[RPG] Do arrows count as trinkets for Prestidigitation

cantripsdnd-5eranged-attack

I am playing a ranger and planning to take magic initiate for a few bonuses. I am wondering whether I could create temporary arrows during one turn and use them the next turn, in case I'm out of arrows, and if it works, what would they do?

Best Answer

Probably not.

Prestidigitation isn't explicit about what a "trinket" is, which means we have to fall back to the general English language. I would interpret a trinket as something small with artistic or sentimental value but no particular mechanical properties, so if I were the DM I probably wouldn't let it replicate the properties of any specific item.

And then there's the big one - the trinket must fit in your hand. Arrows are clearly longer than your handspan (they need to be in order to work), so by my interpretation you definitely couldn't create an arrow. (Perhaps some DMs would consider this clause met if you could wrap your hand around it; that doesn't seem like the natural reading to me but it's defensible.)

But ask anyway.

D&D is ultimately a storytelling game about having fun, and DMs have to adjudicate lots of little things that aren't strictly covered by the rules. If allowing this makes the game more fun and interesting for your table, and doesn't unbalance things, then there's no real reason to shut it down.

(For my part, I lean towards allowing creative mechanics like this if they're a one-off or strictly worse than the normal case, but look to disallow them if they become standard MO that gets used regularly. In this case, since you have to give up your action on round X to create the arrow fired on round X+1 - and thus attack half as often as usual - I don't think there would be any issues.)