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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.
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.