I feel like I’ve seen a meme of this nature with the exact opposite take on this exact same frame.

I remember offhand it being 50 GP per level of the spell you want to cast, though I can’t say where in the PHB I read that.

It’s 3000 GP just for the material components, plus another 400 to pay the caster. At one gold piece a day (the amount a skilled artisan earns) it’d take 11.5 years to earn a clone with a poor lifestyle (2 SP per day).

So you’re living a poor lifestyle for basically half your professional life, just to earn the ability to repeat your professional life and spend another 11.5 years of it earning the ability to repeat your professional life just to spend 11.5 years of it earning the ability to… you get the idea. You’d also need to find a caster capable of casting an 8th level spell, which is rare.

Possible? Yes. Popular? I doubt it.

A clearer way to phrase it might be “there are no rules for the genre of fantasy”. An individual world needs self-contained rules, yes, but just because Tolkien’s Dwarves have beards regardless of gender doesn’t mean that your Dwarves need to be the same.

Wild magic Sorcerer: I do not control the Lobsters (they just kind of showed up)

You check the label and realize it actually says “Tenser’s floating Dikc”, but the salesman is already gone.

In my eyes, the Rule of Cool is best used as the opposite of the Air Bud Clause. (For those who don’t know; the “Air Bud Clause” refers to a rule in basketball that basically says “it’s not allowed just because there’s no rule against it”.) TTRPGs are imperfect systems, and you are going to run into a scenario that isn’t covered in the rules. Rule of Cool is best used here, rather than to bypass rules that do exist.

But also; some systems can be really crunchy, and a lot of the time it can be more fun for everyone involved if you just say “you know what, that’s cool, let’s do it” than to pause for five minutes to leaf through some rulebook (because seriously; you can’t always know the entire rulebook by heart) trying to determine if and why they can’t.

Of course, doing this too much is dangerous. Hence “in moderation”.