Let’s Play D&D With Doctor Strange
If you’ve always wanted a levitating cloak of your own, now’s your chance. This week we’re playing D&D with Doctor Strange.
Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness comes out this week and we’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. The MCU is getting weird and I can’t wait to see how weird, who will be making cameos from other universes, and how they’ll be correcting issues created by previous Marvel titles. It should be a lot of fun.
But while we wait, let’s think about inviting a certain doctor to play D&D. The Sorcerer Supreme may not seem like your classic Dungeons & Dragons player character, but I think you’ll find his powers and snark fit in surprisingly well. This week we’re playing D&D with…
Doctor Strange
The first thing to discuss about the Sorcerer Supreme is that, by D&D standards, he is not a Sorcerer at all. Sorcerer’s magic come from natural ability and Stephen has to work hard to find, hone, and master his craft. He works hard at everything the medicine to the mystic arts. Doctor Strange is a Wizard. That’s okay though, Wizard actually works out perfectly.
From there the question of sub-class always come up, and while there are a lot of kinds of Wizardry Doctor Strange could practice and make for a reasonable and in-character sheet, I went with Chronurgy. He had the time stone in his possession for a while, after all. And, at level fourteen Chronurgy Wizards can take Covrgent Future which allows them to “peer through possible futures and magically pull one of them into events around you.” Which is fairly similar to a move that Strange did pull in Infinity War. If you’d prefer your Doctor Strange as a War Magic Wizard, that’s awesome. I went with Chronurgy.
Strange isn’t all sorcery and magic though, he’s also an established and respected Doctor. I thought we’d be remis to ignore this fact, so I highlighted it a few times on this sheet. A proficiency gives him a +8 to Medicine checks, and the Healer feat let’s him restore extra hit points. Sure, we’re not looking at cleric level healing here. But he stopped working in hospitals a while ago to focus Supremely on Sorcery.
And finally, Doctor Strange has a few personal items that are iconic but don’t necessarily play nice in by-the-handbook D&D. I did my best to work around those. The Eye of Agamotto is a perfect candidate for an arcane focus, but the Cloak of Levitation is a bit of a problem. There are cloaks in D&D and there is levitation and flying in D&D, but no cloaks that allow you to levitate. In reality this would be a custom item that your DM would work with you on. But I’m not your DM so I had to meet you half way. Instead, I gave Strange a Cloak of Protection and a bunch of flying and levitation spells.
The spells themselves were fun and easy to pick because. Wizards have such freedom in the number of spells they can learn, and Doctor Strange has a pretty wide variety of abilities. I tried to take ones that matched with things we’ve seen him do on the big screen. But some just seemed fun or like powers he should have in D&D. Finally, the Resilient feat gives him a boost to Constitution, for those times when he needs to hold onto a spell a little longer than he’d like.
How would you make Doctor Strange in D&D? Are you excited for Multiverse of Madness? What movie, show, comic, or game should I make characters from next time? Let us know in the comments!
Happy Adventuring!
