House rules MUST be announced beforehand. That is the only thing fair to the players. For my campaign I handed a hard copy to the group, with a soft copy available 24/7.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here, my friend.
Yes, of course, any house rules the DM has going in, must be announced and agreed to beforehand.
However, sometimes things come up in live play that require the DM to make a ruling on the spot, and afterwards the table decides to "house rule" something to avoid having to "make it up on the spot" in the future. Such adjustments mid-stream must be allowed to happen. Of course, once this new House Rule is made, it must be added to the document and a new round of print-outs (or PDFs or whatever they are) distributed.
As an example, I have a player who was itching to take counterspell -- because, I think, he expected it to work the way he has seen it on one of the popular D&D shows. That is, the DM announces the spell being cast and the level at which it is being cast, and the player can then, ex post facto, decide if he wants to counterspell. This is, of course, not what it says in the rules. So I posted a house rule ahead of time, that per RAW, and per XGE, it takes a reaction to ID a spell, and a reaction to counterspell, and thus one can do one, or the other, but not both. Either you counterspell "blind" or you ID the spell but then can't counter. He was very unhappy with this (mostly because he saw it as a 'nerf' to the spell), and we had a long conversation. In it, he succeeded in convincing me that there would be no reason to ID a spell as a reaction, if you can't do anything about it. And I decided he had a point -- why, really, would anyone bother, since the act of IDing it precluded any possible reaction to the spell once you know which one is going off? At the same time I had seen a rule here, I think from Pantagruel, saying if they successfully ID a spell he allows his players to cast CS as part of the reaction. I offered this as a compromise and my player agreed it was reasonable. I then changed the standing house rule, and sent out an email informing all the players of this change and why we made it.
In my view this sort of thing is not only legit but must be done from time to time... as we see in live play how a rule is working, we have to decide if we like it or not, and whether we need to change it or not. One cannot expect a DM to know all the possible house rules we will need from Day 1 -- especially not if the DM has never run 5e before (as I, at the time I wrote my house rule document, had not).
I think we in total agreement that sometimes, there are conflicts in RAW. It is not perfect, hence why JC had a sub-industry of tweets dealing with clarifications. And if a DM decides after the fact that "hey, I don't like how this combination/interaction plays out" and House Rules it, no problem. That is the prerogative, even the the job, of a DM.
What I am talking about is stuff that is innately wrong, stuff that there is no possible conflict, or possible re-interpretation, other than a complete departure from established game mechanics. That is the garbage that drove me nuts in that last session. There has NEVER been a situation, through ANY edition, where touching a player with your foot to complete Cure Wounds works, because your hands are full. That is just a bad player thinking "maybe I can get away with this."This player was not a child, but played D&D for over 20 years, off and on.
The natural extension, if the DM had allowed that first rule of cool, would have been: "It would be cool if I cast Cure Wounds as a Held Action, and the player on their turn touched my ankle, and that triggered them getting the effect of Cure Wounds."
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Or, if we go with the rule of cool logic:
Yeah, you carve out instantly a huge chunk of ice, turning it into a massive cloud of super-heated steam, that has explosive force, since you just turned over a thousand cubic feet of ice into steam in a split second. All within 50 feet of you, including yourself, need to roll new characters.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
Fire verse ice is a pretty obvious real world interaction. The rules as written don't consider how the spell should react to every possible substance it can be applied against so a situational ruling is necessary. The DM wound it back to making the area shakey, that's a pretty minimal result. Absolutely nothing like the result you'd expect from a disintergrate, where the wall would have vaporised. It sounds like the enemy suffered no damage, so from an on the fly ruling of a unique circumstance it really doesn't sound too bad.
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
please get a big sheet of ice and a flamethrower and use said flamethrower on the ice and tell me that the fire wouldnt do anything.
sometimes real life physics do affect d&d.
If i were dm i would say that burning hands would melt the ice a bit, not all the way but it would melt the ice, because thats what fire and ice do
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"The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren't in charge. You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game" - Dungeon Masters Guide
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
A sheet of flame melting ice is not the same as disintegrating any kind of material.
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How big and how thick is the ice? How cold is the environment?
It's a spell effect, but seems good precedent to see how wall of ice handles fire:
The wall is an object that can be damaged and thus breached. It has AC 12 and 30 hit points per 10-foot section, and it is vulnerable to fire damage. Reducing a 10-foot section of wall to 0 hit points destroys it and leaves behind a sheet of frigid air in the space the wall occupied.
This is a ten foot wide by ten foot tall section of ice that is one foot thick. I think a reasonable table can recognize the wall of ice's standing, so to speak, as precedent for using magical fire to work against ice. Since I don't know the particulars of the ice formation in the scenario we can't know what a 10x10x1 melt off would do the stability of the structure, though sounds like something a table or DM alone could work out via napkin physics.
I think the superhot steam discharge is a bit of an overreach of vindictive mindset. I could see the melt become slush and then freeze over where PCs are standing probably resulting in difficult terrain effects (which may be in play or may have been ignored because the characters were geared for ice walking, such gear probably getting mired in a slushy fluid situation.
I have a feeling someone may wail about magic ice not being best precedent but the way the ice is articulated in the spell seems to work with what I can remember of icy features being described mechanically in published content.
Again, I think you have a fair grievance if certain "cool moves" disenfranchises other PCs of what should be rule legit actions, but there is a line between saying ones peace to respectfully disagree with how a game is conducted and tantrum. Extrapolating a TPK as part of your protest gets across the line, but I suppose is a more productive stance, if you were communicating these objections to your actual group rather than venting here, than getting your thumb ready to hit that "walk away from game mid session" button. I think what's being missed is at the end of the day, the game is dialogic and how you approach conflict interpersonally may be as much a source of frustration as this particular table's culture. A lesson that applies to gaming as much as it does arguing on the internet. Who wants to form a Cult of Good Sports?
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
A sheet of flame melting ice is not the same as disintegrating any kind of material.
The spell's usage is explicit. There is no room for interpretation.
There are multiple ways to look at this:
RAW: That has been asked and answered above.
Rule of cool (my way): Also asked and answered above: roll a new char.
Applying real life to this situation: A split second of heat applied to a solid wall of ice, who knows how thick, has essentially no effect at all, unless the heat was MASSIVE, and in that case, see DM rule of cool version above.
Rule of cool (the way the player wants it, which is a theme park version with all glory, no consequences): Yeah, the ice suddenly disappears, with no physical residue.
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
please get a big sheet of ice and a flamethrower and use said flamethrower on the ice and tell me that the fire wouldnt do anything.
sometimes real life physics do affect d&d.
If i were dm i would say that burning hands would melt the ice a bit, not all the way but it would melt the ice, because thats what fire and ice do
Tell you what. Go put a container of water in your freezer. The bigger the better. Freeze it for a few days. Then build a fire. Dump that what, ice object that is less than a cubic foot, into the fire. It does NOT immediately melt and evaporate. Now scale that up by a factor of a thousand for a 10 x 10 x 10 section of an ice wall. Then get back to me.
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
A sheet of flame melting ice is not the same as disintegrating any kind of material.
The spell's usage is explicit. There is no room for interpretation.
There are multiple ways to look at this:
RAW: That has been asked and answered above.
Rule of cool (my way): Also asked and answered above: roll a new char.
Applying real life to this situation: A split second of heat applied to a solid wall of ice, who knows how thick, has essentially no effect at all, unless the heat was MASSIVE, and in that case, see DM rule of cool version above.
Rule of cool (the way the player wants it, which is a theme park version with all glory, no consequences): Yeah, the ice suddenly disappears, with no physical residue.
None of this warrants a comparison to Disintegrate.
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How big and how thick is the ice? How cold is the environment?
It's a spell effect, but seems good precedent to see how wall of ice handles fire:
The wall is an object that can be damaged and thus breached. It has AC 12 and 30 hit points per 10-foot section, and it is vulnerable to fire damage. Reducing a 10-foot section of wall to 0 hit points destroys it and leaves behind a sheet of frigid air in the space the wall occupied.
This is a ten foot wide by ten foot tall section of ice that is one foot thick. I think a reasonable table can recognize the wall of ice's standing, so to speak, as precedent for using magical fire to work against ice. Since I don't know the particulars of the ice formation in the scenario we can't know what a 10x10x1 melt off would do the stability of the structure, though sounds like something a table or DM alone could work out via napkin physics.
I think the superhot steam discharge is a bit of an overreach of vindictive mindset. I could see the melt become slush and then freeze over where PCs are standing probably resulting in difficult terrain effects (which may be in play or may have been ignored because the characters were geared for ice walking, such gear probably getting mired in a slushy fluid situation.
I have a feeling someone may wail about magic ice not being best precedent but the way the ice is articulated in the spell seems to work with what I can remember of icy features being described mechanically in published content.
Again, I think you have a fair grievance if certain "cool moves" disenfranchises other PCs of what should be rule legit actions, but there is a line between saying ones peace to respectfully disagree with how a game is conducted and tantrum. Extrapolating a TPK as part of your protest gets across the line, but I suppose is a more productive stance, if you were communicating these objections to your actual group rather than venting here, than getting your thumb ready to hit that "walk away from game mid session" button. I think what's being missed is at the end of the day, the game is dialogic and how you approach conflict interpersonally may be as much a source of frustration as this particular table's culture. A lesson that applies to gaming as much as it does arguing on the internet. Who wants to form a Cult of Good Sports?
Your point about a Wall of Ice would as close to this detour as one can get. Assuming Burning Hands could be perverted into the use you suggest, lets look at the math. A 10 x 10 x 1 section has 30 HP, and Vulnerable to Fire. Burning Hands does 3d6 damage, so lets double that to 6d6 because of Fire Vulnerability. So it is now 21 points of damage. That is still not enough to destroy that 10 x 10 x 1 section, let alone something dozens of feet thick, or even hundreds of feet thick.
And yeah, the only reason I bring up a TPK is because I have people ignoring the precise writeup of the spell to suggest "But this is cool". It pisses me off. A TPK would be just as absurd as me allowing any damage to the ice wall at all.
But that Burning Hands was just one of 7 specific items in a single session. It has a cumulative effect. And when the DM says it is "minutiae", well, that pretty much ends it for me. I will give it next session, and if it goes as badly as I expect, yeah, I will walk. The classy thing would be to finish the session, and leave quietly. But I have found that does not have much impact. I hope I am wrong. The story itself is good, and I really like playing a simple Scout Rogue, but this one player is getting worse, more emboldened, every session. And now that the DM has said that he endorses that style of play, well, that is not for me. This one player ruins it for me.
There is no point discussing whether burning hands works on a wall of ice. It's not relevant at all.
OP has fun playing by the rules. The rest of his group has fun *not* playing by the rules. Two different playstyles that don't work together (without heavy compromise). The choice to make is perfectly clear. Sorry your group doesn't work for you, OP.
The result being discussed was not that the wall suffered severe damage, only that the guy perched on a small ledge above got worried by what was happening below and jumped off. Did he think the fire might continue? Did the impact give him a jolt and he decided his footing was poor? It almost sounds like an intimidation rather than a direct physical effect, as described the enemy was unharmed. The effect as described was minimal but reasonably explained from a story perspective. If the DM had ruled the wall came down, then I'd agree he went too far, but he actually said no to the attempted "rule of cool" pulling it back to a much more reasonable level.
There is no point discussing whether burning hands works on a wall of ice. It's not relevant at all.
OP has fun playing by the rules. The rest of his group has fun *not* playing by the rules. Two different playstyles that don't work together (without heavy compromise). The choice to make is perfectly clear. Sorry your group doesn't work for you, OP.
That is the truth, unfortunately. Or at least ONE of the players, who is enabled by the DM. The rest of the group I am sure would be happy to play by the rules. The newest guy (last session was his first) played in my pre-Covid campaign, and he fit in really well in my campaign. But this one "creative role-playing "guy, well, different story......
here has NEVER been a situation, through ANY edition, where touching a player with your foot to complete Cure Wounds works, because your hands are full. That is just a bad player thinking "maybe I can get away with this.
Right, this is an example of what I was saying -- being able to touch with a foot to Cure Wounds is not an attempt to "be creative" here. It is not an attempt to "recognize the vision of one's character that cannot be encompassed by all of these constricting Gygaxian rules..." It is a blatant attempt to be able to have a "free hand" while holding a shield and a sword (or whatever) in the actual hands. He doesn't want to waste time sheathing the sword, so he comes up with some B/S that is clearly designed to make his character OP, allowing it to do things the rules say you can't do.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
If I read the story correctly then the player asked to heal with his foot but the DM said no. So we agree the DM did the right thing and applied the rules correctly? Not an example of poor rule application like the dim light example.
If I read the story correctly then the player asked to heal with his foot but the DM said no. So we agree the DM did the right thing and applied the rules correctly? Not an example of poor rule application like the dim light example.
The DM made the correct ruling on this.
It was the only time he made the correct ruling. But the fact that some player even considered talking about it enrages me. That player is a bad player. Because the player never checked the rules, or decided the rules did not apply to his character, or thought he could push the DM to allow it. Take your pick. They are all the hallmarks of a bad player.
The thing that gets me the most here is the guy’s (not OP’s, the cleric’s) claim that Rule of Cool is what separates D&D from other board games. Just...no. I’m a more by the book, tough combats player, but that doesn’t mean I play D&D like a board game. It’s about telling fantasy stories, doing silly voices, creating unique characters, and having non-competitive fun with friends. You can do that with or without the Rule of Cool. It’s awesome to do stuff outside the rules once in a while, like swinging over a sword fight on a chandelier, but if you use it for silly advantages like the cleric did, you’re disrespecting the other players (who want their chance too) and DM (who worked hard balancing this).
Your point about a Wall of Ice would as close to this detour as one can get. Assuming Burning Hands could be perverted into the use you suggest, lets look at the math. A 10 x 10 x 1 section has 30 HP, and Vulnerable to Fire. Burning Hands does 3d6 damage, so lets double that to 6d6 because of Fire Vulnerability. So it is now 21 points of damage. That is still not enough to destroy that 10 x 10 x 1 section, let alone something dozens of feet thick, or even hundreds of feet thick.
But the DM did not rule with the player. They did not seem to specify any specific amount of ice melted, merely that the archer was worried enough to jump down. That could have happened even if NO ice actually melted.
Nor did the DM side with the player over their character healing with his foot.
So other than one player trying things you didn't like seeing someone even try, most of the time the DM seems to have ruled reasonably. I am not seeing all this 'enabling' that you are going on about.
Actually, no. The DM said, and I paraphrase a bit "You take out a large enough of a chunk of the wall that the archer feels his position is structurally unsound, and he jumps down." I thought I had made that clear, but I guess not.
So yes, the DM indeed did agree with the player, and gave him the desired outcome, instead of reading the actual spell, then saying "Nope."
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I think we in total agreement that sometimes, there are conflicts in RAW. It is not perfect, hence why JC had a sub-industry of tweets dealing with clarifications. And if a DM decides after the fact that "hey, I don't like how this combination/interaction plays out" and House Rules it, no problem. That is the prerogative, even the the job, of a DM.
What I am talking about is stuff that is innately wrong, stuff that there is no possible conflict, or possible re-interpretation, other than a complete departure from established game mechanics. That is the garbage that drove me nuts in that last session. There has NEVER been a situation, through ANY edition, where touching a player with your foot to complete Cure Wounds works, because your hands are full. That is just a bad player thinking "maybe I can get away with this."This player was not a child, but played D&D for over 20 years, off and on.
The natural extension, if the DM had allowed that first rule of cool, would have been: "It would be cool if I cast Cure Wounds as a Held Action, and the player on their turn touched my ankle, and that triggered them getting the effect of Cure Wounds."
"The Scroll use: I am 100% positive the DM had no clue of that rule, and I kept my mouth shut during the game about it. I should have said something right then." - In fairness the scroll DC rule isn't in the PHB, it was a rule added in the DMG, which would make it an optional rule (not everyone has every rulebook). If you play PHB only then scrolls are open to anyone, they are only restricted by their high cost and rarity.
"Burning hands would do nothing to a wall of ice" - Why not? The spell doesn't mention what it would do verse the environment, so super heated magic fire verse mundane ice should have some effect. Sure vaporising a whole wall would be over the top, but removing enough material that a guy balanced on it feels unsafe seems quite reasonable.
Nope nope nope.
"As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.
The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren't being worn or carried."
An ice wall is neither a creature, nor is a flammable object. It has ZERO effect on an ice wall. To suggest that it has anything close to the same effect as a 6th level spell is completely broken.
Or, if we go with the rule of cool logic:
Yeah, you carve out instantly a huge chunk of ice, turning it into a massive cloud of super-heated steam, that has explosive force, since you just turned over a thousand cubic feet of ice into steam in a split second. All within 50 feet of you, including yourself, need to roll new characters.
The rule of cool cuts both ways.
Fire verse ice is a pretty obvious real world interaction. The rules as written don't consider how the spell should react to every possible substance it can be applied against so a situational ruling is necessary. The DM wound it back to making the area shakey, that's a pretty minimal result. Absolutely nothing like the result you'd expect from a disintergrate, where the wall would have vaporised. It sounds like the enemy suffered no damage, so from an on the fly ruling of a unique circumstance it really doesn't sound too bad.
please get a big sheet of ice and a flamethrower and use said flamethrower on the ice and tell me that the fire wouldnt do anything.
sometimes real life physics do affect d&d.
If i were dm i would say that burning hands would melt the ice a bit, not all the way but it would melt the ice, because thats what fire and ice do
"The D&D rules help you and the other players have a good time, but the rules aren't in charge. You're the DM, and you are in charge of the game" - Dungeon Masters Guide
A sheet of flame melting ice is not the same as disintegrating any kind of material.
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How big and how thick is the ice? How cold is the environment?
It's a spell effect, but seems good precedent to see how wall of ice handles fire:
This is a ten foot wide by ten foot tall section of ice that is one foot thick. I think a reasonable table can recognize the wall of ice's standing, so to speak, as precedent for using magical fire to work against ice. Since I don't know the particulars of the ice formation in the scenario we can't know what a 10x10x1 melt off would do the stability of the structure, though sounds like something a table or DM alone could work out via napkin physics.
I think the superhot steam discharge is a bit of an overreach of vindictive mindset. I could see the melt become slush and then freeze over where PCs are standing probably resulting in difficult terrain effects (which may be in play or may have been ignored because the characters were geared for ice walking, such gear probably getting mired in a slushy fluid situation.
I have a feeling someone may wail about magic ice not being best precedent but the way the ice is articulated in the spell seems to work with what I can remember of icy features being described mechanically in published content.
Again, I think you have a fair grievance if certain "cool moves" disenfranchises other PCs of what should be rule legit actions, but there is a line between saying ones peace to respectfully disagree with how a game is conducted and tantrum. Extrapolating a TPK as part of your protest gets across the line, but I suppose is a more productive stance, if you were communicating these objections to your actual group rather than venting here, than getting your thumb ready to hit that "walk away from game mid session" button. I think what's being missed is at the end of the day, the game is dialogic and how you approach conflict interpersonally may be as much a source of frustration as this particular table's culture. A lesson that applies to gaming as much as it does arguing on the internet. Who wants to form a Cult of Good Sports?
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
The spell's usage is explicit. There is no room for interpretation.
There are multiple ways to look at this:
RAW: That has been asked and answered above.
Rule of cool (my way): Also asked and answered above: roll a new char.
Applying real life to this situation: A split second of heat applied to a solid wall of ice, who knows how thick, has essentially no effect at all, unless the heat was MASSIVE, and in that case, see DM rule of cool version above.
Rule of cool (the way the player wants it, which is a theme park version with all glory, no consequences): Yeah, the ice suddenly disappears, with no physical residue.
Tell you what. Go put a container of water in your freezer. The bigger the better. Freeze it for a few days. Then build a fire. Dump that what, ice object that is less than a cubic foot, into the fire. It does NOT immediately melt and evaporate. Now scale that up by a factor of a thousand for a 10 x 10 x 10 section of an ice wall. Then get back to me.
None of this warrants a comparison to Disintegrate.
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Your point about a Wall of Ice would as close to this detour as one can get. Assuming Burning Hands could be perverted into the use you suggest, lets look at the math. A 10 x 10 x 1 section has 30 HP, and Vulnerable to Fire. Burning Hands does 3d6 damage, so lets double that to 6d6 because of Fire Vulnerability. So it is now 21 points of damage. That is still not enough to destroy that 10 x 10 x 1 section, let alone something dozens of feet thick, or even hundreds of feet thick.
And yeah, the only reason I bring up a TPK is because I have people ignoring the precise writeup of the spell to suggest "But this is cool". It pisses me off. A TPK would be just as absurd as me allowing any damage to the ice wall at all.
But that Burning Hands was just one of 7 specific items in a single session. It has a cumulative effect. And when the DM says it is "minutiae", well, that pretty much ends it for me. I will give it next session, and if it goes as badly as I expect, yeah, I will walk. The classy thing would be to finish the session, and leave quietly. But I have found that does not have much impact. I hope I am wrong. The story itself is good, and I really like playing a simple Scout Rogue, but this one player is getting worse, more emboldened, every session. And now that the DM has said that he endorses that style of play, well, that is not for me. This one player ruins it for me.
There is no point discussing whether burning hands works on a wall of ice. It's not relevant at all.
OP has fun playing by the rules. The rest of his group has fun *not* playing by the rules. Two different playstyles that don't work together (without heavy compromise). The choice to make is perfectly clear. Sorry your group doesn't work for you, OP.
The result being discussed was not that the wall suffered severe damage, only that the guy perched on a small ledge above got worried by what was happening below and jumped off. Did he think the fire might continue? Did the impact give him a jolt and he decided his footing was poor? It almost sounds like an intimidation rather than a direct physical effect, as described the enemy was unharmed. The effect as described was minimal but reasonably explained from a story perspective. If the DM had ruled the wall came down, then I'd agree he went too far, but he actually said no to the attempted "rule of cool" pulling it back to a much more reasonable level.
That is the truth, unfortunately. Or at least ONE of the players, who is enabled by the DM. The rest of the group I am sure would be happy to play by the rules. The newest guy (last session was his first) played in my pre-Covid campaign, and he fit in really well in my campaign. But this one "creative role-playing "guy, well, different story......
Right, this is an example of what I was saying -- being able to touch with a foot to Cure Wounds is not an attempt to "be creative" here. It is not an attempt to "recognize the vision of one's character that cannot be encompassed by all of these constricting Gygaxian rules..." It is a blatant attempt to be able to have a "free hand" while holding a shield and a sword (or whatever) in the actual hands. He doesn't want to waste time sheathing the sword, so he comes up with some B/S that is clearly designed to make his character OP, allowing it to do things the rules say you can't do.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
If I read the story correctly then the player asked to heal with his foot but the DM said no. So we agree the DM did the right thing and applied the rules correctly? Not an example of poor rule application like the dim light example.
The DM made the correct ruling on this.
It was the only time he made the correct ruling. But the fact that some player even considered talking about it enrages me. That player is a bad player. Because the player never checked the rules, or decided the rules did not apply to his character, or thought he could push the DM to allow it. Take your pick. They are all the hallmarks of a bad player.
The thing that gets me the most here is the guy’s (not OP’s, the cleric’s) claim that Rule of Cool is what separates D&D from other board games. Just...no. I’m a more by the book, tough combats player, but that doesn’t mean I play D&D like a board game. It’s about telling fantasy stories, doing silly voices, creating unique characters, and having non-competitive fun with friends. You can do that with or without the Rule of Cool. It’s awesome to do stuff outside the rules once in a while, like swinging over a sword fight on a chandelier, but if you use it for silly advantages like the cleric did, you’re disrespecting the other players (who want their chance too) and DM (who worked hard balancing this).
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
Actually, no. The DM said, and I paraphrase a bit "You take out a large enough of a chunk of the wall that the archer feels his position is structurally unsound, and he jumps down." I thought I had made that clear, but I guess not.
So yes, the DM indeed did agree with the player, and gave him the desired outcome, instead of reading the actual spell, then saying "Nope."