Do caster out of combat options matter?

[Dr.Samurai]

Teleport and plane shift are not the only high impact out of combat spells.

Speak with animals is available to druids from level 1 and is extremely powerful for information gathering. Animals can serve as witnesses and can be bribed into short recon missions. Feather fall is available from level 1 and lets you defeat fall damage. Invisibility is available at level 3. Revivify is available at level 5. Speak with dead is available at level 5.

I think the OP's point when they say "do they matter" is about whether you can get by without them. Judging from the context in the comment.

If the adventure is a murder mystery then a party of barbarians will have to work real hard, they may as well be commoners. A single 5th cleric can cast one spell and solve it as an action.

But it can hardly be called a "murder mystery adventure" if the murder is solved within 6 seconds of discovering the body. In this sense, these out of combat spells are really much more about the destination than the journey.

Also, and this is a tangent, I find that people often assume the game world knows exactly as much about magic as needed to make it as effective as possible. In this case, the murderer doesn't think about foiling Speak with Dead, so the spell is just assumed to solve an entire adventure in a single casting.

I'm willing to bet revivify, speak with dead, feather fall, invisibility, speak with animals are extremely useful in Curse of Strahd.

Probably not a bad bet to take.

But I don't think the OP is saying these spells can't be useful.

^ What Samurai said but I'll add - nobody said alternate routes to spellcasting have to be "convenient." Just attainable. Finding a portal or scroll or a magical creature willing to serve as a mount or a capable NPC could in fact be a huge pain in the donkey relative to having someone who can plane shift on staff. Or they might be equally difficult in entirely different ways. Neither approach locks you into a specific permutation of worldbuilding, especially not one you don't want to be.

This is a good point to make, and goes back to journey vs destination.

And if "convenient" is meant to be a bad thing, get a load of these spells that can whisk you away in the blink of an eye, and solve an entire murder mystery plot before you can say "whodunnit".

I think this is a prime example of why out of combat options not mattering is sure sign of bad campaign. If you got passwall and clairvoyance and can't ever possibly use it to skip an encounter, then the campaign is trash. Honestly. It's a railroad and the train carts are full of trash.

Ok so let me keep track here:

Level 1 Spells
Charm Person
Comprehend Languages
Detect Magic
Disguise Self
Feather Fall
Find Familiar
Unseen Servant
Identify

Level 2 Spells
Augury
Knock
Misty Step
Suggestion

Level 3 Spells
Clairvoyance
Fly
Speak with Dead
Water Breathing

Level 4 Spells
Dimension Door
Divination
Fabricate
Locate Creature?? Arcane Eye??

Level 5 Spells
Contact Other Plane
Passwall
Teleportation Circle
Scrying??


Where is the combat stuff? And if you remove some of these spells to get the combat stuff, does the campaign now suck because you can't deal with out of combat stuff with one of the spells you didn't grab? Many of these spells have been mentioned in this thread, so just trying to understand what these wizards look like. And remember, we're not co-DMing here and we don't want DM fiat, so don't assume you're scribing extra spells into your spellbook from scrolls and other books!