A/2

Animate Objects

I'm a little torn on this one. It's a classic higher-level spell that sounds cool but has limited utility; there's not a lot of practical things you could get, say, an animated credenza to do for you that you couldn't just pay a regular person to do. It also only lasts a minute, so it's not like you can even have the fun of bringing a mailbox to life and having it haul your laundry around.

So it's probably just going to be used for extremely rare circumstances (having a couch throw itself in front of a door instead of having to drag it there yourself) or for combat. The latter is a bit intriguing; even Tiny-sized objects have a surprisingly high number of hit points, so it could be kind of fun to watch a cop get beaten up by a folding chair, but it's still kind of a gimmick, and a lot more effort than just using a handgun or a fireball spell. In the end, most of the enjoyment you would get out of this would be making your own Transformers.

Real-World Rating 4 (More Trouble That It's Worth)*

Antilife Shell

This is a good one. If you assume the 'real world' is a place without magic** and lacking in undead, this lets you create a force field that no living being can pass through for up to an hour. You could still get hurt, and the Construct exemption means someone could sic a drone or one of those freaky robot dogs on you, but otherwise, this is a good one to have in your pocket.

Real-World Rating:  7 (Effective)

Antimagic Shell

A perfect example of a spell that is jaw-droppingly powerful in the context of D&D, but absolutely worthless in the 'real world'. In a fantasy RPG context, this is incredible! It's a magical force field that can't be penetrated by any spell, magic item, or summoned creature, for an hour! It makes you basically invulnerable to all but the most simple, basic threats.

In the 'real world', since our magic-user is the only entity with any magic powers, id does literally nothing.

Real-World Rating: 1 (Worthless)

Aura of Life

Not the most effective healing spell in the world, and the anti-necrotic damage factor is mooted by the lack of necromancy in the real world, but it's still a good emergency life-saver, and it's quicker and more effective than waiting for a paramedic to show up.

Real-World Rating: 7 (Effective)

Aura of Purity

This is a good example of a spell that has a very specific and narrow application, but within those confines, it's pretty great.

Here's what it does:  for up to an hour, our spellcaster is surrounded by a magical aura that prevents anyone within a 30-foot radius from contracting a disease.  An absolute boon to, say, emergency medical workers -- it'd be pretty great to have this in the COVID-19 era. It also grants resistance to poisons and advantages on saves against blindness, charm, deafness, fright, paralysis, or stunning. Not something that would be super useful in modern combat, which tends to focus pretty heavily on guns and explosives, but it would be great for all kinds of frontline rescue workers and the like. A fine entry in the category of spells that you could use to make a lot of money or help people, but only within a strict set of criteria.

Real-World Rating: 5 (Effective But Limited)

Aura of Vitality

The last of the 5th-edition Aura spells, this one is pretty straightforward despite its boner-pill name: it adds 2d6 hit points to anyone of the spellcaster's choice within its range. Mostly just useful for yourself or your flunkies in a combat situation, although you could back-door it into a general ability to heal people, which is another one of those curious effects that seems banal and trivial in the D&D setting but would be a literal miracle in the real world, especially if you live in a country with no public health care system. (I can see this sort of thing also being useful, or at least profitable, in an athletic context -- sort of magical steroids. But that's some pretty long-range thinking for our magic-user, becoming a shadowy sports-medicine guru.)

Real-World Rating: 7 (Effective)

Awaken

This expensive, dramatic spell basically allows our magic-user to make an animal or plant sentient! Under their control for an entire month, their tree, trout, or timber wolf becomes fully mobile, able to communicate in a spoken language of their choice, and gain the intelligence of an average human, permanently. 

Now, in practical terms, this isn't all that great, unless your idea of a good time is having a sentient trout for a friend. But the awakened creature retains its intelligence -- though not its loyalty to the magic-user who cast the spell -- after the spell's duration is over, which creates, shall we say, a rather dramatic social problem. What would the world to if there was a talking tree with demonstrable intelligence walking around? Would the authorities recognize a sentient fish as due the protections of the law? How would a wolf that can speak with men relate to men -- and to its fellow wolves -- once it was no longer bound to a spellcaster but still gifted (or cursed) with sapience? It creates all kinds of thorny ethical, moral, and legal questions. I don't even want to think about a world where someone spends most of a year creating hundreds of bears with full consciousness, suddenly able to make demands on society.  Fun?  Undoubtedly. Terrifying?  Unquestionably. 

Real-World Rating: 4 (More Trouble Than It's Worth)

*: The full Real-World Ratings, for the record:

1 (Worthless)

2 (Mostly Pointless)

3 (Pretty Ineffectual)

4 (More Trouble That It's Worth)

5 (Effective But Limited)

6 (Pretty Okay)

7 (Effective)

8 (Very Effective)

9 (An All-Time Great)

10 (Essential)

**: It might be worth exploring what we mean by the premise of this blog, which is that we have a fantasy-world magic-user with a full complement of spells from Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition in the contemporary world. For the sake of the experiment, we're assuming that magic still exists, but that the secrets of using it have been lost to everyone; there are no magical beasts, dragons, undead, or anything else we couldn't find in our actual daily lives, but this magic-user is somehow able to summon the old gods and eldritch powers in order to cast whatever spell they choose. In other words, he cannot be challenged with magic!  Why?  That's beyond the scope of this blog. But it's a double-edged sword: being the world's only magic-user supercharges some of their spells, but renders others completely worthless***. More on this later.

***:  Like, say, Antimagic Field.