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The Situation:

The party warlock (Pact of the Tome) has recently acquired the Purify Food and Drink spell as a ritual in his Book of Ancient Secrets. The party has just destroyed a hobgoblin base. Facing a return overland journey of several days, they have found the food supplies of the base. The total stores are more than the party would choose to take with them, but they are of dubious provenance. The warlock would like to use Purify on some of the collected rations. At this point in time he has the opportunity to recast it as needed, but this may not always be the case.

The Problem:

The PHB presents food in units of individual items (eg, loaf of bread, hunk of cheese in Expenses), and in units of persons it could feed, cost, and weight (Adventuring Gear, p. 150; 1 ration (food for one person for one day) at 5sp, 2 lb).

The Purify Spell targets none of these units, but rather works on all non-magical food "within a 5-foot-radius sphere". Nowhere else as far as I know references food as a volume.

I track food for the characters using feeding units, weight, and sometimes price, all of which are easily converted into one another using the PHB listing.

It is likely that the warlock will continue to use his new spell. I have no interest at all in continually converting food from volume to weight. I would rather have a rewrite of the spell so that it specifically works on a limited person amount or weight.

Possible Solutions:

An answer need not include a realistic conversion of food volume to weight, taking into account dried vs. fresh rations and quasi-medieval packaging, although estimates obtained from such a conversion may inform a good answer.

Rather, I am more interested in an answer supported by a comparison to similar utility spells that takes into account spell level, level progression, possibly character class, and other effects (creating food out of nothing vs. restoring food that was once healthful, spells that heal as well vs. those that provide only nourishment). A "good subjective" answer will demonstrate knowledge of similar spells and experience in applying such revisions.

I am interested in what would be an appropriate amount of food by weight or ration for a first level spell to purify, rather than calculating how much it could be, given the original volume specifications of the spell.

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    \$\begingroup\$ To clarify, are you saying that all food within a 5 foot sphere is too much for a single casting? \$\endgroup\$ May 7, 2021 at 20:29
  • \$\begingroup\$ @Thomas I believe they're saying the 5-foot sphere is a meaningless/unusable quantity for their campaign \$\endgroup\$ May 7, 2021 at 20:31
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    \$\begingroup\$ It is unclear to me why the spell as written doesn't work for you. \$\endgroup\$ May 7, 2021 at 20:37
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    \$\begingroup\$ @ThomasMarkov A 5-foot radius of food is not a functional game term based on the other sources of sustenance. It sounds to me that OP, and it's a problem I've had before, does not want to spend valuable game time determining how to quantify the functional amount of food that is purified nor cheapen the difficulties of finding food by saying "you find enough". \$\endgroup\$
    – Ifusaso
    May 7, 2021 at 20:47
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    \$\begingroup\$ Converting the spell to work with the units given is one thing. Rebalancing it based on those units is another, and probably what got this closed. \$\endgroup\$ May 7, 2021 at 21:46

3 Answers 3

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Frame Challenge: It's almost certainly not relevant.

I don't think it's necessary to come up with an unambiguous conversion between volume and person-days of food, if such a conversion is even possible. It's vanishingly unlikely to ever come up.

A 5-foot-radius sphere centered just above the floor should be enough to encompass all the gear four to five characters can carry*, pretty much everything in the bed of a wagon, or everything on an entire dinner table. One casting of the spell should be plenty to purify as much stuff as the characters are willing to move around with them.

Even if you decide that's not good enough, given that the spell is a ritual with no costly components -- so the only cost of doing it several times is spending ten minutes each time -- there seems very little reason to worry about the precise volume of food each casting can purify. Unless the party is pressed for time at all times, he should be able to just casually purify each day's food (and much more) as part of setting up camp at night. And if the party doesn't have 20 minutes to do the ritual twice, they probably don't have 10 minutes to do it once, either, nor time to eat the food they just purified.

If you're in a situation where minutes matter -- what I think of as "tactical time" -- then I can't imagine why you'd desperately need to purify a such a huge amount of food that you need a volume-to-person-days conversion. And if you're in "narrative time" where you can skip past hours of walking with a single sentence, then I can't imagine why it would matter whether you spend 10, 20, or 30 minutes on the task.

I'd be more worried about the source of the hobgoblins' mystery meat, honestly.

*A 5-foot-radius sphere is a huge area in terms of stuff you intend to carry. That's more than a pickup bed can hold. Mark out a ten-foot-wide circle on the floor, and imagine piling all your family's camping gear in there, up to chest-height... is it remotely a problem to load as much as your family can carry into that area? And that's only half a sphere. Alternatively, you could imagine filling an entire hot tub with food, and then you and four friends try to carry it all using backpacks and bags.

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    \$\begingroup\$ Agreed, a 10' diameter sphere is almost certainly large enough to purify everything that the PCs are transporting with them if they put it together. Per Ghosts of Saltmarsh, an entire Rowboat is only 5'x10'. How much food can you fit in a rowboat? In practice, I find that the only time the dimensions of Purify Food and Drink may matter is at something like a feast, where the characters themselves may be spread far enough apart that a single casting won't get all of their food. \$\endgroup\$ May 7, 2021 at 21:47
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A quick back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests a lower bound of 600 lbs. worth of food and water:

  • Four PCs can stand in a 2x2 square and all be included in a single casting's area of effect.
  • PC carrying capacity is 15x Strength score, so with an 'average score of 10 this yields 150 lbs. per PC.

This could possibly be improved by squeezing or more Strength, and this assumes packs and satchels to carry it in (which themselves could be your lower bound if that's your style of game), but 600 lb. of food and water is already on the order of hundreds of person-days. The spell is not the limiting factor, even with poor packing.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ This also assumes that the PCs stand inside the area of casting instead of, say, just dropping their packs...and maybe a few boxes, barrels, or crates into a heap and targeting that instead. So this is a 'lower bound' by a significant margin \$\endgroup\$ May 7, 2021 at 21:48
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The volume affected by the spell is (rounding down) 523 cu. ft. If we imagine that each character has a 1-cubic-foot "lunchbox" of food they need to eat per day (which is very generous let's be honest) then for a party of, say, four characters, the spell can purify enough food for each character to survive for 130 days. If you keep this 1-cubic-foot space in mind, you can easily estimate how much food would fill it and 522 more of them.

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    \$\begingroup\$ I don't feel like the portion explaining the total amount of food possible in the spell is beneficial to this answer, and doesn't seem to account for how unlikely it is for characters to be able to accomplish a sphere of food that fills the area (especially since, in my experience, players target the floor, effectively making it a hemisphere instead). This answer could benefit from restating the results into game-like terms "This spell purifies up to 523 ft cubed food, each cubic foot of food can be considered one days' ration for a medium humanoid." or similar. \$\endgroup\$
    – Ifusaso
    May 7, 2021 at 20:42

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