[RPG] Can the spiritual weapon from the spell conduct an opportunity attack

dnd-5eopportunity-attackspells

This question arose last night when our cleric had moved the spiritual weapon in pursuit of an enemy well beyond the battle's front line. The enemy is at the far right of this illustration, and is about to move off the screen to the right. (The spiritual weapon is represented by a cat token … flavor for a nature domain cleric).

The question that arose was: can the cleric make an opportunity attack with the spiritual weapon as the wight moves out of its reach? The wight was within a 5' reach of the weapon, but was not within reach of the cleric who is back by the main melee.

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The ruling was no, since the weapon is not a creature and thus its reach is moot. That seemed a reasonable ruling, but the question that arose as we discussed it afterwards was:

Did we miss out on a rule, or ruling, that would have allowed that spiritual weapon to make an opportunity attack on that wight?

Best Answer

No, Spiritual Weapon can't make Opportunity Attacks.

Spiritual Weapon is a spell cast as a Bonus Action, that then allows you to use a Bonus Action on subsequent turns to make additional attacks, as below:

As a bonus action on your turn, you can move the weapon up to 20 feet and repeat the attack against a creature within 5 feet of it.

Since Opportunity Attacks rely on using a Reaction, there's no provision given by the rules for this to happen with this spell.

That said, as with almost everything else in D&D, your DM may rule that it's ok, and that'd probably be fine in this case.

Jeremy Crawford also agrees and says that spiritual weapon is not intended to be able to make opportunity attacks in this Tweet:

The spell's description would say if the spiritual weapon made opportunity attacks. It intentionally doesn't.