Water Walk: Stride on the Tide
Usable By: Artificer, Cleric, Druid, Ranger, Sorcerer
Spell Level: 3
School: Transmutation
Casting Time: 1 action (ritual)
Range: 30 feet
Duration: 1 hour
Components: V, S, M (a piece of cork)
This spell grants the ability to move across any liquid surface—such as water, acid, mud, snow, quicksand, or lava—as if it were harmless solid ground (creatures crossing molten lava can still take damage from the heat). Up to ten willing creatures you can see within range gain this ability for the duration.
If you target a creature submerged in a liquid, the spell carries the target to the surface of the liquid at a rate of 60 feet per round.
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
I have never, in all my time DMing, seen somebody cast Water Walk. It has never happened. I’ve run a pirate campaign, I’ve run a campaign with a massive Kraken encounter, I’ve run dozens of encounters near lakes, rivers, and streams. Yet in all of those environments players were absolutely preparing spells targeting, nobody wanted Water Walk, and nobody ever needed it either.
The reality of Water Walk is crossing liquids as if they were solids just isn’t that great when teleportation and flight are readily available. You can conjure bridges with magic when needed. Even for a ritual, the time necessary to solve this problem that can be solved just as well with a decent skill check just results in the spell having too small a window of power to ever be considered.
Conceivably, this is just a passive effect you spend fifty minutes casting on the party to have everybody cross some hazardous area unscathed with the only cost being a prepared spell. That’s about as low a cost as I can imagine, but just isn’t enough of a problem that justifies that tiny of a price to solve. Water Walk could be a 2nd or 1st level spell and I doubt it’d see any amount of use more than it does now; fundamentally, moving across liquid as if it were solid just isn’t a powerful effect in a game where you can transform into a gnat or travel to entire other worlds with a snap of your fingers.
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