Indistinguishable from Magic

Find Familiar Let's start this week's installment off with a joke: If it's that familiar, why do you have to find it? Hilarious. Now we move on to the assessment portion of the program: Maybe this says more about me and the people I play D&D with than it does the spell itself, but I have never, in forty years of playing this dumb game, been in a situation where a wizard having a familiar has contributed in a positive way to the game. I've had plenty of players who tried to use their familiar as a sort of shortcut to omniscience* ("I'll send my hawk into the dungeon to find all the traps!"), and I've had plenty who had jolly fun with their familiar as a pet , but I've never seen, as a player or as a dungeon master, a game session where it contributed in a practical way that justified wasting a 1st-level spell that could otherwise have been spent on Magic Missile. If you want a cat, get a cat, but don't pretend it's high magic. Incidental...

Fabricate Finally, we're free of the tyranny of the Es, and into what I call "The F ZONE"! Why am I so excited about the F ZONE? Because, buddies and pals, it has fire  in it.  But before that, we have to get through some dross like this, which basically lets you do with magic what people have been doing for thousands of years with good old manual labor. Friends, I'd be lying to you if I said I didn't sit down and calculate the actual cost-to-benefit ratio of using a 4th-level spell to turn a cluster of trees into a bench, but why bore you with those numbers when this entry is so boring already? You could make the argument that this could liberate a couple of people from some wage drudgery, but the overarching point is that you don't have to use a relatively potent bit of wizardry to save you the work of a lathe, an overseas below-minimum-wage worker, and a trip to Bed, Bath, & Beyond. Real-World Rating:  2 (Mostly Pointless) Faerie Fire What if Dancing Li...

Enthrall This is basically "Bullshit: The Spell". On casting you let out a string of gibberish that your target, if they fail a save, and you get to have advantage for one minute or "Concentration". I dunno, maybe I'm getting jaded already, but this seems like something you could replicate just by telling a story about a dream you once had. Real-World Rating:  3 (Pretty Ineffectual) Etherealness The rare example of a spell that's vastly  more effective in the 'real world' than in D&D, Etherealness lets you basically turn into a living ghost -- invisible, intangible, and able to go anywhere and see anything -- for eight hours . In the game, this is fraught with peril, as you are still subject to spells, ethereal beings, and other risks, but in our reality, it's basically a ticket to omniscience. You don't get it until seventh level, but it's worth it!  Basically beats almost any kind of divination spell there is. Real-World Rating :  1...