Would Prestidigitation remove poison from an object's surface?

Question

I had the passing thought of getting revenge, I mean protecting your items from thieves by using a strong contact poison. Now in the case of coins, would a casting of Prestidigitation be enough to make touching them safe again? What about removing all poison from a quiver of arrows? Say you were facing a nasty rogue who had a quiver full of dangerous poisoned arrows that have been making for a tough fight. Or perhaps you're facing a band of drow and their sleep arrows.

The spell can clean things, and possibly depending on the type of poison used, you could easily consider it dirty. So maybe the kind of poison matters?

Answer 1

Ask Your DM

We are not given a definition of what counts as "dirty" and can be cleaned. Naively, we might consider contact poison to be a type of contamination which could be cleaned off. But you will have to ask your DM to make a ruling.

When your DM makes their ruling, they are likely to consider game balance. Removing all the poison from an enemy's arrows seems like a fairly powerful effect for a cantrip. Your DM might rule that prestidigitation cannot clean poison, or that it cannot affect objects held by an opponent, or that the opponent gets a chance to save.

As to contact poison on a sack of coins, you might argue that prestidigitation is only speeding up the process of cleaning the coins, and you could do it manually with only slightly more effort -- so your DM might be more likely to rule in your favor. The problem with this approach is that a strong contact poison is likely to be quite expensive, so you won't want to put it on something where you'd need to apply and remove it frequently.

Answer 2

Sounds reasonable to me, but don't forget the limitations. Prestidigitation has a range of just 10', and allows you to clean one object no larger than a cubic foot.

If I were DMing a campaign and my player wanted to use the cantrip to clean poison off a thing, I would allow it, but one object at a time, meaning one arrow at a time, one coin at a time. I don't see a use for it mid-combat because you'd have to get within 10' of your target to 'clean' the arrow or whatever weapon you're trying to de-poison, but if you wanna stand that close to a rogue with poisoned arrows and give him the old Mister Clean, well... for some folks WIS is their dump stat, is all I'll say. :)