EDIT: use improvised damage rules for 5d10 fire damage, give or take. Should cover a decent area. END EDIT
Level 2 artificer. Create infusions for alchemy jug and bag of holding. Every day, have jug produce a quart of oil, thats 2 pint flasks of oil, per day. Each flask can do 5 damage per turn for 2 turns. Each pint weighs a pound. 2 pounds of oil a day for 20 points of fire damage.
10 days of oil production from the alchemy jug will produce 20 flasks, which will do 100 fire damage per turn for 2 turns.
Oil costs 1 silver per pint. So 1 gold will get you 10 flasks of oil. Get as many as you can afford and can buy.
Store flasks in bag of holding.
Level 5 artificer, create homunculus servant. It is your delivery mechanism and possibly your detonator. It has an int and wis of 10, so its smart enough to operate semi-autononus. It has a fly speed of 30. And it is immune to exhaustion, meaning it could fly forever or hover above a target forever, or hunker down in some hidden spot and listen for your command to detonate 24/7. You have direct control of it with telekenisis if within a mile. Or create infusion for sending stones to get unlimited range and 25 words of instructions for how/when to attack.
Buy one flask of alchemists fire.
For oil, you can target the ground a creature is standing on. Have the homunculus turn the bag of holding inside out and dump all flasks of oil in one turn. On impact all oil flasks will shatter. When the vial of alchemist fire hits the ground it will shatter and ignite the oil.
500 pounds of oil would cost you 50 gold to purchas, would just fit in a bag of holding, and would do 2500 points of fire damage per turn, for 2 turns.
If homunculus can drop the oil from the air, the only thing you lose is the 25 gold it cost to buy one flask of alchemist fire.to ignite everything, and 50 gold to purchase the oil.
If the homunculus is destroyed in the fire, thats another 100gp to replace.
EDIT TO ADD:
DMG guidelines for improvised damage say wading through lava does 10d10 dmg, and a vat of acid is 4d10. So 500 pounds of burning oil covering the ground or an enemy might be in the 5d10 to 6d10 category
And it should take some time to put the fire out, so maybe a couple turns of fire damage. Maybe they use an action to deal with the fire. maybe 50 to 60 damage total, enemy wastes a turn, for a one shot effect, no concentration, and 50 gold of supplies.
Also, handy for certain kinds of battlefield control, drop the fire between the party and a mob of bad guys, keep them at bay for a couple turns. I like it.
A barrel weighs 70 pounds and can carry 40 gallons of liquid. That would translate to 320 flasks (pints) (pounds) of oil.
When full, the barrel and oil will weigh 390 pounds and do 1600 fire damage a turn for 2 turns.
EDIT TO ADD:
barrel is so you can use thr bag of holding to store more than oil. Someone suggested that a standard barrel is too big to fit into mouth of bag of holding. If so, use carpentry tools to craft a crate that is 2ft x 2ft (2 ft square) and 4 feet deep.that is the max size single object that can fit into a bag of holding. Then build 4 of them for full volume. The weight of the crates will reduce the total amount of oil you can carry, but its an option to be able.to use your bag of holding for oil and other equipment.
Alternatively, if you dont need to store anything in bag of holding but oil, then you could just dump the oil directly into the bag. Rules say you can dump water into the bag without a container. So you should be able to dump other fluids, like oil.
“If multiple effects impose the same condition on you, each instance of the condition has its own duration, but the condition’s effects don’t get worse. Either you have a condition or you don’t. The Exhaustion condition is an exception; its effects get worse if you have the condition and receive it again.” - D&D Beyond Basic Rules
This doesn’t work at all, both in theory and practically. A [magic items]Bag of Holding[/magic items] has a size of 2 feet square and is 4 feet deep on the inside, because of how a barrel works, you cannot contain a barrel inside a bag of holding unless it is especially small. You are incapable of doing that much damage as stated above and that is just an insane waste of money, it works as a blunt damage option, but water is literally a better alternative in every way.
"This doesn’t work at all, both in theory and practically. A [magic items]Bag of Holding[/magic items] has a size of 2 feet square and is 4 feet deep on the inside, because of how a barrel works, you cannot contain a barrel inside a bag of holding unless it is especially small."
Doesnt work at all? Because the barrel doesnt fit? You're an artificer. You have proficiencies in nearly every tool possible. Can you imagine a simple workaround that gets the ship in the bottle? Or is it really that this doesnt work at all? I mean, what if you use carpentry tools and craft a barrel thats 2 foot on a side (2 foot square) and 4 ft deep? Just small enough to fit. If you craft 4 of these barrels, you have 64 cubic feet of volume. or, ya know, just put the oil in flasks.
Actually, rules as written say you can put water into a bag of holding without a container. So if you werent so fixated on proving the idea wrong, you might have come up with the solution to the "barrel is too big" problem by just pouring the oil directly into the bag.
The barrel was my attempt to be able to use the bag of holding for things other than oil.
Ah, so, the goal is to find a way to prove me wrong, not have a good gaith discussion of the rules? Also, what do you mean by "again" if this is your first comment on this thread?
" A creature can take this damage only once per turn."
Since the sentence before that talks about how damage can be applied anytime a creture enters OR leaves a space, it seems more reasonable that the "once per turn" is to disallow applying the damage when a creture both enters AND leaves the space in one turn.
Also, the fact that the rule only applies to CREATURES means that you agree that all the damage from all the oil can be applied to structures? I could drop 300 ppunds of oil on one square of a bridge, light it, and do 1500 fire damage to that square, but only 5 damage to the troll who runs through it?
"All the extra oil gets you is a wider area of coverage"
Yeah, back to prioritizing proving me wong versus good faith, NOWHERE do rules say anything about covering more area. Where did you get that from?
If nothing else, i want all the oil in one spot to quickly burn a bridge, or a roof, or whatever, with a thousand points of fire damage. Even if it can only do 5 damage to creatures, because reasons, i could still do max damage to structures.
The rules here clearly lead to realistic results. The more oil thats burning, the more damage it imflicts.
I also understand that is not going to be a fun game. Reality is first modeled in dnd rules and then nerfed until one-turn-tpks are unlikely and dms dont have to see their favorite villian npc go up in a cloud of smoke in one action because a player actualy read the rules as they were written.
For ex, poison in the real world is cheap, ww1 saw widespread use of chemical and biological weapons on a massive scale because poison gas is cheap and can instakill people. Poison in dnd is nerfed to the point that its just not worth using for most players. The most damaging poison in dnd is purple worm poison, and it only does 42 damage and in an effort to discourage even that, it cost 2000 gold and crearures get to make a con save for half damage. No one in their right mind is going to pay 2000 gold for a dose of purple worm poison when there are free ways to do more damage. So wmds got nerfed out of dnd and makes it playable as a hero adventure instead of a meat grinding game managing thousands of troops.
Everything that does damage is basically scaled so that nothing (at least nothing on equivalent levels) can be killed with a single player's action.
But the rule for oil burning is not one of those rules. Its not balanced. It will instakill literally anything in the monster manual that isnt immune to fire damage.
It clearly needs rebalancing. I dont know what rebalancing looks like, but i guarantee you, FIVE fire damge is not it.
But the only way we get to the point of rebalancing is if people admit the rules have a realistic (fire can quickly kill people) outcome here, and it needs to be nerfed to gamify the effect, to make it playable. 4d6 first turn, and 1 die less every turn after that as the fuel burns out. Or something. But we cant get there as ling as people refuse to see a problem in the rules.
Rules Rely on Good-Faith Interpretation.The rules assume that everyone reading and interpreting the rules has the interests of the group’s fun at heart and is reading the rules in that light.
Outlining these principles can help hold players’ exploits at bay. If a player persistently tries to twist the rules of the game, have a conversation with that player outside the game and ask them to stop.
"Arguing that you can turn mundane items into a higher damage result than 4th tier spells"
I clearly said that you shouldnt do this, that the rules should be changed.
And most complaints have said things like it cant be done because of unrelated things like a barrel wont fit through the opening in a bag of holding. Which has easy workarounds like keep it in flasks. But would otherwise entertain the idea as valid.
"A creature doused in oil takes the amount of damage described in the item description; as there is no mechanism or other mention of upscaling the damage"
Ok, so the idea of lighting a barrel of oil on fire to do a lot of damage all at once is realistic in the real world. But dnd has to put this completely unrealistic rule in place to keep the game playable. In dnd you cant light a barrel of oil on fire because a barrel of oil isnt defined and doesnt exist, nor is its damage defined anywhere.
And thats because it would instakill pretty much anything and make the game nothing more than players trying to figure out how to deliver barrels of oil and light them on fire for every combat. Its an arbitrary (from a realism point of view) rule that is created and enforced to keep the game playable. Cool. As long as we want to accept that, fine.
But also, if thats the case, i would respond that the rule ought to have SOME upscaling the way a gunpowder bomb does 3d6 and a gunpowder keg does 7d6 damage. At least some rule to say more fuel does more damage.
The description for flask of oil says the oil stays around for a minute before "drying", so strictly following just the enumerated rules, if i had a homunculus constantly, quietly pouring flasks of oil on a square every turn until the monster stepped into the square, at which point i light the 10 pints of oil that are on the ground, and combat starts with the monster taking 50 points of damage from the oil alone, from equipment costing 1 gold (10 flasks of oil)
Is that RAW and RAI in your opinion?
I only ask, because that would be using "mundane items into a higher damage result than 4th tier spells", and you declare that above as not in good faith.
50 damage would be something like 14d6 damage, which would be, i think, a 9th level fireball.
I'd allow it but the damage would still be 5 points per round. Multiple loads of oil mean it burns for a longer time. There should also be a reasonable limit on how much oil will stay in one place at a time, e.g.10 gallons of oil will not stay in a 5 foot square without containment.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
Well, if my homunculus dumps a pint every turn, and oil "dries" after a minute/10 turns, then if it keeps dumping for an extended period, there should always be 10 pints of not-dry oil on the square, and when ignited, it should do 50 damage the first turn, and then the oldest pint dries up and it does 45 damage the next turn (assuming my homunculus retreated or was destroyed by the fire, and is no longer adding oil), and 40 damage the next turn, and so on.
Well, if my homunculus dumps a pint every turn, and oil "dries" after a minute/10 turns, then if it keeps dumping for an extended period, there should always be 10 pints of not-dry oil on the square, and when ignited, it should do 50 damage the first turn, and then the oldest pint dries up and it does 45 damage the next turn (assuming my homunculus retreated or was destroyed by the fire, and is no longer adding oil), and 40 damage the next turn, and so on.
Why should it stack? Again, there is no RAW that it can, only that a creature doused in the oil takes 5 damage. You can attempt to make a realism argument that given it describes a certain quantity more oil should mean more damage, but the counterpoint is that per realism oil burns at X temperature regardless of the quantity, so more oil doesn’t create more heat at the point of contact.
I am using an attack and a flask of oil every turn, but i only do 5 damage? I dont follow that.
Each flask of oil is independent of the others. Each flask is a separate attack. Each flask should do 5 damage when ignited if the oil is still wet.
The flasks aren’t attacks though, in that sense. Being doused in oil simply sets the “doused in oil” flag to positive, priming the subject for the next effect, which causes fixed damage if they take fire damage. If we were talking about Alchemist’s Fire flasks you’d have a point since each produces its own instance of damage- although I believe RAW technically requires you specifically take an Action to utilize the effect, meaning dumping a bunch from a barrel is in DM territory- but we aren’t so the idea that each flask’s worth of oil represents an attack in game sense simply is not true.
Use an attack to throw a dagger, it does 5 damage.
Two people use their attacks to each throw one dagger.
Only does 5 damage total?
Do dagger attacks "stack"? Or is "stacking" a concept that does not apply to them?
The only difference between 2 dagger attacks and 2 oil flask attacks is the delay. So lemme ask: 2 wizards cast delayed fireball and throw them into the same square. Do you roll damge for one fireball or two?
A quick look for the rules about stacking didnt point me to an original source book.
Use an attack to throw a dagger, it does 5 damage.
Two people use their attacks to each throw one dagger.
Only does 5 damage total?
Do dagger attacks "stack"? Or is "stacking" a concept that does not apply to them?
The only difference between 2 dagger attacks and 2 oil flask attacks is the delay. So lemme ask: 2 wizards cast delayed fireball and throw them into the same square. Do you roll damge for one fireball or two?
A quick look for the rules about stacking didnt point me to an original source book.
If I cast Hold Person on a target and they fail the save, they’re paralyzed and hits on them from 5 ft are crits. If someone else casts Hold Person on the same target and they fail again, that doesn’t mean hits after that roll their critical damage twice. All failing the save does is impose a binary “yes/no” condition- doused in oil. If a doused subject takes fire damage, they take extra. There is no check for how thoroughly they’re doused; it’s a simple “if X, then Y” progression. You’re inventing a concept of attacks that simply does not exist in relation to what we’re talking about.
Look, the rules are silly and unrealistic to make the game playable. Reality would tpk a party every other session if dnd had real gunpowder or real poison.
I already tried to meet you halfway and see what the rules would mean if it takes one action per flask
But now it feels like your making more rules because rules are rules,and even ambiguous rules are whatever younwant them to be, losing sight of whether it is about playability or not.
The stacking rules seem VERY ambiguous here and i dont think stacking applies. You do. This is less of an effect or a condition, and more of a "a pint of fuel does 5 damage" so more fuel stacks.
And again, i already tried to work with you on adding more fuel only by way of strictly what the rules for a pint of oil says. Use an attack per pint, only last 10 turns and evaporates.
But now you wanna say more fuel is same damage? Its not clearly enumerated in the rules that thats true. Point me to the rule that applies to this situation and we can discuss.
Or just say you think its still tooo powerful and feel the need to impose more silliness on how we model the real world in dnd, nerfing it even more to make it playable and predictable.
But fuel is fuel. Fuel is energy. Fuel is the source of the damage in the first place. More fuel stacks. So, youre going to need to either quote me the rule in play for this specific sitiation or just say you wanna nerf it for playability.
Otherwise, i dont agree with the level of nerfing silliness you propose. And we can just agree to disagree.
Did no one tell this dude that a 400 pound rock would work better than this peasant rail-gun of an idea? I just woke up and having a massive rock fall on the enemy just sounds easier in every way. If you don’t want to play by the rules, don’t play D&D, it’s that easy, not wanting to do that is like complaining that you get only get to move 1 piece per turn in chess.
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EDIT: use improvised damage rules for 5d10 fire damage, give or take. Should cover a decent area. END EDIT
Level 2 artificer. Create infusions for alchemy jug and bag of holding. Every day, have jug produce a quart of oil, thats 2 pint flasks of oil, per day. Each flask can do 5 damage per turn for 2 turns. Each pint weighs a pound. 2 pounds of oil a day for 20 points of fire damage.
10 days of oil production from the alchemy jug will produce 20 flasks, which will do 100 fire damage per turn for 2 turns.
Oil costs 1 silver per pint. So 1 gold will get you 10 flasks of oil. Get as many as you can afford and can buy.
Store flasks in bag of holding.
Level 5 artificer, create homunculus servant. It is your delivery mechanism and possibly your detonator. It has an int and wis of 10, so its smart enough to operate semi-autononus. It has a fly speed of 30. And it is immune to exhaustion, meaning it could fly forever or hover above a target forever, or hunker down in some hidden spot and listen for your command to detonate 24/7. You have direct control of it with telekenisis if within a mile. Or create infusion for sending stones to get unlimited range and 25 words of instructions for how/when to attack.
Buy one flask of alchemists fire.
For oil, you can target the ground a creature is standing on. Have the homunculus turn the bag of holding inside out and dump all flasks of oil in one turn. On impact all oil flasks will shatter. When the vial of alchemist fire hits the ground it will shatter and ignite the oil.
500 pounds of oil would cost you 50 gold to purchas, would just fit in a bag of holding, and would do 2500 points of fire damage per turn, for 2 turns.
If homunculus can drop the oil from the air, the only thing you lose is the 25 gold it cost to buy one flask of alchemist fire.to ignite everything, and 50 gold to purchase the oil.
If the homunculus is destroyed in the fire, thats another 100gp to replace.
EDIT TO ADD:
DMG guidelines for improvised damage say wading through lava does 10d10 dmg, and a vat of acid is 4d10. So 500 pounds of burning oil covering the ground or an enemy might be in the 5d10 to 6d10 category
And it should take some time to put the fire out, so maybe a couple turns of fire damage. Maybe they use an action to deal with the fire. maybe 50 to 60 damage total, enemy wastes a turn, for a one shot effect, no concentration, and 50 gold of supplies.
Also, handy for certain kinds of battlefield control, drop the fire between the party and a mob of bad guys, keep them at bay for a couple turns. I like it.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/dmg-2024/running-the-game#ImprovisingDamage
END EDIT TO ADD
A barrel weighs 70 pounds and can carry 40 gallons of liquid. That would translate to 320 flasks (pints) (pounds) of oil.
When full, the barrel and oil will weigh 390 pounds and do 1600 fire damage a turn for 2 turns.
EDIT TO ADD:
barrel is so you can use thr bag of holding to store more than oil. Someone suggested that a standard barrel is too big to fit into mouth of bag of holding. If so, use carpentry tools to craft a crate that is 2ft x 2ft (2 ft square) and 4 feet deep.that is the max size single object that can fit into a bag of holding. Then build 4 of them for full volume. The weight of the crates will reduce the total amount of oil you can carry, but its an option to be able.to use your bag of holding for oil and other equipment.
Alternatively, if you dont need to store anything in bag of holding but oil, then you could just dump the oil directly into the bag. Rules say you can dump water into the bag without a container. So you should be able to dump other fluids, like oil.
END EDIT
“If multiple effects impose the same condition on you, each instance of the condition has its own duration, but the condition’s effects don’t get worse. Either you have a condition or you don’t. The Exhaustion condition is an exception; its effects get worse if you have the condition and receive it again.” - D&D Beyond Basic Rules
This doesn’t work at all, both in theory and practically. A [magic items]Bag of Holding[/magic items] has a size of 2 feet square and is 4 feet deep on the inside, because of how a barrel works, you cannot contain a barrel inside a bag of holding unless it is especially small. You are incapable of doing that much damage as stated above and that is just an insane waste of money, it works as a blunt damage option, but water is literally a better alternative in every way.
"This doesn’t work at all, both in theory and practically. A [magic items]Bag of Holding[/magic items] has a size of 2 feet square and is 4 feet deep on the inside, because of how a barrel works, you cannot contain a barrel inside a bag of holding unless it is especially small."
Doesnt work at all? Because the barrel doesnt fit? You're an artificer. You have proficiencies in nearly every tool possible. Can you imagine a simple workaround that gets the ship in the bottle? Or is it really that this doesnt work at all? I mean, what if you use carpentry tools and craft a barrel thats 2 foot on a side (2 foot square) and 4 ft deep? Just small enough to fit. If you craft 4 of these barrels, you have 64 cubic feet of volume. or, ya know, just put the oil in flasks.
Actually, rules as written say you can put water into a bag of holding without a container. So if you werent so fixated on proving the idea wrong, you might have come up with the solution to the "barrel is too big" problem by just pouring the oil directly into the bag.
The barrel was my attempt to be able to use the bag of holding for things other than oil.
"If multiple effects impose the same condition"
Damage isnt listed as one of rhe possible conditions.
"Nope, try again"
Ah, so, the goal is to find a way to prove me wrong, not have a good gaith discussion of the rules? Also, what do you mean by "again" if this is your first comment on this thread?
" A creature can take this damage only once per turn."
Since the sentence before that talks about how damage can be applied anytime a creture enters OR leaves a space, it seems more reasonable that the "once per turn" is to disallow applying the damage when a creture both enters AND leaves the space in one turn.
Also, the fact that the rule only applies to CREATURES means that you agree that all the damage from all the oil can be applied to structures? I could drop 300 ppunds of oil on one square of a bridge, light it, and do 1500 fire damage to that square, but only 5 damage to the troll who runs through it?
"All the extra oil gets you is a wider area of coverage"
Yeah, back to prioritizing proving me wong versus good faith, NOWHERE do rules say anything about covering more area. Where did you get that from?
If nothing else, i want all the oil in one spot to quickly burn a bridge, or a roof, or whatever, with a thousand points of fire damage. Even if it can only do 5 damage to creatures, because reasons, i could still do max damage to structures.
The rules here clearly lead to realistic results. The more oil thats burning, the more damage it imflicts.
I also understand that is not going to be a fun game. Reality is first modeled in dnd rules and then nerfed until one-turn-tpks are unlikely and dms dont have to see their favorite villian npc go up in a cloud of smoke in one action because a player actualy read the rules as they were written.
For ex, poison in the real world is cheap, ww1 saw widespread use of chemical and biological weapons on a massive scale because poison gas is cheap and can instakill people. Poison in dnd is nerfed to the point that its just not worth using for most players. The most damaging poison in dnd is purple worm poison, and it only does 42 damage and in an effort to discourage even that, it cost 2000 gold and crearures get to make a con save for half damage. No one in their right mind is going to pay 2000 gold for a dose of purple worm poison when there are free ways to do more damage. So wmds got nerfed out of dnd and makes it playable as a hero adventure instead of a meat grinding game managing thousands of troops.
Everything that does damage is basically scaled so that nothing (at least nothing on equivalent levels) can be killed with a single player's action.
But the rule for oil burning is not one of those rules. Its not balanced. It will instakill literally anything in the monster manual that isnt immune to fire damage.
It clearly needs rebalancing. I dont know what rebalancing looks like, but i guarantee you, FIVE fire damge is not it.
But the only way we get to the point of rebalancing is if people admit the rules have a realistic (fire can quickly kill people) outcome here, and it needs to be nerfed to gamify the effect, to make it playable. 4d6 first turn, and 1 die less every turn after that as the fuel burns out. Or something. But we cant get there as ling as people refuse to see a problem in the rules.
Regarding the rules:
Rules Rely on Good-Faith Interpretation.The rules assume that everyone reading and interpreting the rules has the interests of the group’s fun at heart and is reading the rules in that light.
Outlining these principles can help hold players’ exploits at bay. If a player persistently tries to twist the rules of the game, have a conversation with that player outside the game and ask them to stop.
"Arguing that you can turn mundane items into a higher damage result than 4th tier spells"
I clearly said that you shouldnt do this, that the rules should be changed.
And most complaints have said things like it cant be done because of unrelated things like a barrel wont fit through the opening in a bag of holding. Which has easy workarounds like keep it in flasks. But would otherwise entertain the idea as valid.
"A creature doused in oil takes the amount of damage described in the item description; as there is no mechanism or other mention of upscaling the damage"
Ok, so the idea of lighting a barrel of oil on fire to do a lot of damage all at once is realistic in the real world. But dnd has to put this completely unrealistic rule in place to keep the game playable. In dnd you cant light a barrel of oil on fire because a barrel of oil isnt defined and doesnt exist, nor is its damage defined anywhere.
And thats because it would instakill pretty much anything and make the game nothing more than players trying to figure out how to deliver barrels of oil and light them on fire for every combat. Its an arbitrary (from a realism point of view) rule that is created and enforced to keep the game playable. Cool. As long as we want to accept that, fine.
But also, if thats the case, i would respond that the rule ought to have SOME upscaling the way a gunpowder bomb does 3d6 and a gunpowder keg does 7d6 damage. At least some rule to say more fuel does more damage.
The description for flask of oil says the oil stays around for a minute before "drying", so strictly following just the enumerated rules, if i had a homunculus constantly, quietly pouring flasks of oil on a square every turn until the monster stepped into the square, at which point i light the 10 pints of oil that are on the ground, and combat starts with the monster taking 50 points of damage from the oil alone, from equipment costing 1 gold (10 flasks of oil)
Is that RAW and RAI in your opinion?
I only ask, because that would be using "mundane items into a higher damage result than 4th tier spells", and you declare that above as not in good faith.
50 damage would be something like 14d6 damage, which would be, i think, a 9th level fireball.
I'd allow it but the damage would still be 5 points per round. Multiple loads of oil mean it burns for a longer time. There should also be a reasonable limit on how much oil will stay in one place at a time, e.g.10 gallons of oil will not stay in a 5 foot square without containment.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Well, if my homunculus dumps a pint every turn, and oil "dries" after a minute/10 turns, then if it keeps dumping for an extended period, there should always be 10 pints of not-dry oil on the square, and when ignited, it should do 50 damage the first turn, and then the oldest pint dries up and it does 45 damage the next turn (assuming my homunculus retreated or was destroyed by the fire, and is no longer adding oil), and 40 damage the next turn, and so on.
I am using an attack and a flask of oil every turn, but i only do 5 damage? I dont follow that.
Each flask of oil is independent of the others. Each flask is a separate attack. Each flask should do 5 damage when ignited if the oil is still wet.
Why should it stack? Again, there is no RAW that it can, only that a creature doused in the oil takes 5 damage. You can attempt to make a realism argument that given it describes a certain quantity more oil should mean more damage, but the counterpoint is that per realism oil burns at X temperature regardless of the quantity, so more oil doesn’t create more heat at the point of contact.
The flasks aren’t attacks though, in that sense. Being doused in oil simply sets the “doused in oil” flag to positive, priming the subject for the next effect, which causes fixed damage if they take fire damage. If we were talking about Alchemist’s Fire flasks you’d have a point since each produces its own instance of damage- although I believe RAW technically requires you specifically take an Action to utilize the effect, meaning dumping a bunch from a barrel is in DM territory- but we aren’t so the idea that each flask’s worth of oil represents an attack in game sense simply is not true.
"Why should it stack?"
Use an attack to throw a dagger, it does 5 damage.
Two people use their attacks to each throw one dagger.
Only does 5 damage total?
Do dagger attacks "stack"? Or is "stacking" a concept that does not apply to them?
The only difference between 2 dagger attacks and 2 oil flask attacks is the delay. So lemme ask: 2 wizards cast delayed fireball and throw them into the same square. Do you roll damge for one fireball or two?
A quick look for the rules about stacking didnt point me to an original source book.
If I cast Hold Person on a target and they fail the save, they’re paralyzed and hits on them from 5 ft are crits. If someone else casts Hold Person on the same target and they fail again, that doesn’t mean hits after that roll their critical damage twice. All failing the save does is impose a binary “yes/no” condition- doused in oil. If a doused subject takes fire damage, they take extra. There is no check for how thoroughly they’re doused; it’s a simple “if X, then Y” progression. You’re inventing a concept of attacks that simply does not exist in relation to what we’re talking about.
Look, the rules are silly and unrealistic to make the game playable. Reality would tpk a party every other session if dnd had real gunpowder or real poison.
I already tried to meet you halfway and see what the rules would mean if it takes one action per flask
But now it feels like your making more rules because rules are rules,and even ambiguous rules are whatever younwant them to be, losing sight of whether it is about playability or not.
The stacking rules seem VERY ambiguous here and i dont think stacking applies. You do. This is less of an effect or a condition, and more of a "a pint of fuel does 5 damage" so more fuel stacks.
And again, i already tried to work with you on adding more fuel only by way of strictly what the rules for a pint of oil says. Use an attack per pint, only last 10 turns and evaporates.
But now you wanna say more fuel is same damage? Its not clearly enumerated in the rules that thats true. Point me to the rule that applies to this situation and we can discuss.
Or just say you think its still tooo powerful and feel the need to impose more silliness on how we model the real world in dnd, nerfing it even more to make it playable and predictable.
But fuel is fuel. Fuel is energy. Fuel is the source of the damage in the first place. More fuel stacks. So, youre going to need to either quote me the rule in play for this specific sitiation or just say you wanna nerf it for playability.
Otherwise, i dont agree with the level of nerfing silliness you propose. And we can just agree to disagree.
Just take it up with your GM and see what they say.
Maybe one of them will agree with you.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
Did no one tell this dude that a 400 pound rock would work better than this peasant rail-gun of an idea? I just woke up and having a massive rock fall on the enemy just sounds easier in every way. If you don’t want to play by the rules, don’t play D&D, it’s that easy, not wanting to do that is like complaining that you get only get to move 1 piece per turn in chess.