You choose an area of water that you can see within range and that fits within a 5-foot cube. You manipulate it in one of the following ways:
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You instantaneously move or otherwise change the flow of the water as you direct, up to 5 feet in any direction. This movement doesn’t have enough force to cause damage.
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You cause the water to form into simple shapes and animate at your direction. This change lasts for 1 hour.
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You change the water’s color or opacity. The water must be changed in the same way throughout. This change lasts for 1 hour.
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You freeze the water, provided that there are no creatures in it. The water unfreezes in 1 hour.
If you cast this spell multiple times, you can have no more than two of its non-instantaneous effects active at a time, and you can dismiss such an effect as an action.
I went to a friend's house and asked for a glass of water.
"here you go", she said, handing me a large tankard of blood, eyeballs, mist, and brains.
"thank you", I said, smiling. "this is mostly water, and I can definitely see the water in it."
Then I cast Shape Water and her head exploded.
A fun use I like for this spell is if you are underwater, you can use it to create a five foot cube of ice beneath yourself and just float back to the surface (since the ice's mass is much larger than your own, and you shouldn't be heavy enough to overcome its buoyancy, though a very heavy character may want to watch out).
That and being able to just have instant ice for your cool drink on a summer day is always nice; prestidigitation can cool the drink directly, but that's not as a stylish. 😉
Can you see the water in a human?
But you can’t see the water
Can Shape Water be used to make improvised weapons out of ice?
Personally, I think it's feasible. Arguably impractical in combat, perhaps, but still feasible.
If you can make a three ton ice block with Shape Water, making weapons can't be much more complicated.
RAW, the spell states:
- You cause the water to form into simple shapes and animate at your direction.
- You freeze the water, provided that there are no creatures in it.
- Each effect lasts one hour.
- With multiple castings, you can have no more than two of its non-instantaneous effects active at a time.
I'm well aware that both shaping and freezing water would take two separate castings, but it can be done in a single turn via Quickened Spell Metamagic.
Assuming it's possible, of course there would be have to be limitations on what a caster could make, since Shape Water is only a cantrip.
Most simple melee weapons are arguably themselves simple shapes, and Improvised Weapons can have the same stats as actual weapons.
If the PHB says that a table leg can be used as a Club, then I would argue an icicle can function the same as a dagger.
Also, ice is pretty fragile, so if I allowed it in my games, ice weapons would shatter after no more than 1d4 rounds of use.
Ice ammunition like darts and arrows would shatter on impact and be irretrievable without more castings of Shape Water, I'd wager.
I'm assuming you could make ice shards and control them fully it is just frozen water but could you make water vaper and put it in a enemies lungs and freeze the water making it suffocate could you make mist or would this just be water and ice control
this + undless water would be an interesting combo
I've been thinking about using Shape Water on glasses to essentially make a glass harp, but I don't know that's beyond Shape Water limits or not
Could you use this to blow bubbles?
There are some wonderful and creative uses for this spell, several ideas running wild in these comments and really at the end of the day, DM pretty much makes the call... Please keep in mind this spell is a cantrip. Turning a wet patch of ground into an ice field and simulating a grease spell makes far more sense due to the situational nature of this sort of use and it's emulating a level 1 spell... other people looking to emulate blindness by freezing eyes due to their water content (or even changing the opacity of the fluid in the eyes) i personally feel should be ruled as an over reach of the spells ability. Using it to create a barrier seems sensible if you use two casts of the spell to make that happen... thats two actions in combat to provide cover of a similar degree of overturning a banquet table or blocking off a bottle neck in preparation of an encounter makes sense. Also restricting it specifically to liquid water i feel mostly just DM choice. Maybe you're running the Icewind Dale campaign and having constant access to the snow really ramps up the usefulness of a situational spell but you've got to decide if thats a constant resource you're not willing to contend with or maybe you want to reward your players creativity and let them enjoy the benefits so long as shape water doesn't become the meta for the campaign.
An argument could easily be made here that for a little home brew aspect of adding in more facets to the spell as players increase in levels. Maybe you're level 1 character can't manipulate snow but once they hit 5 loose forms of solid water are accessible like snow and slush, then later manipulating ice and later still water vapor. This allows the spell to reach those higher levels of utility and rewards creativity but keeps your level 1 caster from 1 shotting a great wyrm red dragon cause they gave it an aneurism with a frozen blood clot.
you can cast this to form a gold coin
color gold
shape that of a coin
and Freese it
Depending on what counts as a simple shape you could make water lenses with this. Small drops of water can be used as a makeshift magnifying glass without any magic (the droplet forms a round shape due to surface tension, smaller droplet, -> stronger tension -> more round droplet -> higher magnification).
With magic shaping the water, a better lense might be possible, supplanting the need for telescopes in some situation (all if it’s easy to make a super minor magic item that does this).
Lightning edit: You wouldn’t need to have the water free floating in the air for this. It could rest on a glass plate (this might limit possible optics a bit?? I’m no physicist). All the cantrip needs to be able to do is lift some parts of the water a bit off the ground. (Might also be possible to make ice lenses if you can make really clear ice)
If I can redirect the flow of water...I can push a cube 5 feet in any direction...so could I use this spell to push a submerged creature that's in that cube? If the water pulls them along with it. Could you then use the spell to lift someone out of the water? Or drag them down?
Can I move the water throw the air
Jesus, this spell is useful. Wanna create cover? Simply make a wave and freeze it. Wanna seem like a fortune teller? Get a cool looking bowl, put some water in it, and specify some rules (such as "gold means fortune, red means death," "sword means death, coin means fortune," etc) involving colors or shapes, then make it whatever you want. You could further it by saying you could use divination to change whatever outcome they got, for a cost, or you could pretend to be a helpful diviner if you're secretly evil aligned and don't want your party to know it. In a single action, you could make it harder for your enemies to catch you, you could create a near impenetrable wall, block off paths towards you, you could cancel out whole parts of the battlefield by freezing water once it's been elevated and repeating, forming frozen towers, so long as there's enough of it, and more. You could likely find a way to encase someone in it even with the restriction of the space not being occupied, or just create a cage for them. You could give someone advantage on pretty much any charisma check by forming shapes to show what they're talking about, or trick deaf people into thinking something that isn't true. Say there's a trapdoor and a thing you don't like, if you get them to go down the hole, you could close the hatch and freeze the water over it, and leave them with a nasty surprise once it melts, seeing as that's a bone crushing amount of water. You could flood rooms, part the seas, and more given enough time and creativity.
Sorry but RAI doesn’t trump RAW. RAI is almost always up to interpretation. RAW is generally not. You can memorize all the trivia and have all the context you want but at the end of the day Jeremy Crawford himself can’t change what’s already written down if it’s not not officially published in the official Errata. If you choose to rule against it as a DM you certainly can, but understand you’re creating home brew rules subject to the players feedback.
You can certainly make a wall of Ice, in fact, as written you can make exactly 2 of them. Read the text again, “If you cast this spell multiple times, you can have no more than two of its non-instantaneous effects active at a time, AND you can dismiss such an effect as an action.” 1 action to form and move the water, 1 action freeze. End the first action. Repeat one more time. 2 blocks. 5x5x5 x2. That’s a 10foot wall buddy.
Water that becomes less dense through freezing floats. Ice for example has 9% less density. By RAW you can make it float.
Lastly, one of your own examples you gave is wrong. You can’t stop rain from falling on you because rain is continuous throughout the round. Whereas you only get so many actions in a 6 second span of time. You would only have time to reduce some of it before getting wet.
The last part of your comment tells me you’re annoyed that a cantrip can have zero concentration, 2 one hour duration effects, major fabrication uses for utility, and to top it all off its Somatic only meaning it works even if you get grappled and silence. And that’s not even including all the other things you can do with it using 2 spellcasters and holding an action.
Sorry but RAI doesn’t trump RAW. RAI is almost always up to interpretation. RAW is generally not. You can memorize all the trivia and have all the context you want but at the end of the day Jeremy Crawford himself can’t change what’s already written down if it’s not not officially published in the official Errata. If you choose to rule against it as a DM you certainly can, but understand you’re creating home brew rules subject to the players feedback.
You can certainly make a wall of Ice, in fact, as written you can make exactly 2 of them. Read the text again, “If you cast this spell multiple times, you can have no more than two of its non-instantaneous effects active at a time, AND you can dismiss such an effect as an action.” 1 action to form and move the water, 1 action freeze. End the first action. Repeat one more time. 2 blocks. 5x5x5 x2. That’s a 10foot wall buddy.
Water that becomes less dense through freezing floats. Ice for example has 9% less density. By RAW you can make it float.
Lastly, one of your own examples you gave is wrong. You can’t stop rain from falling on you because rain is continuous throughout the round. Whereas you only get so many actions in a 6 second span of time. You would only have time to reduce some of it before getting wet.
The last part of your comment tells me you’re annoyed that a cantrip can have zero concentration, 2 one hour duration effects, major fabrication uses for utility, and to top it all off its Somatic only meaning it works even if you get grappled and silence. And that’s not even including all the other things you can do with it using 2 spellcasters and holding an action.
Yeah like I said, rule of cool and if you want to use it a specific way that's up to you. However even in a Crawford tweet it was said that the rules are written where "... everyday things—walls, gravity, bread, laughter—work the way we expect them to, except for when the rules say otherwise." Therefore water is still water, still affected by normal physics, except as specifically worded by the spell.
And how do you stack those 5ft blocks on top of eachother? Water doesn't fly. Water doesn't defy gravity. Could you go to a lake and create a 5ft cube of water in the lake? Absolutely! Could you create yet another 5ft cube of water underneith that cube? Absolutely! Would that cube lift the other cube higher due to boyancy? Totally would! By creating second block of ice underneith it the first block of ice would be, likely, fully emerged from the water. Could you lift both of those cube of ice OUT of the water with that cantrip? No. You could likely move them around in the water using the "change the flow." Could you lift it out of there by hand? You could certainly try, a 5 ft cube of ice weighs about 285 lbs. Make me a Strength (Athletics) check.
I understand how you could be confused by what I said. Float in the air, as in flying or hovering. Water does not naturally float in the air, so no water bending ala ATLA where they can make it float or fly. No lifting 5ft cubes of water into the sky and flinging them at people.
Ok. That's your rule as a DM, I would say that's harmless enough to let it work as it could fall into "shaping the flow of water," you could argue that rain isn't a "flow" perse, but that's whatever, I don't see the harm in that.
Interesting assumption. I was simply stating what the spell does or does not do... because three years ago this became a thing in a game I was running and I did a lot of research and watched a lot of videos that were saying things that did not really make sense RAW. There was a lot of conversation about how people would simply be able to float (fly/hover) a 5ft cube of water over to a fire elemental and kill it with 935 cold damage. So I wrote that post.
My point was simply that by the existence of spells and abilities such as Wall of Water/Ice or Control Water, nor is it Watery Sphere a single cantrip doesn't replace all the things that leveled spells can do.
If i get the shape water cantrip as a water Genasi do i still get 2 more cantrips from bard or is it just one
it means you cant use this spell on them because you cant see the water :)
Is the animation speed limited to the movement speed? Because 1.1km/h ( 5 feet per 6 seconds) isn't that useful. That water cube can't even keep up when I saunter.
Can I use a more effective form to gain speed?
For example, can I form a ball, wheel or roller and animate it to follow me at my walking speed? (Flow speed near the core is about 1km/h, outer speed correspondingly higher; Or is the power lost at the outside?)
Freezing water expands and emits heat. When it defrosts, it absorbs heat, cools the environment and shrinks. Can I control the amount of expansion and heat flow?