Ok, so I get cantrips and I have been looking at Mage Hand and Prestidigitation. Mage hand is pretty self-explanatory, but Prestidigitation is a little more open to interpretation...
I would like to ask my fellow players/GMs in the community:
"How have YOU used Mage Hand or Prestidigitation in game?"
"Why would you recommend _______ as a cantrip over other options?"
I get 5 cantrips for the level I'm at. I only have one more cantrip slot left and I'm trying to decide if this is worth it. My current 4 selections are Daze, Detect Magic, Message, and Read Magic.
Thanks for any input y'all have!
-mb
PS - This may be obvious, but I have to choose from the Sorcerer/Wizard spell list.
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Hard to say. I look at Prestidigitation as the weak anything and everything spell. It's a universal spell, meaning it doesn't really belong or have abilities that are limited to one school of magic. Some things I've done with it recently:
1. Lit some oil by creating a simple spark.
2. Made flowers appear to grow at my feet as I walked through the grass.
3. Created a handful of small flowers to give to a crazy man who said he wanted a tribute of flowers.
4. One of my party members was hallucinating a troll attack, which actually ended up damaging him. I made it look like I was casting a CMW spell, and I even spoke the words my cleric speaks and mimicked his gestures. I also made it give him a tingling sensation in his chest. He believed it was really a CMW spell and it healed him, since the damage was only "believed" damage.
5. I pulled a Gandalf by manipulating someone's tobacco smoke in our home into a boat and sailed it out the window, implying that I was irritated that he was smoking in the room.
I can't say that all these uses are RAW or RAI, but the fact it they were VERY fun uses, and sparked some excellent RP. The way I look at it, the idea is minor manipulation of the essence around you.
I can say that use of Prestidigitation is heavily based on your own imagination and problem solving skills. You can use it as often as you can come up with a silly idea of how some minor magic would make a situation cooler. I use prestidigitation in combat only about 20% of the time I actually use it. Most of it is flavor/rp stuff.
Hope that helped.
Prestidigitation is great for getting blood/ichor/fluids out of clothing after a hard fight and provide a fresh, clean scent as well. Much easier than having the cleric dump create water spells over and over again until you're a sopping mess but still stinky.
The ever popular "little blue ball of light" to temporarily distract a guard is always nice, too.
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I use it to change the odors sometimes faced in a place.
I use it to change the colors of clothing sometimes, especially if i am using disguise/bluff to impersonate someone.
I use it to annoy the hell out of someone by constantly casting it on their food to make EVERYTHING taste like chicken.
I use it to clean my clothing after having been doused by something icky.
I use it to create small items to throw down a dark hallway and see if something responds to the noise.
I use it to soil clothing of smarmy stuck up paladins that piss me off.
I use it for a variety of flavorful, fun, and sometimes completely inane and unimportant tasks, and sometimes I have used it to make an important disguise roll better.
Its fun.
Mage hand can be more useful perhaps, but Prestidigitation is a spell that requires lots of imagination.
Also seen it used to flavor drinks, make cups, or some-such and minor telekenesis. Combine with ghost-sounds to give the impression that someone's hiding behind the curtians to distract.
It seems like a sortof does any cantrips to a much lesser degree and doesn't grant much mechanical bonuses.
Conjurs a ball of light? You can read by it, but can't see past 5 ft ahead of you with it, etc.
I'll agree with all of the above -- every bard in all of my campaigns takes it, not because it's an effective spell, but because it adds greatly to the storytelling element. Examples:
- Drying the party off after a soaking rain.
- Producing crude miniatures while recounting a tale and placing them on the table and moving them about to add depth to the story
- Presenting flowers to a beautiful woman (or man)
- Giving things to children to make your party more popular with the NPCs
Mage Hand has more practical uses: Dropping coins in obviously-trapped slots; sliding ropes across a floor, etc. But Prestidigitation is more fun to play.
Cool ideas. I kinda thought Prestidigitation might be a good RP spell. I like that it can be very creative. Thanks for all the input. Anyone else want to add to this? I'd love to hear how others have used it!
-mb
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On a rather flamboyant sorcerer I played, it was used to create a very small wind to have his hair and cloak blowing dramatically on any entrance he made.
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One trick I used Prestidigitation for was a drow assassin detector.
A drow assassin had just killed an NPC and fled invisibly out the window toward the courtyard. I teleported to block the exit from the courtyard and I had already had up my decorative shower of cherry blossoms (prestidigitation effect in a 5 to 10 foot area around me) since we were impressing the local lords and ladies. Well prestidigitation effects automatically vanish if they interact with another magic effect (this was 3.5e not sure if that is still true of pathfinder). So I knew the blossoms would vanish when the invisible assassin closed on my position. One quick casting of baleful polymorph later and I had a new pet frog assassin.
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possible uses for prestidigitation (sorc0)-- Color spots on things so you don't get lost for at least an hour. Make people smell unique so they can be tracked. Or just soil everything! Even your skin tone and whiten your teeth (+diplo?), or add bruises to look ugly. Amplifies your voice, cold sensation can ease pain, sweeten or improve the taste of food (+cook), make handwriting fancier/worse(+linguist?), hide body odor (i.e., I smell like pine needles in a forest) (+stealth), sorting and gathering lightweight items, REMOVES BLOOD AND GRIME FROM ADVENTURERS CLOTHES - Unsoiling clothing could enable one to make a makeshift latrine in a confined space, healthy alternative to salt, Tie your own shoes without touching them, tie SOMEBODY ELSES shoes together without touching them, never sweat again, Feel comfy temperature wise in warm/dank environments - make somebody else very hot or cold in their armor, Put insignia on things, Dramatically blow your hair and/or clothing around (+Intim?), Sound effects: Make somebody's sword gleam, crackle or crack loudly (intim), Make poison things smell like coffee/cream/whiskey/etc, Soil a rival speakers clothes before he presents in public, Motion blur a dagger/fingers/forks, Make awful food you must sustain yourself on delicious, Change people's hair/eye color at will (+disguise), Blow smoke at will, Color coordinate weapons and clothes, instant hot sauce, Color camouflage/black-clothed people's dress to garish colors so they are easy to pursue (if he's wearing black, make him orange), Simulate bloodstains on surfaces to cause distraction or incriminate somebody, create an illusory fly to pester or distract someone, Make a skeleton move to scare somebody, Dry a spell book, Cause fake gems to sparkle and glow, retrieve/steal keys, drop a rock on somebody to wake them up, light a candle, Always be clean and fresh, temporary tattoos (for style or impersonation), "clean" parts of a binding circle because they have to be continuous and perfect, make forged document look old and brittle, Build a ship in a bottle and other fine manipulations, Make valuable item look old and worthless so it might be overlooked or not recognized for what it is, Unclasping a garment to make it fall off, create small objects: Gems/notes/goodies, Drink somebody under the table -- as you can make YOUR beer look and smell and taste real - but it is water, Make normal water seem to boil and hiss when dropped on an object - to convince other folk it is magically hot and too dangerous to touch/say water is holy water and lie that item is evil/cursed and doubly dangerous, chain numerous color/movement effects and tricks above to cause an entertaining diversion at a party while everyone else searches a house, turn a coin into a ring for an hour, turn a scrap of paper into a scrap of linen, and then change that into a rose, Dampen torches/gunpowder, gather coins all over the floor into collectable piles, Misdirection: Have small objects fall behind somebody looking for you -- strike when their back is turned, Make somebody's imposing black armor a shade of effeminate purple, Run a shell game, Dampen a man's trousers as he shows off in front of his friends to shame him, Extinguish light sources with dampen, Cheat SHAMELESSLY at cards (pair? Royal flush!), Shake/Stir a volatile substance, Shake/Stir a Martini, Don't just change your odor to something local, change your COLOR to something local!, Make your voice frightening or soothing, empty somebody's quiver, move a dagger to cut bowstrings/quiver straps, remove a wig, change the color of somebody's uniform to raise suspicion, change a society woman's dress to a color of last year's fashion, Gather Caltrops so they can safely be retrieved or crossed, Untie a belt pouch, move pebbles or caltrops into boots taken off in camp or barracks -- then raise the alarm, make other objects smell/taste like you to throw off stalking dogs, sovereign glue does not weigh much -- glue things together quickly and well -- like weapons in scabbards/doors/levers -- even somebody's shoes, color a sheet of paper same as the floor and cover a hole with it (even hover it), TRIP TRAPS that respond to a pound or less of force, make a statue cry tears, Maybe Start an avalanche/Rockslide, Create a (small, clumsy, but functional) mirror to use as a signal or to reflect a gaze, Mood lighting and theme music! move a candle to cause a fire, silently conveying a plan with static symbols in the air, Repeatedly clean a veil/mask to serve as a filter, Purify water by repeatedly pouring it through a cloth and cleaning the cloth. Color a room to search for anti-magic zones - The zone won't color. LIGHTING OIL vs. swarms, have everything of value of 1 lb. or less quietly float itself out of a room, hold small objects steady or prevent them from falling (+SlightoHand?), DISTURB undead w/o doing damage to cause inactive undead to rise (a weak disrupt undead), make the back half of an arrow and hold it to your eye to fool somebody into thinking you were shot dead by arrows fired into your area or a trap -- then jump up and hose them. (or do this to the rouge so he can backstab.)
I think the only reason my cleric put up with the party arcane archer sometimes was because he'd use prestidigitation to clean her up after a long day of exploding zombies :)
Most of my survivalist characters, rogues, rangers, and barbarians usually get this homemade item, Undergarments of Cleanliness, no-slotted item that can cast prestidigitation 1-3 times per day depending on how much they want to spend.
We had a rather amusing incident in a campaign where some cultists were trying to herd a bullette into attacking a local town.
"What is a bullette's favorite food?" we asked the GM.
"Sheep," the GM said.
The party then used prestidigitation to make the cultists smell strongly of sheep.
Good times were had by all.
Except the cultists.
Pretty sure that Bulette's are overly fond of halflings per the bestiary entry. Should have made them smell like Halflings.
Awesome! Haha, I love that book of a post that Vicon wrote, and the bullette thing is hilarious! Thanks all!!