[RPG] Does Bless Have Costly Material Components

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Bless, along with several other spells, like Commune and Dispel Good and Evil, list Holy Water as a material component. None of them list a cost for this holy water, but the items table says that a flask of holy water costs 25g. Do these spells have a cost or not?

Best Answer

From PHB, p. 203:

Casting some spells requires particular objects, specified in parentheses in the component entry. A character can use a component pouch or a spellcasting focus (found in chapter 5) in place of the components specified for a spell. But if a cost is indicated for a component, a character must have that specific component before he or she can cast the spell.

In other words, if no cost is listed, then your pouch/focus should be enough. Many of the trivial components are meant for flavour/fluff/comedic effect (see: those that require guano; or the lightning spell that require fur + glass, to generate static electricity).

Also notice that Bless requires a "sprinkling of holy water," which seems to be a trivial amount, unlike like a flask.

What about the Commune spell, which explicitly lists a "vial" of holy water?

The same reasoning applies (no cost listed, so, focus/pouch takes care of it), though granted, it's where the rules start to keel under the pressure of realism. A GM would obv. not allow a player to have such a profitable activity, and he needn't prevent it by fiat: he could just reason "if that were possible, every Cleric/Pally could do it, flooding the market and erasing all profits" (or something along those lines). But again, this is just catering to realist intuitions, which can become a slippery slope very quickly.

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