[RPG] Can Ogre clerics use Purify Food and Drink on humanoid characters

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Can Ogre clerics use Purify Food and Drink on humanoid characters to cure them as humanoid creatures are regarded as food in Ogre culture?

Similarly, can Ogre clerics use Create Food and Water to summon a halfling teammate?

Best Answer

'Rules as written' it's pretty tenuous, 'rules as intended' it's definitely out. Allowing this could easily break your game.

Before I get into the details, consider the general principle that there are no secret rules in D&D 5e. So, always be suspicious of a reading of any feature that seems to allow additional benefits for only a small subset of users, especially if those additional benefits are not explicitly stated anywhere. Anyway...

1. Purify Food and Drink

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.

Rules as written, whether a humanoid eating character could use this spell to heal other humanoids of poisons and diseases really depends on how you choose to define 'food and drink'. These are not game defined terms, so it's up to DM to make their own call or ruling. Can living breathing humanoids be considered food? That may come down to whether you'd call a cow food, or whether it would have to be a steak first.

Rules as intended, this should definitely be disallowed - it's a huge exploit. To illustrate this just compare the effects with Lesser Restoration. Lesser Restoration is a 2nd level spell that lets you cure just one creature of just one condition. Purify Food and Drink is a first level spell, which can be cast as a ritual, therefore not expending a spell slot. Ruling that it could be used this way would allow it to cure every poison or disease affecting every creature in a five foot radius.

2. Create Food and Water

You create 45 pounds of food and 30 gallons of water on the ground or in containers within range, enough to sustain up to fifteen humanoids or five steeds for 24 hours. The food is bland but nourishing, and spoils if uneaten after 24 hours. The water is clean and doesn’t go bad.

Rules as written, it's just about arguable this spell could be used by a humanoid eating character to create an adult halfling. If you have already ruled that living humanoids can be considered 'food', which I would not recommend, then, by weight creating a living adult halfling is possible (they weigh about 40 pounds).

Would a halfling be bland and nourishing to eat? Nourishing, maybe but bland seems unlikely - however as far as I'm aware there's no published material that discusses how the playable races taste. If your DM has already allowed you to consider a living halfling 'food' it seems unlikely that this will prove a sticking point, with a lack of actual evidence to the contrary available.

Rules as intended, however, once again this is a massive exploit. The spell text states that the 'food' you create 'spoils if uneaten after 24 hours' - that doesn't seem like an accurate description of a happily functioning, living and breathing humanoid to me. The spell text therefore probably isn't intended to describe living creatures.

Once again, comparison to other spells reveals how overpowered this is. There are lots of other spells that allow conjuring allies (for example) and they generally are fourth level or higher spells, and once summoned the allies stick around for about an hour. If allowed, Create Food and Water, would undercut all of those spells. It would become a third level spell that allowed the creation of a halfling ally that could last a day until they started rotting (or years if you then cast Purify Food and Water on them!). Either way, by allowing all of this you'd have moved firmly into fairly ridiculous homebrew territory.

All other spells that are capable of summoning companions provide guidelines for the statblocks that should be used for those companion. Here you'd need to make them up - which should be another indication that it's not an intended use of this spell.

3. It's not about the Ogre

A final caveat - as I see it this question isn't really just about an ogre. The ogre is (ironically) the thin end of the wedge.

As demonstrated in this Reddit thread an NPC Ogre wielding these spells could be a hilarious addition to your campaign. However, what's good for the goose is good for the gander and if an NPC can do it, soon your players may want to do it too.

Ogre's aren't (at time of writing) a playable race but there are playable monstrous races which could be argued to eat other humanoids. Taking it further, in an evil campaign, any PC could declare themselves a cannibal. Or, in a good campaign, they could take the Haunted One background and say that as a child their PC got lost in the wilderness and ate their friend, after they'd died, in order to survive. They've never told anyone but the memory still tortures them and they can't shake the idea that ultimately everyone around them is made of food.

Basically, if you let an Ogre NPC do this in your campaign, it'll be hard to justify disallowing other characters - including PCs - from doing it too.