Sculpted Fireball

[Rel]

I posted a thread about this a year ago or so. The concensus then and my belief now is that this becomes VERY powerful if you don't require that the cubes be touching. In my particular situation I had the party Wizard who had bought a Metamagic Rod and several times per day he was dropping Lightning Cubes (sometimes EMPOWERED Lightning Cubes) all over the battlefield. Since it was very rare for there to be more than four distinct pockets of bad guys at once, he was hitting virtually every single enemy combatant each time he did this. And to top it off, the smaller individual areas made it much easier for him to position them so that they didn't hit any allies. After a couple sessions of that and getting some responses to my thread, I ruled that they had to be touching cubes.

He still got tons of use from the Rod and the other party members occasionally got to kill something.

 

[Sithobi1]

There is no rod of sculpt spell, so that was a HR, and if it is that overpowered, don't let the player have it.

 

[Andre]

...he was dropping Lightning Cubes (sometimes EMPOWERED Lightning Cubes) all over the battlefield.

Just a quick note: if he was sculpting lightning bolt, the original spell has no range - the bolt begins at the caster's hands. So the cubes could not be placed "all over the battlefield". Now if he uses fireball as the base spell and uses both Sculpt Spell and Energy Substitution, that works.

Concerning the original question, the text of the feat does not specify that the cubes must touch, so one can reasonably conclude that they don't have to. Of course, the GM can also reasonably conclude that it's too good at that point and Rule Zero the feat. My group never had a problem with using the more liberal interpretation.

 

[Pyrex]

IIRC, line effects are place on the lines between squares, and effect the squares that touch the line. This would effectively double the volume of the line shape.

You're not thinking in 3d. A gridline intersects 4 cubes, not two.

Fired along a gridline, Lightning Bolt affects an area 10'x10'x120'.

Also, it doesn't *have* to be placed on a gridline. You choose any two vertex of your area and select any other vertex within 120' and draw a 120' line through those two points.

Because of this, among other configurations, you can also throw 5'x5'x120' or 5'x10'x120' bolts.