April Rules FAQ: Great Weapon Fighting, Pact of the Blade, Green-Flame Blade, Booming Blade, Moonbea

The latest rules D&D 5E rules FAQ from WotC's Jeremy Crawford looks at class features and spells. More specifically, it discusses whether Great Weapon Fighting offers retools with features like Divine Smite (no), If Pact of the Blade's bond has to be with a melee weapon (no), if green-flame blade and similar spells work with extra, opportunity, and Sneak attacks (yes and no) and how moonbeam works.

The Sage Advice Compendium now has these updates incorporated. Read this month's answers here.

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[Ahglock]

Well phooy, Moonbeam and its ilk are kind of useless at our table if we go by this ruling.

On the other hand.... Rouge's just got a really, really, fun new use of magic initiate!

How? It's mobile so you can almost always have it so at the start of someone's turn they get effected. How effective do you want sustainable damage spells to be. Spells like spirit guardians curb stomp fireball overall in my experience. Yeah occasionally concentration gets broken fast or its at a range it's ineffective but overall they have been some of the best spells I've seen and we've used these rules.

 

[Kite474]

How? It's mobile so you can almost always have it so at the start of someone's turn they get effected. How effective do you want sustainable damage spells to be. Spells like spirit guardians curb stomp fireball overall in my experience. Yeah occasionally concentration gets broken fast or its at a range it's ineffective but overall they have been some of the best spells I've seen and we've used these rules.

That kind of relies on some initiative handling. Plus they have to end their turn there. From what the ruling seems to state that if you put it over them it does not count. Granted I could be reading it wrong

 

[Ahglock]

That kind of relies on some initiative handling. Plus they have to end their turn there. From what the ruling seems to state that if you put it over them it does not count. Granted I could be reading it wrong

It's start their turn there for spirit guardians at least. We don't have a Druid so I'm unsure of moonbeam. If it was end yes that would limit its effectiveness.

 

[trystero]

The link to the Compendium PDF should be http://media.wizards.com/2016/downloads/DND/SA_Compendium.pdf instead of http://media.wizards.com/2015/downloads/dnd/SA_Compendium.pdf (which is an older version).

 

[dave2008]

That kind of relies on some initiative handling. Plus they have to end their turn there. From what the ruling seems to state that if you put it over them it does not count. Granted I could be reading it wrong

It is start of the targets turn, not end of the turn. It is going to do the damage (start of turn), just not twice (when cast and start of turn). The only way to avoid damage would be to have someone push the target out of the zone after the casting and before the target's turn.

 

[Kite474]

It is start of the targets turn, not end of the turn. It is going to do the damage (start of turn), just not twice (when cast and start of turn). The only way to avoid damage would be to have someone push the target out of the zone after the casting and before the target's turn.

Oooooh. Ok that makes sense. Thank you kindly for clearing that up

 

[RulesJD]

You have to understand the difference between a round and a turn to properly see how it works. Once you do, it's exceedingly simple. Please refer to your PHBs for the difference between a round and a turn.

From there, here is how the spells like Moonbeam/Spirit Guardians work:

1. Unless the spell says otherwise, the spell causes no damage WHEN CAST. The casting character ends their turn.

2. On the very next turn, a character can run up and grapple the target, pull them out of the AoE. The target will have take zero damage at this point because they have not started their turn or entered the AoE for the first time on a turn.

3. On that same turn, the grappling character and push the target back into the AoE. At this point, the target will have entered the AoE for the first time on a turn, so the damage will be triggered. The target entered the AoE on the grappler's turn.

4. The grappler ends their turn. Next, a Warlock blasts the target out of the AoE. The Warlock ends their turn. The target starts its turn outside of the AoE, so it takes no damage.

4a. Alternative. Grappler ends their turn. Next, a Warlock blasts the target out of the AoE, and then back into it on the Warlock's turn. Because the target will have entered the AoE for the first time on a turn, it will take the damage again.

5. After all of that, the target's turn comes up, it is inside the AoE, so it is starting its turn inside the AoE, so it takes damage again.


Please note that the above is an extreme example and highly unlikely to happen in real gameplay. The general rule of thumb is that unless the spell says otherwise, the target will not take any damage on the caster's turn, and only on subsequent turns if somehow forced movement is involved or it starts its turn int he AoE.

 

[Kobold Stew]

My original post seems to have been lost as multiple threads have come together (?), so I'll repeat one point:

I'm disappointed with the rationale given for the GWF ruling -- it seems particularly weak to pin it on "the tedium of excessive rerolls" rather than an actual reading of the text. That makes it subjective (if a table doesn't find re-rolling tedious, does the ruling still hold?), and it also seems only potentially relevant to face-to-face or realtime play; ; is there rerolling tedium in an online game?

It feels, to me, a very mealy answer to what could be a straightforward ruling.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

When I mean Independence Day, that bold underlined italicized thing is what I am talking about. If you remember the movie, a whole bunch of people were partying under the light thinking the aliens were going to beam them up. Light shines (spell is casted), suckers don't move, start of their next turn still in the light, get blasted. Exactly what he said.

I don't consider the ship laser being in use until, y'know, it actually fires. Before that, it's just a floodlight, and nobody's scared of a floodlight. (I mean, maybe it could give you temporary light-blindness if it's right in your face and suddenly turns on, but that's not the same thing at all.)

And the thing I was talking about was, again, that the laser is already on--Moonbeam has *already* done damage to other targets--and then it moves, up to 60 feet, which is six times the spell's diameter (5' radius = 10' diameter). This means the beam could, very easily, "sweep over" an enemy, without doing anything to them at all, because they never "passed into" its area of effect, nor "started their turn" in it, even though they were inside its area at some point. Or, again to use the ID UFO-laser, the beam is already on and hurting people, passes over a location doing no damage to anything within, then comes to a stop and can begin hurting things again.

I'm not sure it's contradictory:
<quotesnop>
What's being clarified is that you can't do the old 'I slide the creature in and out of the Wall of Fire' trick from 4e to do massive damage on a single turn. But if a party has a bunch of forced-movement effects, there seems to be no restriction against each party member forcing a monster into the moonbeam area on each of the party members' turns (and then back out again, so the next party member can push it back in and out), then the last party member leaving the monster in the area so that it takes damage at the start of its turn.

I don't see that either the spell description or Crawford's advice uses the term 'round' at all.

--
Pauper

See, I agree with you--the problem is that the person I replied to was interpreting it as "once per round." The relevant bit being: "It also makes it so that you can't be pushed back and forth across it on the same round, taking damage each time. So, you only take the damage 1/round, but you also can't jump in and out to avoid the damage on your turn." This interpretation requires contradictory readings.

 

[Pauper]

See, I agree with you--the problem is that the person I replied to was interpreting it as "once per round." The relevant bit being: "It also makes it so that you can't be pushed back and forth across it on the same round, taking damage each time. So, you only take the damage 1/round, but you also can't jump in and out to avoid the damage on your turn." This interpretation requires contradictory readings.

Ah, yes -- thanks for the clarification. I see your point.

If you assume that a creature that starts its turn in the area cannot effectively 'enter the area for the first time' on the same turn, then the other poster's argument makes more sense, but that argument also assumes that a creature can only take damage from Moonbeam on its own turn. Crawford's illustration of how a creature might be forced into the Moonbeam on another creature's turn illuminates that assumption as flawed.

Regardless, some people might still find themselves confused as to why a creature being forced through the Moonbeam on another creature's turn takes damage, but the same creature takes no damage if the Moonbeam simply passes over it. From a 'game physics' perspective, the distinction doesn't make a lot of sense, but from a 'game mechanics' perspective, it is more understandable**.

**Edit: the reason it's more understandable is that the spell itself allows the effect to move, so 'sweeping' over multiple opponents is trivial; a caster could do so on every casting and on every one of its turns it can maintain its concentration. On the other hand, say, having a Great Weapon fighter forgo a round of Extra Attacks in order to attempt to bull rush an enemy into the Moonbeam might well prove to be mechanically inefficient except in extraordinary circumstances, such as bull-rushing an afflicted lycanthrope into the Moonbeam to force it back into human form.

--
Pauper