Flesh to Stone: Doesn’t Make Me Hard
Spell Level: 6
School: Transmutation
Casting Time: 1 Action
Range: 60 feet
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
Components: V, S, M (a pinch of lime, water, and earth)
You attempt to turn one creature that you can see within range into stone. If the target’s body is made of flesh, the creature must make a Constitution saving throw. On a failed save, it is restrained as its flesh begins to harden. On a successful save, the creature isn’t affected. A creature restrained by this spell must make another Constitution saving throw at the end of each of its turns. If it successfully saves against this spell three times, the spell ends. If it fails its saves three times, it is turned to stone and subjected to the petrified condition for the duration. The successes and failures don’t need to be consecutive; keep track of both until the target collects three of a kind.
If the creature is physically broken while petrified, it suffers from similar deformities if it reverts to its original state.
If you maintain your concentration on this spell for the entire possible duration, the creature is turned to stone until the effect is removed.
Review by Samuel West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Wow, Flesh to Stone lets me be like Medusa! I think I’ll take this spell, and I’m sure it’ll be so cool when it works, I can have my own statue garden of the evil guys!” - Timmy the new player, before never once successfully petrifying a creature in the remaining twenty sessions of his campaign.
Flesh to Stone exists as a spell for DMs to fairly eventually petrify players. In the hands of a player character, it is the hottest of hot garbage.
For those curious, the restrained condition reduces the affected’s speed to 0, prevents them from gaining speed, grants attack rolls made against them advantage, and imposes disadvantage on their attack rolls and their dexterity saving throws. Is just restraining a creature (something you can do without magic) worth your 6th level slot? If you don’t think so, then you shouldn’t be casting Flesh to Stone, as the likelihood of it petrifying a creature is laughable, and probably worse than just killing it.
Consider that in order for the spell to do anything at all, the target first has to fail a con save. If they succeed, welp, guess you just spent a turn and you’re 6th level spell slot on nothing! Should they fail, they become restrained. This is fine, but seeing as Hold Person and Hold Monster both are lower level AND paralyze the target (making melee attacks crit and crucially incapacitating them), there isn’t any reason to cast Flesh to Stone for just a restrain condition.
The question then passes to will the petrification actually occur, and how good is petrifying a creature? To answer clearly: no, and bad. At minimum, you need three rounds to transform a creature to stone or alternatively end the restraint. At maximum, the restraint lasts for five rounds before either the target is petrified or freed. Five rounds is a gigantic amount of time, all during which the affected creature can still be taking actions as they like. Sure, they’re restrained, but paralysis or banishment prevent any kind of action, and do so IMMEDIATELY. For the petrification to deny the actions, you have to get crazy lucky in an encounter lasting at least five rounds.
All of this is contingent on you maintaining concentration on the spell. This decision baffles me; the spell already requires a creature fail FOUR saving throws for a petrification effect, yet still can end from a stray arrow and a bad concentration save.
Against players I’m all for all the hoops needed to jump through before petrification occurs. It's basically as close to dead as a character can get without being technically dead, so having lots of time and ways to interact with the magic is important. If you’re a player, this spell is bad. There are dozens more effective spells for equal or lower level, which is a shame, because petrification is pretty rad.
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