Really? I saw plenty of this in 4E. You can be just as niggly and nitpicky about the placement of a square fireball as a circular one.
Theater of the mind is the only solution I've ever found for this particular issue.
Diagonal area of spells
Theater of the mind is the only solution I've ever found for this particular issue.
Satyrn
First Post
But this thread started specifically with the notion of rotating a square!
Tony Vargas
Legend
Not nearly as fiddly as a true circle that's not snapping to a grid, like a 1e fireball on wargamer's green felt tabletop & measuring tape, or, of course TotM.
A fireball template on a grid (like in 3e, you could only place the center at a corner, so you could fiddle with placement, but no messing with orientation, the issue the OP was dealing with), or a simple cube, there's a lot less of an issue.
Makes it worse, really. Now, if you mean in the sense that players have no authority over tracking positioning, sure, but that could be TotM, or keeping a map/grid behind the screen. Either way, you eliminate the fiddling around, since the player has no direct opportunity to do so. The best he can do is ask "how many of them can I catch in a fireball." Then you either make a good faith attempt at figuring out exactly where everyone is on the field, and where a fireball could be placed to maximize how many of them it catches - or you just make up a number that sounds good to you.
No kidding, but it strayed. That's not how firecubes worked. They were Area Burst 3, so you picked a square, and every square w/in 3 (forming a 7x7 square) was affected. 'Rotating' it did nothing, because you were counting squares, not doing geometry.
Go off the grid and run TotM, and you can place it to the foot. Trigonometry becomes useful.
Hussar
Legend
Li Shenron
Legend
But then you CAN play without a grid. I don't really think you "can't" do the above, you can do whatever you want and it's probably going to work even better than the RAW.
I gotta admit that this is one of my proud nail moments in 5e. I hate it when casters do it. It just bugs the heck out of me. I think it's cheesy. Yes, it's perfectly fine by the rules, but... well... my but isn't all that rational and I think I might be talking out of it.
I do think that 4e had the right of it. 1:1 counting and be done with it. Yes, for the 2 seconds that a fireball is on the table, it's square, but, that resolves so many of the niggling "Oh, if I shift this over 5 feet, it might get that guy, but that other guy is going next in initiative, so I should shift it over there" Mickey Mouse crap that I see at the table.
Uhm... probably I don't understand here, but how does 1:1 diagonals help the case of a wizard wanting to cast a 45-degrees Fireball? If you apply the 1:1 rule to spells area, the 45-degrees Fireball has a DOUBLE total area compared to the straight-oriented Fireball, so this actually encourages everyone to "diagonalize" their spells.
Or did you just mean that 4e explicitly forbids that, and you always have to cast square-area spells oriented in the same way as the grid?
Li Shenron
Legend
Really?
But you do allow fighters et al to target a specific creature when shooting arrows or throwing weapons. You do not normally contemplate the possibility that they hit another square.
Oofta
Legend
Really?
And people never attempt to hit an hoop under 20 inches in diameter that's 10 feet in the air from 50 feet away with an orange inflated ball that's roughly half the diameter of the hoop. While moving and being actively harassed and blocked by other people. Admittedly it doesn't always work, but people get amazingly close all the time.
Don't understand human spacial awareness.
Hussar
Legend
Really?
Apples and oranges. Hitting a specific target with an arrow is a HECK of a lot different than hitting a specific point with a grenade such that you can tell that target X is exactly this far away and target Y is exactly that far away from the point where you are throwing a grenade.
And, yes, I was referring to the 4e rules (and 3e as well) where you couldn't realign the grid. As was explained earlier, you counted from a central point, so, you actually couldn't make diagonal squares.
And people never attempt to hit an hoop under 20 inches in diameter that's 10 feet in the air from 50 feet away with an orange inflated ball that's roughly half the diameter of the hoop. While moving and being actively harassed and blocked by other people. Admittedly it doesn't always work, but people get amazingly close all the time.
Don't understand human spacial awareness.
Now, if you could throw a ball the size of the 3 point line, at an exact point in a group of people so that you could deliberately hit some people and not others, then you'd have a point. Given that in basketball, you are throwing at a clearly defined point (complete with square on the backboard to help aiming and lines on the floor to aid as well), I'm not sure that it's really a viable comparison to throwing a grenade in a group of people so specifically.
the Jester
Legend
When we use minis and a battlemat, we do not use the grid. I measure distances, and when a pc casts a spell with a cube as an area, I have them put a + at the center of that area, indicating both the center and the orientation of that area.
So, no problem for me.
So, no problem for me.
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