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Cooking Up Contingency Plans
(i.imgur.com)
Since my polymorph meme has only garnered three downvotes so far I thought I'd offer a bit more controversial take, and see if I can manage to stir the pot a bit with this one.
So this sent me down an absolute rabbit hole. As a DM there's a few ways I'd consider to stop this being entirely game-breaking:
Personally I would instead depart from RAW and point out a version of option 2, but a lenient one. Something like "you can do this but you are sapping your very essence to do it. Every time you do it, you permanently lose 10% of your HP" or "every time you do this you increase the number of death saving throws you must succeed before you die". Or my personal favourite: "every time you do this you perturb the very laws of nature. Nature is rather fond of its laws and so decides to perturb you right back. Roll on this table to see what happens." and make the table include the above alongside a few other things and maybe a roll on the wild magic table.
In the end I enjoy ingenuity but the role of DM gives you a lot of latitude to... handle... those who believe they found a loophole.
It goes off but doesn't heal you because the text specifically says
That's flavour text.
You are, in fact, a creature within your reach.
You're a valid target for the spell, but the heal doesn't trigger cause the target isn't someone other than yourself.
But it doesn't say, "only from others."
The mere act of including "from others" is all the proof required.
If Self was valid for the Siphon effect they wouldn't have had to mention it at all, since Self is automatically included as a valid target unless otherwise stated.
I think that’s kind of a stretch. The range of the spell is explicitly “Self”, and the heal triggers off a hit dealing damage to the target.
If this kind of cherry-picking clauses worked, the Paladin “Breaking your Oath” sidebar would be meaningless. All an impenitent Paladin player needs to do is point to the first sentence of the Sacred Oath feature that says “[…] you swear the oath that binds you as a paladin forever.”
Also the fact that a redundant statement is included is not proof of anything. I’ve fielded similar arguments with someone who thought the “Casting the spell doesn’t remove it from your list of prepared spells.” clause in the Spellcasting feature of prepared casters was proof that all other methods of spellcaster deleted the spell after it was cast. Trying to explain that “A spell is a discrete magical effect, a single shaping of the magical energies” is not the same as one-time use only, the same way a sword being a discrete object doesn’t mean swinging the sword is a one time thing, is exhausting.
If we're going strict RAW, the "from others" clause only affects life force, not HP. Spells don't do more than what they say, after all. So you can take HP from others, but not life force.
Thanks to our natural language rules we can easily interpret Life Force as a synonym for HP
And it doesn't say "you cannot fly", yet it doesn't make you capable of flying. This means nothing: The spell does only what it says it does and it quite clearly says "you can siphon life force from others".