I am creating an Illithid race for one of my players to use, but the mind blast ability is giving me a lot of trouble. I have added it as a racial ability with an associated action. This is intended to work as a 15-foot radius sphere centered on the character, but that's where I'm running into issues. Initially, I tried to set this as a spell action, spell range to self, area of effect to sphere, and area of effect size at 15. However, all I see on the character sheet when doing this is that the range is self. There is no indication that it is a 15-foot radius sphere except in the description where I wrote that out.
I tried changing the spell range type from self to 15 feet, but that sets it up as a ranged attack that could be cast up to 15 feet from the character (which is not correct). At another user's suggestion, I changed the attack range to 15 feet instead. This gets the range to display more or less correctly, but then displays an attack bonus (which is not correct as this is an auto hit ability) and adds the ability modifier to the damage roll (again incorrect). As noted in the original thread, the part of this that seems like a bug is the fact that the ability score type field is required since it specifically says "if applicable." There are plenty of instances where this should not be required, so I'm not sure why it is.
The end goal here is just to get this to display as an AOE attack centered on the character a la Arms of Hadar.
A potential solution: You could make the ability a homebrew spell, and then have the racial ability grant the spell?
Eh, that doesn't really work. There are a lot of required fields there that don't apply (like spell level, school, and class availability), plus it would show up in spells (I assume).
It's been a while, but I see that this still doesn't seem to have been fixed... it seems to me like AOE options in the actions section just don't do anything. Pretty annoying :(
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Initially created this in a different forum thread (https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/homebrew-house-rules/25231-need-some-help-creating-racial-traits), but I want to summarize it here as I think it is actually a bug.
I am creating an Illithid race for one of my players to use, but the mind blast ability is giving me a lot of trouble. I have added it as a racial ability with an associated action. This is intended to work as a 15-foot radius sphere centered on the character, but that's where I'm running into issues. Initially, I tried to set this as a spell action, spell range to self, area of effect to sphere, and area of effect size at 15. However, all I see on the character sheet when doing this is that the range is self. There is no indication that it is a 15-foot radius sphere except in the description where I wrote that out.
I tried changing the spell range type from self to 15 feet, but that sets it up as a ranged attack that could be cast up to 15 feet from the character (which is not correct). At another user's suggestion, I changed the attack range to 15 feet instead. This gets the range to display more or less correctly, but then displays an attack bonus (which is not correct as this is an auto hit ability) and adds the ability modifier to the damage roll (again incorrect). As noted in the original thread, the part of this that seems like a bug is the fact that the ability score type field is required since it specifically says "if applicable." There are plenty of instances where this should not be required, so I'm not sure why it is.
The end goal here is just to get this to display as an AOE attack centered on the character a la Arms of Hadar.
A potential solution: You could make the ability a homebrew spell, and then have the racial ability grant the spell?
Eh, that doesn't really work. There are a lot of required fields there that don't apply (like spell level, school, and class availability), plus it would show up in spells (I assume).
It's been a while, but I see that this still doesn't seem to have been fixed... it seems to me like AOE options in the actions section just don't do anything. Pretty annoying :(