polymorph and eating someone?

[Degwerks]

Would you die if you ate an enemy while polymorphed into a T-rex, and later reverted back to your humanoid form ? Would the sudden change in mass burst you open? I'm thinking I better not try it...

[Rusvul]

...I'm pretty sure that's not covered by RAW.

I would rule that once you eat something (and it's no longer alive) it counts as part of your creature. Otherwise you run into problems when the Wizard who just ate a meal polymorphs into a mouse... So if you ate someone and reverted while they were still alive, I'd rule they're shunted out of you. If they die and then you revert, then they're part of you and you're fine.

[ji6]

Of course! Imagine, if things changed sizes with the, how rich druids would be by wildshaping into rats and putting small pieces of gold in their mouth for the reverse effect (aka, gold becoming huge)! Businessmen would want to become druids! Druid schools would quickly fill the landscape, before governments shut them down due to inflation! Then, the bans of the polymorph spell of all forms would come to life, causing war between many spellcasters and everyone else! This would be chaos!!!!!! The suicide bombing druids with long bombs in their snake before expanding and exploding would cause chaos and even most terrorist would become disenfranchised, resulting in terrorist unions, leading to the downfall of man!

AKA: You just have to explode, sorry mate. :P

[Mellack]

I would say that as long as the person you ate is dead (not just swallowed whole and still kicking), then they count the same way as equipment. They no longer qualify as a creature, but instead count as an object, and follow those rules. So you could have the meal merge with you or be dropped when you shift.

[Dalebert]

AKA: You just have to explode, sorry mate. :P

For the reasons given in the post right before yours, this interpretation is absurd. By the same reasoning, druids and wizards would explode whenever they turn into small creatures because they have food in their stomachs and intestines in various stages of digestion that won't fit inside a raven or snake or whatever.

Sorry, the "you explode" interpretation is disqualified because it breaks everything.

If whatever you ate is dead, it's no longer an entity. It's now just food and it transforms with you.

And there's no reason it has to go the other way because it presents no complications. At worst, if you turn into a T Rex, you're just kind of hungry because your stomach is empty. Probably not a problem since you probably did so in order to eat some bad guys.

[Shining Wrath]

It's magic, so it can make no sense and still work. Your gear also appears and disappears - where does a wizard's spellbook go while she's a T-Rex? If someone wounds the T-Rex in exactly the right spot, does it damage the spellbook?

There's also a complete and total non-conservation of mass going on here. This isn't Fritz Leiber where the Grey Mouser left a puddle behind when becoming a rat, and drained matter away from a couple of corpulent ladies when reverting back. The multiverse supplies the new T-Rex body, when you revert it returns the old one and takes the T-Rex body back. There may not in fact be any "atoms" in common between the two bodies. Or maybe there are some, but atoms are added and subtracted as needed, created and destroyed by the energy of the spell.

In the big picture, the question of what happens to undigested matter seems a relatively trivial matter.

[HarrisonF]

With most magic effects, if there is a mass collision, then something gets expelled to the closest available spot. For example, teleport and wall of force both do this.

We play that polymorph does the same thing if switching to or from causes spatial conflicts, such as eating someone and then switching back. Polymorph is already really good without additional shenanigans like that.

[Malifice]

What kind of a monster is eating a person while wild shaped anyway?

[Rusvul]

The kind that can polymorph into a Giant Frog and wants to deal 2d4 Acid Damage per round for free against those pesky halflings.

[Malifice]

The kind that can polymorph into a Giant Frog and wants to deal 2d4 Acid Damage per round for free against those pesky halflings.

Still, pretty monstrous.

Can you imagine it?