Purify Food and Drink: Green Eggs and Ham

Usable By: Artificer, Cleric, Druid, Paladin

Spell Level: 1

School: Transmutation

Casting Time: 1 action

Range: 10 feet

Duration: Instantaneous

Components: V, S

All nonmagical food and drink within a 5-foot-radius sphere centered on a point of your choice within range is purified and rendered free of poison and disease.

Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold

Some spells shape how 5th edition can be run from a DMs perspective. Problems with simple binary solutions (you have it or your screwed) tend to leave bitter tastes in players’ mouths at worst, or feel trivial and a waste of time at best, leading to a DM not interfacing with that kind of problem at all and instead opting for different puzzles and challenges to better engage the group. Purify Food and Drink, while unbearably boring, presents this issue for DMs - poisoned food and drink becomes a problem whose solution is so clean and easy it becomes not worth doing at all.

The first major strike that causes this problem is the classes that get access to Purify Food and Drink are prepared casters. If there is ever a belief that putrid food or drink can be a problem, all the cleric, druid, or paladin has to do is prepare the spell when needed. You don’t have to spend any known spells on it, nor any space even in a spellbook. You simply need to be a character of one of those classes and suspect something is amiss with the food you or important characters would eat.

Then, once it's prepared, the second major strike comes: the ritual tag. Eating normally isn’t done in haste in 5th edition. Most times, when characters are eating, it's part of downtime or resting, both of which alot for ample extra time to cast ritual spells. Now, not only do the prepared casters not lose comparatively based on not having access to other spells they’d rather have, they don’t even need to spend spell slots solving the problem. It’s simply solved. They can ritual cast it to their heart's content, purifying whatever food and drink would be consumed regardless if a mundane ailment afflicts it.

From here, there are two remaining situations.

The food is magically cursed or plagued, causing the damage anyway or
Whatever poisoned based encounter the DM had created is now over.

If the party consumes the food and still gets sick, it feels like they saw the problem coming, prepared for it, and are getting punished unfairly. This can easily result in players feeling bad about the circumstances and building up animosity towards a DM. If the problem is solved, they feel like they wasted time having to jump through hoops for an anticlimactic solution to a non-problem. There isn’t any winning here.

This alongside Detect Poison and Disease and the major lack of diseases and poisons available tip the potential fun conundrum of sickly food or drink with mystery surrounding it into territory not worth investing time or effort into.

Why go through the trouble of coming up with potentially interesting poisons or diseases that challenge the players on a different axis when there are such cheap tools that tell the players “this is how you solve this entire problem”? The juice usually isn’t worth the squeeze, and if the DM isn’t offering this exact problem, Purify Food and Drink is left with no problems to solve.

5e Spells

Purify Food and Drink: Green Eggs and Ham