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D&D 5E Disintegrate Vs. Druid
- Thread starter Exadus
- Start date
This is a stunningly good argument against your position, by virtue of being completely wrong.
Say you are polymorphed (all the polymorph rules appear to be the same) into a form with 75 hit points of damage, and you take 80 points from a disintegrate. Your argument is that, when you've applied 75 hit points and hit zero, you haven't yet applied "this damage"; it doesn't count as "this damage" until you revert and take the 5 excess.
Now consider someone who isn't polymorphed, and who has 75 hit points left. You hit them with an 80-point disintegrate. Now what? You apply 75 damage. Now you're done. But your argument tells us that you have not yet applied "this damage" when you apply 75 damage and end up at 0. So if we believe that your argument is correct, disintegrate can only proc on non-polymorphed people when it reduces them to 0 exactly with no excess.
The sheer incoherence of this is actually the best argument I've seen yet against the notion that disintegrate doesn't proc off the druid's hit points temporarily hitting 0.
Arial Black is absolutely 100% right on this matter, and in perfect accordance with my views. The blackjack example is a perfect analogy.
The only comments from people opposing this position amount to a Dude-esque "that's just like... your opinion, man," which while true to some extent, is just not the case when you get down to brass tacks. The rules for the game are very clear on how to handle damage and effects that react to each other. Disintegrate deals # amount of damage, wildshape cracks and the druid reverts to his own hp pool (you can't just skip this step), disintegrate deals the rest of its damage, etc.
So, I'm out. I think the issue is very clearly resolved. Run it however you want, obviously, but you're screwing a player if you vape their druid like this.
The only comments from people opposing this position amount to a Dude-esque "that's just like... your opinion, man," which while true to some extent, is just not the case when you get down to brass tacks. The rules for the game are very clear on how to handle damage and effects that react to each other. Disintegrate deals # amount of damage, wildshape cracks and the druid reverts to his own hp pool (you can't just skip this step), disintegrate deals the rest of its damage, etc.
So, I'm out. I think the issue is very clearly resolved. Run it however you want, obviously, but you're screwing a player if you vape their druid like this.
No, you don't somehow subtract 5 from the total damage. Someone with 75 hit points gets hit for 80 damage, they got hit for 80 damage. c.f. death from massive damage in the DMG, et al.
Except that 5hp won't be enough to kill them, so that 5hp doesn't do anything. Their hitpoints decreased by 75, and that's it.
I think your other post does an excellent job of highlighting the real issue; both you and the other person who made that argument treat it as "screwing the player"... Implying that only player druids are ever at issue. And I think that's the thing; this would be a sucky thing to have happen to a PC, which is a good reason not to do it.
But you have not come even close to establishing that the rules are "clear", and the reason you're not getting much more than "that's just, like, your opinion man" is that you've never actually cited a rule that supports the disputed claims. You talk about "order of operations", but that concept isn't even present in the rules. We had another person claim that the "order" is clearly present in the "make an attack" rule, but it's not.
You're inventing rules, and you're doing it based on having picked an outcome that you're emotionally attached to; it would "screw the player" to "vape" their druid. But that's a purely emotional argument; it's not an argument from rules. And then you invent whatever rules you need to get that result.
This is ridiculous. 5e already covers that very well with "rulings, not rules". GM concludes that it's more fun for the polymorph effect to protect the player, and runs with it. Heck, I might well end up running it as "wildshape wins" for PCs, but let you dust an NPC shapechanger, because that would be fun too.
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Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
They did not take 80 points of damage. They took 75.
GMforPowergamers
Legend
some one with 55 hp polymorph into an animal with 40 hp gets hit for 75 pts from a disintegrate gets brought to 0, and as such is dusted, or hits 0 turns into his or her normal form and takes 35 damage and is fine... both have the ability to be read in the books, the only clair answer is it's a DMs call... in my case it depends on the type of world I am running... deadly or not.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
It's impossible to deal 80 points of damage to someone with 50 hit points. Once you hit 0, you stop since there are no negative numbers in 5e. Read the Instant Death section. Once you hit 0, damage just remains and doesn't do anything at all unless it equals your maximum hit points. Therefore, disintegrate must be able to ash someone by dealing partial damage. It would be nonsensical to expect that disintegrate could only ash someone if you roll exactly the number of hit points they have left.
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Arial Black
Adventurer
The 'amount of damage done by an attack' is a related but different thing than 'the amount of hit points lost from that attack'.
If a raging barbarian gets hit by an attack that deals 30 points of damage, you apply all 30, even though the target's hp only get reduced by 15.
If you deal 80 hp of damage to someone with 50 hit points, you must apply all of those 80 points, and the fact that the target's hp are only reduced by 50 doesn't change the damage that the attack dealt.
As for showing you the rules that say you cannot do less damage: the rules tell you what they are, they do not tell you what the rules are not! If the rules tell you that 'this attack' does 80 damage, this is the rule that tells you that you do exactly 80 damage! Unless you can point to another rule which lets you alter that, then you must do that amount of damage; you have no permission to do a different amount.
This is a permissive rules set; you cannot do whatever you like unless the rules tell us you cannot, the rules tell you what you are allowed to do (in terms of game mechanics). You cannot roll an attack, roll 1, and then say, "No, I'll call that a 2 instead". You cannot roll a 20 and say "No, I'll call that a 19 instead". And you cannot roll 80 damage and say, "No, I'll call that 53 instead".
This isn't that kind of rules set! 5e is a ruleset that assumes GM judgment, so some rules permit things, and other rules prohibit things, and you have to make calls. (I also note; outside of a small number of tabletop wargamers, that's the opposite of what "permissive" means in English; "permissive" means "permitting by default, restrictions are always explicit".) So the rules primarily tell you how to do things, not which things you may do and which you may not.
The more you make up new rules and new systems of how rules would be constructed, the more obvious it is that you haven't got an argument from the actual rules text, which is why you keep adding new rules. What is the problem here? Why is it such a huge deal that you absolutely must find a way to argue that this rule is completely unambiguous, rather than just acknowledging that 5e is full of rules ambiguities and that is by intent?
The more you make up new rules and new systems of how rules would be constructed, the more obvious it is that you haven't got an argument from the actual rules text, which is why you keep adding new rules. What is the problem here? Why is it such a huge deal that you absolutely must find a way to argue that this rule is completely unambiguous, rather than just acknowledging that 5e is full of rules ambiguities and that is by intent?
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