A situation with "Banishment"

[zerzix]

I have a situation in my game which I was curious how others would rule on this. I have a player character that was hit with a Prismatic Spray (violet) and sent to another plane. I had not yet rolled or chosen which plane of existence he was on when it returned to his turn. At which point he announced that he was going to cast the spell, “Banishment” on himself. There by sending himself back to his home plane of existence.

My first instinct was to say no way, but he made a few good arguments.

1. I wasn’t sure he could target himself with this spell or with dismissal? The spell reads Target - One or more extraplanar creatures – which he stated that he was now currently one – being on a different plane.

2. If he could target himself would it “banish” him from the current plane he was on to his home plane?

3. Or would it default to Dismissal and have a 20% chance of ending up on a different plane? (which then we rolled a 13%) He then argued that “Banishment” spell was a more powerful version of Dismissal and didn’t have the 20% mischance listed and therefore shouldn’t be accounted for.

Any one else have thoughts on this situation?

 

[freyar]

Well, this seems like a good case for DM ruling. Something interesting when I looked up the spells just now in the PRD:

Dismissal just says it forces the extraplanar creature back to its "proper plane" with a 20% chance of going to a 3rd plane.

Banishment, from the PRD: "It enables you to force extraplanar creatures out of your home plane." So banishment only works if the caster is on his or her home plane in the first place (but there's not the 20% chance).

So it seems that, by RAW, the banishment wouldn't do anything, but dismissal would have sent the caster to a random plane. That might be an RBDM thing to do though.

The difference in wording of the two spells is inherited from 3.5, btw.

 

[frankthedm]

Banish won't help, Dismissal might.

 

[Wycen]

This situation almost came up in our astral campaign a few years ago. And at the time I believed that Banishment would have worked.

However, reparsing the sentence now, I'm saying it wouldn't work because the caster is not on his home plane.

Of course, I'm just going off what I have read in this thread, not investigating everything myself like I did years ago.

 

[zerzix]

Yeah, So far, from here and pazio boards no one has a definit answer. So it will continue to be debated in the group. lol As a GM I allowed it to happen once with the revised rule that it most likely wouldn't work a second time. Rewarded the player for quick thinking, but somewhere I'm certain it wasn't intended to be used as so and was just left without the details.

 

[Micco]

That was the right move. Reward him for thinking and keep the game moving, warning that it might have been divine intervention that helped and it might not work the second time.

I'd definitely rule it didn't work. It clearly isn't the intent of the spells to allow a free plane shift if you aren't on your own plane. But that's my interpretation, ymmv.