For the past few months, I’ve been using the D&D Beyond character sheet to run my Aasimar paladin in a friend’s online campaign. She’s awesome. She’s great. I love her.
I’ve also come to really like the online character sheet… frankly more than I thought I would. Especially with the addition of the dice roller and game log. It works. It works well. Being able to click on just about any number of the character sheet to roll some dice is just soooo convenient. There’s probably more to say on that… but for now, I wanted to post the workaround I needed to make that dice roller work in one more edge case – the paladin’s divine smite.
I’m sure it is in the devs’ backlog, but divine smite only shows up on the sheet as a class feature description, not a roll-able feature. I asked the question to the community for confirmation (as have others) and got a number of great recommended workarounds. I played with a few things and this is the one I landed on.
The goal is to capture the effect of the divine smite class feature in a homebrew spell. This actually feels like a pretty natural solution for the paladin as they already get ‘always prepared’ Oath Spells. I want Divine Smite to work in the same way… not taking up any room in my ‘prepared spells’ list, but still burning spell slots when I use it. This should be simple but it took me a few iterations with the homebrew tools so I’ll include the full homebrew item write-up below. First, I want to point out two critical elements that make it work.
Available for Class(as) – I was originally going to just set this to ‘Paladin’ as Divine Smite should be usable by all paladins. Then I read the fine print in the tooltip. Turns out this is how Oath Spells are specified. If you add subclasses here, the spell will be added to the character sheet as an ‘always prepared’ spell. At first I thought I would have to customize my subclass (my Oath) to add the custom spell, but this is way easier.
Higher Levels Scaling – With these settings, the character sheet will take care of Divine Strike’s scaling damage when cast with higher level spell slots. I chose to use ‘Spell Level’ scaling to specify the increased damage die when cast at 2nd, 3rd, and 4th level. The only thing I haven’t found a way to account for is the extra 1d8 against undead and fiends… for now I’ll add a reminder in the Notes section for the spell.
That’s it. Pretty simple really, but given that it took me a few attempts, I thought I’d document here. Have fun. 🙂
‘Divine Smite’ homebrew spell
Here is the breakdown of my homebrew spell (I’ve highlighted the entries that I think are necessary for the spell to show up properly on the sheet).
Basic Information
| Spell Name | Divine Smite |
| Casting Time | 1 No Action |
| Spell Range Type | Touch |
| Duration Type | Instantaneous |
| At Higher Levels Scaling? | <checked> |
| Higher Level Scaling Type | Spell Level |
| Available for Class(es) | Paladin; Paladin – Oath of the <insert your oath here> |
Additional Information
| As Part of Weapon Attack | <checked> |
| Affected Weapon Range Type | Melee |
| Spell Effect Tags | Damage |
Modifiers (1)
| Modifier Type | Damage |
| Modifier Subtype | Radiant |
| Dice Count | 2 |
| Die Type | d8 |
At Higher Levels (3)
| Scaling Level Value | 2 |
| Modifier to Scale | Damage – Radiant (2d8) |
| Scale Effect | Additional Points |
| Dice Count | 3 |
| Die Type | d8 |
| Scaling Level Value | 3 |
| Modifier to Scale | Damage – Radiant (2d8) |
| Scale Effect | Additional Points |
| Dice Count | 4 |
| Die Type | d8 |
| Scaling Level Value | 4 |
| Modifier to Scale | Damage – Radiant (2d8) |
| Scale Effect | Additional Points |
| Dice Count | 5 |
| Die Type | d8 |
