It’s supposed to be metaphorical and whimsical I think If you think about it pretty much every single ingredient for a spell is some type of weird old saying Except for fireball which is literally just the ingredients for gunpowder
Question for people who actually play DnD themselves instead of obsessing bisexually over Lou Zac and Siobhan. Do your tables actually... pay any mind to spell components? At all? Or do your spellcasters just get to cast spells because they're spellcasters and handwave the nitty gritty details?
mostly, if u have a spell, u can use it. depends on what u want to do, like for example fhsy minor spoiler: the bad kids made tinctures and needed every ingredient
Spell components only matter unless they have a gold cost - otherwise, you can just use an arcane focus. That said, I love them and I use them all the time. It's flavor! It's perfectly good flavor that we're throwing away, here!
For a lot of tables the necessity of getting the ingredients goes up with their cost and how advanced the spell is. For most low level spells, my table always played it as basically every general store has a small stock because every baby wizard is using these components and our characters keep full up. We have to go shopping for high level components and things that normal shops wouldn’t keep stocked
