I also wanted to preface this, I mentioned the Clone spell a bit in this video, the incubation period isn't 30 days, it's 120... I realized this editing mistake a bit too late and wanted to post it here to clarify any future confusion. (This is why I shouldn't edit while knocked out from several holiday food comas...)
Funnily enough, this actually subverts the "Fragile wizard" trope, and allows for more defense. Most notably, if you hijack an evil high ranking humanoid, preferably a martial style boss encounter, you get to upgrade your hp. In addition, you could potentially get: legendary actions/legendary restences/ multiattack from a monster statblock / special speeds, spells or immunities. That, and you would still have the jar. Personally I would ditch the old body, and keep the jar close, probably as a pendant hidden under clothing. It does serve as a phylacotry light, in case of death, there is an (assuming wizard) about 25% chance to survive, not great, not terrible since its extra. However the most appealing thing besides finding a barbarian to borrow is the ability to escape death and to cheese humanoid enemies. Simply put, if you hold your action while at low health to retreat into the jar when something deadly would hit, you get to go back in the jar, and the body gets taken care of. Yes, this does reduce the wizard to what essentially is a cursed magic item, however since its a valuable relic, someone will probably pick it up sooner or later, and you got yourself a new body. Also, for infiltration, this is amazing, nab the backdoor guard while the party is talking to them, let two of them in, dispose of the body 70 feet away from the building, go back to the jar, then possess the target noble/cultist leader/whatever and instantly get leadership to your side. If you pick targets that are in your cr range, they will probably have okay HP, and even then you still get the wizards defensive suite, death saves, and a hail mary cha save. So more defensible than the avarage nobody. You bring up that stealing a barbarian for the str and dex is not that great, however it kind of is? Being able to have good con, and thus concentration saves, on top of probably doubling your health pool is a good deal. Also, assuming you are not sniping other players (ouch), you most likely will possess a humanoid with a monster stat block, like a wherewolf, and all of those features, multiattack and resist nonmagical damage, those are not class abilities. Also, if you like being alive, a lot of campaigns use some gemstone or reliquary as a central artifact, or contain magic items of great importance that are gemstones (think crystal ball). Nothing prevents you from making this your magic jar to guarantee some durability, probably put a magic aura on it to hide that it is a magic jar though. As someone might try to cast dispell magic and end your entire career. I dont get the sequestered part? The spell specifies that if your body is dead when the jar breaks, you die. This suggests that the jar can still exists even if your body does not. Even without sequestered. This can function as semi lichdom, allowing for the borrowing of bodies indefinitely.
Hear me out, What if you use it on a Dread Lord (Like Strahd) to not only indefinitely subdue the lord AND prevent resurrection of said lord but also have the body of the lord including their ridiculous stats. Naturally you have to bait out legendary resistances and probably have a divination wizard set it up but you could use it to solve situations like that.
@@smilesschemes Polymorph Strahd into a commoner drop polymorph when swap is complete. I had the exact same idea for a dragon but vampire lord works too!!😂😊🙂
@@Ilikestarwars1245i thought of doing this on various creatures and using clone afterward to make it so you can die and then choose what species you want to turn into.
You can use this spell on any humanoid including undead. As a necromancy wizard this allows you to take control over some truly terrifying monsters and still have command undead unused
It does not have the [Evil] descriptor in 3.5 and therefore is not inherently evil to cast. It might be okay to use it to swap bodies with an evil character and kill them easily.
It can be used to take over a powerful humanoid foe during battle to take them out of the fight or for infiltration as the perfect disguise that will even foil True Seeing. As for Good aligned uses imagine taking control of an important evil individual at a crucial time (assuming the players know in advance), they can stop an assassination, execution, declaration of war or whatever else without bloodshed
My issue with the spell is the name: "Magic Jar". It's possibly the lamest spell name there is. The first thing that comes to mind for using this spell for good is any situation where you need to take control of a person's body semi-permanently - not just influence, like with other control spells, or temporarily impersonate, like with _Disguise Self_ or _Alter Self._ Infiltration comes to mind, such as replacing a noble in the evil king's court for several weeks, or taking the body of the BBEG's right-hand after you defeat them, to set up an attack in the BBEG's lair.
My thought is that this could be a way to put someone on ice if their body was posessed/snatched or if someones body is destroyed or unavailable this could be a way to give them yours to save them.
I could see someone using this spell to give chronicel sick people a functionel body. Like giving dying children a new body. Only problem is how you get those bodies but magic
Yeah. If you could somehow create an empty humanoid vessel that a user of Magic Jar could pop into, MAYBE it would be ok? But there aren't many RAW ways to make that happen tho
@@smilesschemesClone spell. Can even let you create a biologically younger version of the genetic host Cracking open the vessel before the host dies would leave you with a soulless body
Using it for good makes me think of Dragon Ball and the Evil Sealing Technique Master Roshi was going to use against Piccolo. I can see a hero sacrificing themselves to take the BBEG's body and trap their soul in the container. Maybe even break the container to kill them.
Breaking the container would also end you though, and breaking the container would actually try to shunt you back into your own body and the host back into their body if everyone was close enough
Bruh... you're going to need some ninth level true polymorph shenanigans right there but you're not wrong... However, I don't think the clone interaction works on a different body. Souls are weird. But I believe how it works is that if you use Clone on the dragon, then it creates a clone of the dragon which can only be inhabited by that dragon's soul. I think you can possess the clone after it's finished maturing
@@smilesschemespolymorph changes the race stat so you wouldn’t need true polymorph, and your game stats are replaced with the possessed creatures game stats so you would probably make a clone of the dragon if you cast it on the body specifically but you would make a clone of yourself with the stat of being a dragon if you cast it on yourself.
i have a not evil way to cast this spell. find a fighter/barbarian with good if not max physical states get him or her to help you with this. use magic jar on them, then with their body cast clone. then give them their body back. so when your clone is ready you can have a new body
Yes, my thumbnail is a Yugioh reference! And it's effect is it allows me to make a visual joke that only a certain population of my viewers will understand and appreciate ...It also allows me to draw two cards from my deck
I see a "good" use for this spell. Basically a community has an important wizard among them that they do not want to die from old age. So he uses the magic jar / sequester combo on a young criminal sentenced to death. The community keeps their wizard forever, and it only uses up a criminal who was dying anyway.
This here. This is how a BBEG is born. Entirely by accident. Starting with good intentions. It simply does not take long for this kind of practice to corrupt an initially "good" aligned character. I can see it now: at the end of the adventure, when the BBEG is finally tracked, and about to be vanquished he says "You know, I meant well. Things just got a bit out of hand."
@@kylelind6239 I think the wizard getting corrupted by using up criminals is kind of cliche and not very fitting. If I wanted to make this wizard a BBEG, I would make effort to protect his people what damns him. For starters, his home city needs buffer zone. If there is no buffer zone, then any danger can just stroll up on his city and hurt it. Over the centuries, the wizard will find himself having to perform pretty inhumane acts to maintain and occasionally expand this buffer zone. When ever an new power rises he needs to add some more buffer so his side has more resources. Occasionally he will need to annex mine or strategic resource. And of course the buffer region doesn't like being exploited. And doing what it takes to protect the city wears on him. Every so often he had to do monsterous things to protect his city. Doing one or two such things would not be so bad. Everyone who lives to old age in a fantasy medieval setting has some baggage. But unlike those people, he doesn't die and it just builds up on him.
What are the limitations of the "jar" or "crystal"? What if the body is in a wall or column and the crystal/jar is part of a golem? By putting a contingency on the Sequester that it stops when the soul is returned to the body(or the golem dies), the BBEG is able to either get away or show up for round 2? As for a player doing this? Combine Alphonse Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist with the Zentradi from Robotec. The body is inside the golem in a Sequester and the player inhabits the golem(or--showing my age--like the end of The Black Hole from 1979). Not sure what the stats would be for this golem, but the wizard has been working on this for a long time and now the golem becomes his physical stats. He is immune to poison. ... ... Would this make him a Warforge?
I believe this spell exists due to a creature called brain in a jar. That does this exact thing but the spell basically lets players do it. Hypothetically the GREAT uses of this spell are for illusion wizards and casters that focus on denying people the truth and basically wizard assassins that find ways of infiltration for them and others. Given that the item can be anything technically you can use mage hand or other move object spells and possess the possessed item. So float it over to a royal and instantly gain the power to grant people permission in areas and secondly the spell continues indefinitely so you can just shunt your soul back into the item. And then possess someone else while your body is in your house or in a wagon as this heist goes on. Also as a ln illusion wizard you can wipe memories. As an assassin you can kill someone and blame it on someone else. Lastly say you possess a corrupt king and confess his evils or something. Now you have done good for an entire nation. Possibly ending a long war or something. Are there better ways of doing all this. More than likely. Also as a 6th level spell... It's kinda late. Id argue that it should be 4th at least so then arcane tricksters and eldritch knights can use it. Since they have limited spells they can use. A multi purpose one could change their end game.
I agree. With this spell, it seems that the most ethical thing you can use it for is to stop the greater of two evils. Taking over a corrupt king, infiltrating and eliminating an evil group seems to be some of the best uses for it.
In a weird and kind of bizarre way... that could make sense? That is something that you could offer as a use for it. It would be interesting to include that in your worldbuilding if there were enough 11th level wizards running around that you can have them give out the ability for the sick and dying to get new bodies from condemned criminals
I summon Pot of Greed and... steal your... body? that... doesn't sound right. Memes aside, one way that could be used for good is, if there are no other options for body swapping, you can use this in a situation where one character that needs to do charisma checks alone (or other mental stat checks) does a switch with one of the party members that have higher mental stats. Another, although more morally grey, use is if you need to contain a bad guy and you don't have other means to do that, so you put their soul in a jar and carry that instead, making sure to keep the bad guy's body 100ft away from the jar so even if it breaks somehow, they just die. Also, body swapping aside, this is literally how monsters in Undertale stored the human souls, sorry not sorry.
Cast Simulacrum(7), then Planeshift(7) to Astral Plane, have your Simulacrum cast Magic Jar(6) on large gem, then hide its body inside a rock and Planeshift home. Now you have a gem magic item that can poses enemies on your turn. Horde of trolls, on your turn it poses a troll and turns on friends, before it dies it returns to gem and you finish it off.
You are in error as to your interpretation of statistics. It is an easy enough mistake to make as the following sentence refers to keeping your INT, WIS, and CHA one might infer that statistics only mean STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, and CHA but if you look at the find familiar spell it says you summon the spirit of a celestial, fey, or fiend and it takes an animal form of a beast and has it's statistics. Do we only use the STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, and CHA of the beast chosen when following those instructions for having those statistics or do we use the entire stat block. The word stat in stat block is actually short for statistics. Therefore when magic jar says we get the statistics of the creature they mean each and every single thing in that stat block, except for what they exclude... which is INT, WIS, and CHA, and also any class feature, but that leaves the entirety of the stat block to work with. Why else do you think this spell is 6th level has such precarious conditions? Simply for some STR, DEX, and CON plus little else? No. This spell is evil but it is also 6th level and quite powerful.
I hate the idea that because the spell is "evil" players shouldn't have access to it, dude it's a GAME, if you can't separate fiction from reality maybe you shouldn't DM? Because it's a GAME I would tell my players using this spell on anything other than an explicitly evil creature is going to affect their alignment, again this is a GAME we have game mechanics for this, you don't need to be the morality/fun police. The only time I'd consider removing something from the game on moral grounds would be if I'm DMing for children.
Hey now, I'm not saying I'd ever remove this spell from my games. I am super confused/interested in how it got into the player options tho. I was just saying that there are spells that are difficult to use in a more ethical sense and I feel like Magic Jar fits that description
@@smilesschemes How it got into player options is that it's a spell with an interesting affect that opens up narrative possibilities, you know what's also ethically questionable? Stabbing people, clubbing them, perforating them with arrows, setting them on fire, electrocuting them, fuck man if you think Magic Jar is bad have you seen Heat Metal? That's a Cleric spell!
If you are say, undead right, you can't feel sensation that you normally would have felt back when you were alive, so this spell is a way for them to live a sort of quasi alive existence, experiencing sensations that they could no longer experience because their body is dead. Also super useful for Spy type stuff, but if you're anything other than undead, then this spell is not practical at all, your body would die and you would die eventually if you abandon it for long enough, I mean you have to be in your body in order to feed it and drink so it's really not a practical long-term spell for a living creature. But if you have an undead, particularly one that adopts a vapor form or what have you, and then you can contain their body and you can carry their body with them, yeah. Also a vampire can go out in the daytime, a ghost can have physical presence again, a vampire could abandon needing to feed on blood, etc.
I also wanted to preface this, I mentioned the Clone spell a bit in this video, the incubation period isn't 30 days, it's 120... I realized this editing mistake a bit too late and wanted to post it here to clarify any future confusion.
(This is why I shouldn't edit while knocked out from several holiday food comas...)
Funnily enough, this actually subverts the "Fragile wizard" trope, and allows for more defense. Most notably, if you hijack an evil high ranking humanoid, preferably a martial style boss encounter, you get to upgrade your hp. In addition, you could potentially get: legendary actions/legendary restences/ multiattack from a monster statblock / special speeds, spells or immunities. That, and you would still have the jar.
Personally I would ditch the old body, and keep the jar close, probably as a pendant hidden under clothing. It does serve as a phylacotry light, in case of death, there is an (assuming wizard) about 25% chance to survive, not great, not terrible since its extra. However the most appealing thing besides finding a barbarian to borrow is the ability to escape death and to cheese humanoid enemies.
Simply put, if you hold your action while at low health to retreat into the jar when something deadly would hit, you get to go back in the jar, and the body gets taken care of. Yes, this does reduce the wizard to what essentially is a cursed magic item, however since its a valuable relic, someone will probably pick it up sooner or later, and you got yourself a new body.
Also, for infiltration, this is amazing, nab the backdoor guard while the party is talking to them, let two of them in, dispose of the body 70 feet away from the building, go back to the jar, then possess the target noble/cultist leader/whatever and instantly get leadership to your side. If you pick targets that are in your cr range, they will probably have okay HP, and even then you still get the wizards defensive suite, death saves, and a hail mary cha save. So more defensible than the avarage nobody.
You bring up that stealing a barbarian for the str and dex is not that great, however it kind of is? Being able to have good con, and thus concentration saves, on top of probably doubling your health pool is a good deal.
Also, assuming you are not sniping other players (ouch), you most likely will possess a humanoid with a monster stat block, like a wherewolf, and all of those features, multiattack and resist nonmagical damage, those are not class abilities.
Also, if you like being alive, a lot of campaigns use some gemstone or reliquary as a central artifact, or contain magic items of great importance that are gemstones (think crystal ball). Nothing prevents you from making this your magic jar to guarantee some durability, probably put a magic aura on it to hide that it is a magic jar though. As someone might try to cast dispell magic and end your entire career.
I dont get the sequestered part?
The spell specifies that if your body is dead when the jar breaks, you die. This suggests that the jar can still exists even if your body does not. Even without sequestered. This can function as semi lichdom, allowing for the borrowing of bodies indefinitely.
I think there's just some spells that good people don't cast 😅
Ya know... I kinda came to that realization too after this vid
Hear me out, What if you use it on a Dread Lord (Like Strahd) to not only indefinitely subdue the lord AND prevent resurrection of said lord but also have the body of the lord including their ridiculous stats. Naturally you have to bait out legendary resistances and probably have a divination wizard set it up but you could use it to solve situations like that.
You could do something like that, but the spell only works on Humanoid creatures
@@smilesschemes Polymorph Strahd into a commoner drop polymorph when swap is complete. I had the exact same idea for a dragon but vampire lord works too!!😂😊🙂
@@Ilikestarwars1245i thought of doing this on various creatures and using clone afterward to make it so you can die and then choose what species you want to turn into.
You can use this spell on any humanoid including undead. As a necromancy wizard this allows you to take control over some truly terrifying monsters and still have command undead unused
It does not have the [Evil] descriptor in 3.5 and therefore is not inherently evil to cast. It might be okay to use it to swap bodies with an evil character and kill them easily.
Yeah, that makes sense
It can be used to take over a powerful humanoid foe during battle to take them out of the fight or for infiltration as the perfect disguise that will even foil True Seeing.
As for Good aligned uses imagine taking control of an important evil individual at a crucial time (assuming the players know in advance), they can stop an assassination, execution, declaration of war or whatever else without bloodshed
Looking over the comments, I've been thinking that a lot too. It can be used to completely neutralize certain threats at crucial moments
@@smilesschemes It's very much a spell that encourages and requires creativity to use well
My issue with the spell is the name: "Magic Jar". It's possibly the lamest spell name there is.
The first thing that comes to mind for using this spell for good is any situation where you need to take control of a person's body semi-permanently - not just influence, like with other control spells, or temporarily impersonate, like with _Disguise Self_ or _Alter Self._ Infiltration comes to mind, such as replacing a noble in the evil king's court for several weeks, or taking the body of the BBEG's right-hand after you defeat them, to set up an attack in the BBEG's lair.
Infiltration is really starting to make the most sense with this spell
Magic Jar has been around since AD&D. It is in the books for Gygaxian reasons.
I can get that it’s never left because it’s just been there for so long. But still, it’s a crazy spell to me
Capturing an enemy without risking lives.
That's a really good use for it. And if we're talking about ethics, it is a strong nonviolent alternative
Thank you. Here I go brainstorming another character.
Good luck! And it's nice seeing another Yugioh fan here
My thought is that this could be a way to put someone on ice if their body was posessed/snatched or if someones body is destroyed or unavailable this could be a way to give them yours to save them.
So, make a magic scroll of magic jar, have them cast it, and put the caster's body into a Sequester after they put themselves into the crystal?
I could see someone using this spell to give chronicel sick people a functionel body. Like giving dying children a new body. Only problem is how you get those bodies but magic
Yeah. If you could somehow create an empty humanoid vessel that a user of Magic Jar could pop into, MAYBE it would be ok? But there aren't many RAW ways to make that happen tho
@@smilesschemesClone spell. Can even let you create a biologically younger version of the genetic host
Cracking open the vessel before the host dies would leave you with a soulless body
You could just use reincarnate.
Using it for good makes me think of Dragon Ball and the Evil Sealing Technique Master Roshi was going to use against Piccolo. I can see a hero sacrificing themselves to take the BBEG's body and trap their soul in the container. Maybe even break the container to kill them.
Breaking the container would also end you though, and breaking the container would actually try to shunt you back into your own body and the host back into their body if everyone was close enough
It's simple how to use it for good. Polymorph evil dragon into a humanoid, magic jar, you are now a good dragon. Use clone to make it your real body.
Bruh... you're going to need some ninth level true polymorph shenanigans right there but you're not wrong...
However, I don't think the clone interaction works on a different body. Souls are weird. But I believe how it works is that if you use Clone on the dragon, then it creates a clone of the dragon which can only be inhabited by that dragon's soul. I think you can possess the clone after it's finished maturing
@@smilesschemespolymorph changes the race stat so you wouldn’t need true polymorph, and your game stats are replaced with the possessed creatures game stats so you would probably make a clone of the dragon if you cast it on the body specifically but you would make a clone of yourself with the stat of being a dragon if you cast it on yourself.
i have a not evil way to cast this spell. find a fighter/barbarian with good if not max physical states get him or her to help you with this. use magic jar on them, then with their body cast clone. then give them their body back. so when your clone is ready you can have a new body
Is that thumbnail a yugioh reference?
The fuck does it do?!
Yes, my thumbnail is a Yugioh reference!
And it's effect is it allows me to make a visual joke that only a certain population of my viewers will understand and appreciate
...It also allows me to draw two cards from my deck
I see a "good" use for this spell. Basically a community has an important wizard among them that they do not want to die from old age. So he uses the magic jar / sequester combo on a young criminal sentenced to death. The community keeps their wizard forever, and it only uses up a criminal who was dying anyway.
This here. This is how a BBEG is born. Entirely by accident. Starting with good intentions. It simply does not take long for this kind of practice to corrupt an initially "good" aligned character. I can see it now: at the end of the adventure, when the BBEG is finally tracked, and about to be vanquished he says "You know, I meant well. Things just got a bit out of hand."
@@kylelind6239 I think the wizard getting corrupted by using up criminals is kind of cliche and not very fitting. If I wanted to make this wizard a BBEG, I would make effort to protect his people what damns him. For starters, his home city needs buffer zone. If there is no buffer zone, then any danger can just stroll up on his city and hurt it. Over the centuries, the wizard will find himself having to perform pretty inhumane acts to maintain and occasionally expand this buffer zone. When ever an new power rises he needs to add some more buffer so his side has more resources. Occasionally he will need to annex mine or strategic resource. And of course the buffer region doesn't like being exploited. And doing what it takes to protect the city wears on him. Every so often he had to do monsterous things to protect his city. Doing one or two such things would not be so bad. Everyone who lives to old age in a fantasy medieval setting has some baggage. But unlike those people, he doesn't die and it just builds up on him.
What are the limitations of the "jar" or "crystal"? What if the body is in a wall or column and the crystal/jar is part of a golem? By putting a contingency on the Sequester that it stops when the soul is returned to the body(or the golem dies), the BBEG is able to either get away or show up for round 2? As for a player doing this? Combine Alphonse Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist with the Zentradi from Robotec. The body is inside the golem in a Sequester and the player inhabits the golem(or--showing my age--like the end of The Black Hole from 1979). Not sure what the stats would be for this golem, but the wizard has been working on this for a long time and now the golem becomes his physical stats. He is immune to poison. ... ... Would this make him a Warforge?
Mechanically I'm not 100% sure, but this does seem like it would be an awesome rabbit hole to go down
@@smilesschemes 🙂
I believe this spell exists due to a creature called brain in a jar. That does this exact thing but the spell basically lets players do it.
Hypothetically the GREAT uses of this spell are for illusion wizards and casters that focus on denying people the truth and basically wizard assassins that find ways of infiltration for them and others.
Given that the item can be anything technically you can use mage hand or other move object spells and possess the possessed item. So float it over to a royal and instantly gain the power to grant people permission in areas and secondly the spell continues indefinitely so you can just shunt your soul back into the item. And then possess someone else while your body is in your house or in a wagon as this heist goes on. Also as a ln illusion wizard you can wipe memories. As an assassin you can kill someone and blame it on someone else. Lastly say you possess a corrupt king and confess his evils or something. Now you have done good for an entire nation. Possibly ending a long war or something.
Are there better ways of doing all this. More than likely. Also as a 6th level spell... It's kinda late. Id argue that it should be 4th at least so then arcane tricksters and eldritch knights can use it. Since they have limited spells they can use. A multi purpose one could change their end game.
I agree. With this spell, it seems that the most ethical thing you can use it for is to stop the greater of two evils. Taking over a corrupt king, infiltrating and eliminating an evil group seems to be some of the best uses for it.
What if you use the spell to get sick people a new body. Wouldn't that count as good?
True... but the sick person is the one that needs to cast the spell, and then they would be needing to take over someone's body
@@smilesschemes For some reason my first post didn't show on my computer.
Just use Glyph of Warding and condemned convicts...
In a weird and kind of bizarre way... that could make sense? That is something that you could offer as a use for it. It would be interesting to include that in your worldbuilding if there were enough 11th level wizards running around that you can have them give out the ability for the sick and dying to get new bodies from condemned criminals
I summon Pot of Greed and... steal your... body? that... doesn't sound right.
Memes aside, one way that could be used for good is, if there are no other options for body swapping, you can use this in a situation where one character that needs to do charisma checks alone (or other mental stat checks) does a switch with one of the party members that have higher mental stats.
Another, although more morally grey, use is if you need to contain a bad guy and you don't have other means to do that, so you put their soul in a jar and carry that instead, making sure to keep the bad guy's body 100ft away from the jar so even if it breaks somehow, they just die.
Also, body swapping aside, this is literally how monsters in Undertale stored the human souls, sorry not sorry.
Yeah, body swapping could be an interesting point for it. It's a pretty niche spell in that regard
Cast Simulacrum(7), then Planeshift(7) to Astral Plane, have your Simulacrum cast Magic Jar(6) on large gem, then hide its body inside a rock and Planeshift home. Now you have a gem magic item that can poses enemies on your turn. Horde of trolls, on your turn it poses a troll and turns on friends, before it dies it returns to gem and you finish it off.
You are in error as to your interpretation of statistics. It is an easy enough mistake to make as the following sentence refers to keeping your INT, WIS, and CHA one might infer that statistics only mean STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, and CHA but if you look at the find familiar spell it says you summon the spirit of a celestial, fey, or fiend and it takes an animal form of a beast and has it's statistics.
Do we only use the STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS, and CHA of the beast chosen when following those instructions for having those statistics or do we use the entire stat block. The word stat in stat block is actually short for statistics. Therefore when magic jar says we get the statistics of the creature they mean each and every single thing in that stat block, except for what they exclude... which is INT, WIS, and CHA, and also any class feature, but that leaves the entirety of the stat block to work with.
Why else do you think this spell is 6th level has such precarious conditions? Simply for some STR, DEX, and CON plus little else? No. This spell is evil but it is also 6th level and quite powerful.
Not all PCs are good.
Very true
I hate the idea that because the spell is "evil" players shouldn't have access to it, dude it's a GAME, if you can't separate fiction from reality maybe you shouldn't DM? Because it's a GAME I would tell my players using this spell on anything other than an explicitly evil creature is going to affect their alignment, again this is a GAME we have game mechanics for this, you don't need to be the morality/fun police. The only time I'd consider removing something from the game on moral grounds would be if I'm DMing for children.
Hey now, I'm not saying I'd ever remove this spell from my games. I am super confused/interested in how it got into the player options tho. I was just saying that there are spells that are difficult to use in a more ethical sense and I feel like Magic Jar fits that description
@@smilesschemes How it got into player options is that it's a spell with an interesting affect that opens up narrative possibilities, you know what's also ethically questionable? Stabbing people, clubbing them, perforating them with arrows, setting them on fire, electrocuting them, fuck man if you think Magic Jar is bad have you seen Heat Metal? That's a Cleric spell!
Heat Metal do be very brutal. Honestly, a lot of the typical player actions can be very morally gray. U right
If you are say, undead right, you can't feel sensation that you normally would have felt back when you were alive, so this spell is a way for them to live a sort of quasi alive existence, experiencing sensations that they could no longer experience because their body is dead. Also super useful for Spy type stuff, but if you're anything other than undead, then this spell is not practical at all, your body would die and you would die eventually if you abandon it for long enough, I mean you have to be in your body in order to feed it and drink so it's really not a practical long-term spell for a living creature. But if you have an undead, particularly one that adopts a vapor form or what have you, and then you can contain their body and you can carry their body with them, yeah. Also a vampire can go out in the daytime, a ghost can have physical presence again, a vampire could abandon needing to feed on blood, etc.