The companion piece. If you want the rules, the full 2014 versus 2024 breakdown, and where this spell came from, that’s all in the Create or Destroy Water explainer post. Go read that first, then come back, because here we’re doing the fun part, every way people have tried to squeeze combat, control, and outright chaos out of ten gallons of water.
This is the spell that looks like a canteen refill until somebody at the table asks the words “can I put it in his lungs.” I sorted the best ideas into four buckets. Real uses that lean on the actual rules. Cheeses that are clever and mostly legal. Questionable stuff that lives or dies by your DM. And the deviant stuff, because when a spell makes water appear, somebody always tries to use it to kill a guy.
And one rule that governs this entire spell before we start. Create Water only ever puts water into an open container, and Destroy Water only ever removes water from an open container or clears fog. There is no save, no attack roll, and crucially no target. The spell touches water and space, never a creature directly. Almost every “broken” idea below crashes into that one wall, so keep it in mind the whole way down.
REAL USES (straight from the rules)
1. Never die of thirst again. The honest headline. Ten gallons of clean, drinkable water on demand, and the survival rules run at about one gallon of drinking water per person per day in temperate weather, more in heat. So a single first-level slot waters a big party for a day, tops off everyone’s skins on a desert crossing, or keeps a besieged keep from dying of dehydration. This is the spell’s actual job and it’s a great one in the right campaign. (Straight from RAW, plus the exploration and survival rules.)
2. Water the animals and the crops. Same idea, bigger scale. Warhorses, mules, and camels drink a lot, and a farm or a wagon train in a drought is a genuine adventure problem. Upcast it and you’re making twenty, thirty, forty gallons a cast. It’s not flashy, but a druid who keeps the caravan alive through a dry stretch is the reason the caravan makes it. (RAW plus upcast, ten extra gallons per slot above first.)
3. Put out the fire. The cleanest combat-adjacent use. The rain option drops water in a 30-foot cube and extinguishes exposed flames there, no save, no roll. Burning building, flaming barricade, a room full of lit braziers, a torched supply wagon, gone. If your party is trying to save the burning orphanage instead of loot it, this is your button. (RAW, Create Water rain option.)
4. Snuff the lights and own the dark. A sharper version of the same trick. Extinguish the torches, lanterns, and campfires lighting an enemy camp or a guard post, and suddenly the fight happens in the dark, which is exactly what you want if your side has darkvision and theirs doesn’t. You’re not dealing damage, you’re rewriting the lighting, and lighting decides who has advantage. (RAW, extinguishing exposed flames.)
5. Delete the fog. The underrated one nobody prepares for until they need it. Destroy Water clears fog in a 30-foot cube, so natural mist, a Fog Cloud spell, or a chunk of any foggy obscurement just disappears. Your archers can suddenly see the field again, the ambush loses its cover, the druid’s own Fog Cloud gets cleaned up when it’s in the way. Situational, but when the situation hits, this line is the whole reason you memorized the spell. (RAW, Destroy Water fog option. Whether it clears thicker “cloud” spells like Stinking Cloud is a separate argument, see the Questionable bucket.)
6. Fill the moat, flood the ditch, make the barrier. Because the spell is instantaneous, the water you make is real and permanent, it doesn’t wink out when the spell ends. So you can fill a dry moat before a siege, top off a defensive trench, or pour water into a low pit to make it genuinely harder to cross. Ten gallons at a time is slow, but with time and upcasting it adds up to real terrain that stays after you stop casting. (RAW, instantaneous duration.)
7. Wash it off. Pure utility, but it comes up more than you’d think. Rinse contact poison off a party member, wash acid or filth off gear, clean a wound before a Medicine check, sluice away something you’d rather not touch. Ten gallons of clean water solves a surprising number of “how do we deal with this without touching it” problems. (RAW, clean water.)
CHEESES (clever, and mostly legal)
8. Instantaneous means the water is yours forever. This is the quiet engine behind half the good tricks. There’s no concentration and no duration to maintain, so once you cast, that water is just ordinary permanent water. Fill a container, walk away, and it’s still full tomorrow. Compare that to a concentration spell you have to babysit, and the humble permanence of this one starts looking strong for anything where you want water to stay put. (RAW, instantaneous.)
9. Water as a wall against fire creatures. Older editions were explicit that a fire elemental treated a body of water as an impassable barrier it could not cross, and players still reach for that logic in 5e. The EN World thread on exactly this points out that fire elementals do not breathe, so you cannot “drown” one, but that standing water can still function as terrain a fire creature refuses to enter, with one user noting a fire elemental “cannot enter water or any other nonflammable liquid” and treats it as an impassable barrier. In 5e that’s a DM call, not printed rules, but making a puddle a fire monster won’t walk through is a very reasonable table ruling to ask for. (EN World)
10. Destroy Water as denial. Everyone fixates on making water and forgets you can unmake it. In a desert or shipwreck campaign, destroying an enemy’s water supply is a quiet kill. Emptying a water-filled trap, draining a flooded passage so the party can cross, or wrecking a ritual that needs a bowl of water all work off the same option. It’s niche, but on the day it matters it’s the whole game. (RAW, Destroy Water container option.)
11. Ice bridge, with a helper. On its own the spell just makes liquid water in a container or as rain, so you cannot freeze it. But create the water into a depression or a mold, then have someone shape and chill it with Shape Water, or freeze it with Ray of Frost or cold in a cold environment, and you’ve got the raw material for an ice patch or a rough bridge. The freezing is the other spell’s job, this one just supplies the water. Fully a combo, and the freezing step is where your DM weighs in. (RAW plus a second spell, label it a DM-assisted combo.)
12. Soak them first, then bring the lightning. A cinematic favorite. Douse a target or a patch of ground with the rain option, then have the party’s caster follow up with lightning or cold. Be honest at the table though, 5e has no rule that being wet gives vulnerability to lightning or cold, so this is pure Rule of Cool unless your DM grants a bonus. Great flavor, zero guaranteed mechanics. (RAW gives no wet-vulnerability rule, so this is explicitly a DM call.)
QUESTIONABLE (ask your DM, these get argued to death)
13. The lungs thing. This is the argument this spell is famous for, so know it cold. Can you create ten gallons of water directly inside an enemy’s lungs to drown them instantly? The community answer is no, and it comes up so often that r/DnD veterans call it a meme of bad-faith play. When one DM asked whether a cleric could drown an orc by casting into its lungs, on the reasoning that “when a creature breathes, its lungs become open containers,” the top replies shut it down. “It’s not within the rules, and it’s so commonly attempted by players trying to get an edge outside the spirit of the rule that it’s literally a meme at this point. No, lungs are not an open container. They’re a part of a creature. You also don’t have line of sight on them.” Another poster: “Otherwise this level 1 spell becomes a one action I can kill anyone and win everything button. The spell doesn’t say it can deal damage in its description, so it doesn’t.” A separate r/DnD thread, where a player wanted to create water inside a foe’s bladder to burst it and then in a mouth to drown them, landed the same way, with a mechanics reminder people skip: the spell makes up to ten gallons, so on a tiny “container” most of it just spills out, it deals no damage to whatever holds it, and creatures can hold their breath for one plus their Constitution modifier in minutes anyway, so there’s time to spit it back up. As one top comment put it, “a creature is not a container, let alone an open one.” The D&D Beyond forum thread lands in the same spot. A rare DM might allow a watered-down version with an attack roll and a Constitution save as an interrogation gimmick, but as a kill button it’s a hard no at almost every table. And if you genuinely want a drown-a-guy spell, r/dndnext points you at the honest tool, Watery Sphere from Xanathar’s, which actually targets a creature and offers a save. (r/DnD ; r/DnD, “Create or destroy water problem,” r/DnD ; r/dndnext, “popular illegal exploits,” r/dndnext ; and D&D Beyond forums, “Flooding someone’s lungs,” dndbeyond.com)
14. Does it hurt a fire elemental or a water elemental? Officially, no, and this one actually has a designer ruling. Jeremy Crawford addressed it directly, and the answer is that Create or Destroy Water does not affect elemental creatures, because “a water elemental is not water, it’s a creature,” and the broader principle is that “spells and other effects that target objects or environmental phenomena are ineffective against” monsters. So Destroy Water cannot delete a water elemental and the rain cannot douse a fire elemental, no matter how much sense it seems to make. Your DM can always rule otherwise for their table, but by the book, elementals are immune to this. (Sage Advice, Crawford ruling)
15. Does clearing fog also clear a Stinking Cloud or Cloudkill? The spell says you destroy “fog,” and this is where the exact wording actually helps you. Fog Cloud is literally fog and clears cleanly. Cloudkill is too, because its own text calls it “a 20-foot-radius Sphere of poisonous, yellow-green fog.” So the popular r/DMAcademy thread where a DM let Create or Destroy Water dispel a Cloudkill drew a wide “that’s fair, and arguably RAW” response, on the logic that the spell never says non-magical fog and that parties almost never have it prepared, so reward the planning. One catch the thread flags: your destruction is a 30-foot cube while Cloudkill is a 20-foot-radius sphere, which is 40 feet across, so a single cast trims the cloud rather than deleting the whole thing. Stinking Cloud is the shakier case, because its text says “gas,” not “fog,” so a strict reading leaves it standing. Worth settling before you spend your action hoping. (r/DMAcademy , plus RAW on the word “fog.”)
16. Can a helmet, cupped hands, or a hole in the ground count as the open container? The whole spell hinges on “open container,” and the rules never define exactly what qualifies. A bucket, obviously yes. A barrel, a trough, a waterskin, yes. A depression in the ground, a hollow log, an overturned shield, an open helmet on someone’s head, now you’re asking your DM. This is the single most important ruling to nail down at your table, because it decides whether half this list is possible or not. (RAW is silent on the boundary, so this is DM territory by design.)
17. Fill something to make it overflow or burst. If a container has to be open, can you overfill it to slosh out, foul a room, or dump water on someone standing under a ledge? Pouring ten gallons into a small open pot obviously overflows, and where that water goes and whether it inconveniences anyone is your DM narrating physics. This is also why the “explode a foe’s bladder with ten gallons” pitch fails twice over, and the r/DnD “create or destroy water problem” thread walks right into it: a bladder is not an open container, and even if you pretended it were, the spell makes up to ten gallons and does nothing to damage its container, so the water would simply spill instead of rupturing anything. You’re not going to burst a sealed barrel, because it has to be open, but you can absolutely make a mess on purpose. (RAW open-container rule plus DM adjudication of the spillover; r/DnD)
DEVIANT, FUNNY, AND CURSED
18. The Bag of Holding overfill dream. Somebody always asks. Can you pour ten gallons, about eighty pounds of water, into a Bag of Holding to overload it and make it rupture? Two problems. The bag needs to count as an “open container,” which is already a stretch, and a Bag of Holding’s whole gimmick is that it holds a fixed weight and volume regardless, so ten gallons is nowhere near its limit anyway. It’s a funny mental image and a complete non-starter mechanically, but the sentence gets typed at least once per campaign. (RAW open-container rule plus the Bag of Holding’s capacity rules kill it, so this is a joke, not a build.)
19. Destroy the tavern. The pettiest use on the list. Destroy Water quietly empties up to ten gallons out of any open container in range, so you can drain the innkeeper’s ale barrel, ruin a rival’s water stores, or empty the villain’s decorative fountain for no reason other than spite. Whether the tavern’s ale counts as “water” is a DM call and probably a no, but a clever cleric will absolutely try. (RAW Destroy Water, with a DM call on what counts as water.)
20. Make it rain indoors, purely for the vibe. The rain option does not care that you’re inside. Cast it in the throne room and it drizzles on the king. It puts out his candles, dampens the mood, and technically accomplishes nothing, which is exactly why some player at your table is going to do it at the worst possible moment. This is the soul of the spell, ten gallons of water and infinite bad ideas about where to put them. (RAW rain option.)
So that’s the pile, and I’ll be honest with you, this is a spell that’s far more workhorse than warcrime. The open-container rule and the official “it doesn’t touch creatures” ruling wall off almost every drowning-and-flooding fantasy people bring to it, and what’s left is a genuinely useful survival and utility spell with a few sharp situational combat edges. That’s not a knock. Keeping the party alive in the desert and clearing the fog off your archers wins real sessions. And if you want proof of how hard the community has chewed on this spell, r/DnDcirclejerk has an all-time classic about a beleaguered DM whose entire party is four level-one druids who only cast Create or Destroy Water, drying a troll out cell by cell, blinding bandits by destroying the water in their eyeballs, and flooding a cesspool moat onto a royal procession, which is the exact “the body is an open container, it has holes” logic every real table eventually has to swat down. For now, tell me the truth in the comments, has anyone at your table ever actually gotten a drowning past their DM with this thing, or does the container rule kill it every single time? Let me know below, go read the explainer if you skipped it, and until next time, roll high and stay ridiculous. (r/DnDcirclejerk)
