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Cooking Up Contingency Plans
(i.imgur.com)
Since my polymorph meme has only garnered three downvotes so far I thought I'd offer a bit more controversial take, and see if I can manage to stir the pot a bit with this one.
So this sent me down an absolute rabbit hole. As a DM there's a few ways I'd consider to stop this being entirely game-breaking:
Personally I would instead depart from RAW and point out a version of option 2, but a lenient one. Something like "you can do this but you are sapping your very essence to do it. Every time you do it, you permanently lose 10% of your HP" or "every time you do this you increase the number of death saving throws you must succeed before you die". Or my personal favourite: "every time you do this you perturb the very laws of nature. Nature is rather fond of its laws and so decides to perturb you right back. Roll on this table to see what happens." and make the table include the above alongside a few other things and maybe a roll on the wild magic table.
In the end I enjoy ingenuity but the role of DM gives you a lot of latitude to... handle... those who believe they found a loophole.
It goes off but doesn't heal you because the text specifically says
Doesn't say "exclusively from others". Without casting this spell you couldn't do that normally.
It also says,
No qualifiers about the target having to be a creature other than you. It just has to be a creature within your reach.
Also as regards:
Do you also ban death ward and healing word? What about wizards who dip a level into virtually any other spellcaster or take a feat for a healing spell who can do this kind of thing without even having to make an attack roll or take necrotic damage?
The fact that it mentions others to begin with can't be ignored though.
Essentially by including that gate in the spell we understand that Self is a valid target, but if target is self then heal does not occur.
There's no need for the rest of the text to explain what has already been explained, it would be redundant.
I would rule of cool this to result in either instant death or not being downed, at least that way there's high risk/reward.
There's no need for that, wizards are strong enough as is. They can pick up cure wounds somehow and use that spell instead.
Sure, but if someone at my table went full Jesse, I'd be inclined to not crush their fun.
I'd possibly go for it as well, Except there would be a downside to this approach.
They could grab magic initiate, or multiclass, to pick up cure wounds to heal more and it would actually work without having to ignore a part of the spell, or the RAI
Oh yeah, I fully understand that so many was to do something like this are better. You’re using a 6th level spell, a 3rd level spell, a 1,500 gp component, and using up your contingent spell on this just to get back ½ of 3d10 on a hit.
This is about one of the least broken healing tricks you can do in 5e, but so many people are going out of their way picking at minutia or saying “Here’s how I’d houserule this to stop that trick” (essentially admitting it works fine without DM fiat to counteract it) without considering that life transference is infinitely better and also fails to exclude yourself a viable target for healing. Or just polymorphing yourself, or putting yourself in a resilient sphere before you take the damage is perfectly valid, strictly better and still an utter waste of a contingency.
Just FYI though, this is what being creative with spells actually looks like. Coming up with a weird unforseen non-RAI use-case and implementing it within the bounds of the actual words of the spells. Not reading the name of the spell and saying, “I create water inside his lungs, instantly drowning him. (Pls don’t look up suffocation rulez. thx” or “I heat the metal calcium in his bones, lol.”
All that aside, it looks like my pot stirring was a bit more successful this go ‘round. If I got some people to sign up to argue with me and migrate away from that site I used to use before it became enshittified beyond human tolerance, my purpose was served.