindsight to a distance of 30 feet.
I think that transformation of the flesh in various ways is a deeply neglected part of warlock theme, so I’ve added that.
I think I’ve made Natural Weapons and Armor an interesting, but not dominating, option for some builds. Letting you use your spellcasting ability modifier rather than Strength is a big deal, to me; a new way to calculate AC is good too. It intentionally isn’t as good for pure AC as Mage Armor until you expend a level 4 spell slot on it, but it’s at least a reasonable alternative to Mage Armor (1 less AC and gaining a swath of other benefits) at its baseline level.
Stepping back a bit: granting flight (without Concentration) or blindsight does potentially share space with other spells. I think that’s highly appropriate for a transmutation spell, though. Fly is still a strong option, even with Concentration and a lower duration, because it gets a higher speed, can target others, and can upcast to target multiple creatures.
If you’ve enjoyed this deep dive into a spell with a long legacy in D&D, check out the Edition Wars podcast! In episodes that first aired during the Twelve Days of Christmas, Sam Dillon and I explored the edition-over-edition development of many classic D&D spells. This link goes to the Christmas Day episode: the bless spell.
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This is an interesting rebuild of Alter Self. I quite like the complex additional features when you up-cast it.
There are quite a few spells that suffer from not being good in their intended use case because of the Concentration requirement. This got me thinking that maybe there should be a second Concentration-like mechanic, lets call it Focus, that does the same thing that Concentration does, but can’t be ended early unintentionally, like from damage. So Focus would run alongside Concentration, still limiting the total number of buff spells a caster can have going at once, but potentially making some spells better because the caster isn’t worried a stray hit is going to waste their spell. A caster could have one Focus spell (probably a spell that buffs exploration or social stuff) and one Concentration spell (one that buffs combat stuff) going at once.
Might be too much tracking for some people, but I think the benefits would outweigh that downside as long as you could put spells in the correct camp.
I would be open to experimenting with such an idea, sure. Though I like it a lot when a spell has clear, strong combat and noncombat applications, so… I’m not sure how that would get categorized. Fly, Invisibility, and See Invisibility all spring to mind as examples.
That is a good point. Maybe where there is a question the default choice is Concentration rather than Focus. In the three spells listed, I would probably put both Fly and Invisibility in the Concentration pool and See Invisibility in the Focus pool.
It might also be a question of active vs passive. Fly and Invisibility both seem like active effects, things that the character is continuously working at. See Invisibility has the feel of a passive effect, something that the character is just benefiting from rather than actively maintaining. So maybe the divide would be more based on the vibe of the spell (as the kids say?).
It might be (and in reality probably is) too complicated to be viable, but I almost wonder if it would be any better for the upscaling effect on Natural Weapons and Armor to be inflicting a condition appropriate to the natural weapon, choosing from some set of reasonably powered options (grappled and prone both come to mind, but I assume there are others that are worth the doing but not overly powerful).
That in particular might help make that option for the spell a potentially more useful option for classes/subclasses like Warlocks and Bladesingers that are already getting extra attacks.
That is a cool idea, but I have to admit that I don’t have ideas that are quite landing for me in that vein. I’ll ruminate on it.
At higher levels should be every 2 levels 4,6,8 without concentrate, another option is to allow 1 size smaller at higher level casting. (Medium to Small, Small to Tiny)
I like this. Robust options and utility. The only thing I’d add (and I acknowledge that it’s a completely personal preference) would be some kind of hot weather/cold weather adaptation, more for narrative reasons than mechanical ones.
Yeah, I think that’s a solid addition. Doesn’t come up that often; doesn’t NEED to.
A lot of the appeal of D&D’s wildly expansible spell system is quirky corner-case stuff. If a spell has a clear, reasonably common use case AND a quirky ribbon-feature use case, I think you’ve got something great.
(A bit late, but if I remember correctly, in DnD3e Alter Self was completely different from Dnd3.5e. It wasn’t based around the polymorph rules as in DnD3.5e, and allowed the caster to produce the effects they wanted such as minor flight, and so on, rather than requiring the player to search through various monster manuals until they found a humanoid with the features they wanted.
…yeah, you’re absolutely right! 3.0 Alter Self is sick as hell and has legitimate use cases as early/cheap flight!