A basic principle of adjudication is reasonable restraint. A Firebolt spell is clearly more akin to a flaming crossbow bolt than say the
phase shifting Romulan disrupter you were describing before. Giving Firebolt a set of non relevant powers that are not logically inferable or deductible might be rhetorically prudent, but does not yield
sound results, and is not imaginatively restrained.
A Firebolt could
burn through stone, depending on hardness, hp, etc, but even if you ruled Firebolt was more akin to a plasma lance, a plasma lance does
not behave as a
PSRD (Phase Shifting Romulan Disrupter). Logic and the ‘real world’ provide a guide.
Take Magic Missile and X-ray vision. X-ray vision may let you see through walls, which would allow one to target Magic Missile, possibly through a stone wall. Since gravity is a type of force, and can ‘pass‘ through walls, allowing this rare combination to work, makes a certain logical sense.
Once one starts applying physical, tangible characteristics to ephemeral effects like Charm Person, the questions become larger than the answers.
Many people play
Fantasy RPGs and NOT
Sci-Fi RPGs due to not wanting to deal with hard science considerations, let alone Hard Science plus Metaphysical calculations in rulings for a RPG.
Bacon Bits,
your post above seems to be a category error, like asking what the weight of the idea of the color yellow is.
What is the weight of a Charm Person spell?
If I can calculate how much a Soul weighs, and the terminal velocity of a Charm Person spell, then something has either gone horribly wrong in my D&D game, or I am about to win a Nobel Prize or Fields Medal.
Why is Charm Person, using your terminology ‘smart’ enough to target someone in full plate?
The visor holes, the chain mail in the armpits?
There is no
empirically reasonable reason why a pane of glass or a table offering full cover, stops spell targeting, but not a shell of steel surrounding one, ala plate mail
other than “them’s the rules”.
If a pane of glass stops Charm Person from targeting someone, because the spell is ‘dumb’, then a halfling with full cover from a crowded room, or a table is
not targetable by RAW.
@Oofta, would you let Charm Person work if cast by a person from across a crowded room, soo crowded that full cover applies?
I doubt most people think they are playing in a D&D world, where having glass panes in your windows
makes you safer from certain magical attacks, then
not having glass in your windows?
This certainly does not seem to be the case for D&D designer Mike Mearls.
The ruling also takes the magic, the wonder out of spellcasting. A hemispherical Wall of Force can prohibit Dominate Person from achieving spell lock, but if sound is not included under “blocking physical effect” in W.o.F....then an amazing Charisma (Persausion) check can potentially convince the Wall of Force caster to “turn off the wall”, when Dominate Person can not target them.
Is this really, how
most people envision the D&D universe works?
What ever happened to the Sympathetic Magic Tradition, from history? Before Einstein’s ‘‘Spooky Action at a distance”, the paradigm’s foundation was laid from centuries of believing that a representation was sufficient to affect the source object with magic.....
....................Not glass window panes are lesser globes of invulnerability.