D&D 5E Is it houseruling to let a torch set fire to things?

[pemerton]

A fireball burns hotter and with much more fire than a torch ever would.

Where do the rules say that? How is that not a house rule, according to your sense of that phrase?

Oh, and you should probably read fireball. It does say what it will burn.

But it doesn't say that that is all that it will burn. Treating that as an exhaustive list requires adding in something (eg the world "only") that is not written down. Hence, by your standards, that is a house rule.

Some might have fireballs set trees on fire. Others might say the fire is over with too soon.

Those aren't disagreement over whether or not a fireball is capable of setting things alight, though. They're differences over what the threshold of combustibility is. To put it another way: they're not disagreements over the content of the rules. They're disagreements over what, exactly, the rules require of the imagined situation in question. Which is to say that they're differences in adjudication.

 

[pemerton]

What if I extrapolate something different?

That's what happens when rules are written in natural language, and require having regard to an empirical context (whether real or, in the case of RPGing, imagined) as part of the process of their application.

When the different extrapolations are made by politicians, or judges, the result can be constitutional crisis or even civil strife.

But when the different extrapolations are in the context of playing an RPG, I just think of it as part of playing the game.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Take Burning Hands as an example:

As you hold your hands with thumbs touching and fingers spread, a thin sheet of flames shoots forth from your outstretched fingertips. Each creature in a 15-foot cone must make a Dexterity saving throw. A creature takes 3d6 fire damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a successful one.

The fire ignites any flammable objects in the area that aren’t being worn or carried.​

Like Moldvay Basic and 4e's fireball spell descriptions, the description here only refers to damage to creatures. There is also the stipulation about objects that are neither worn nor carried. Does this mean that if an enemy wizard is holding a scroll, and my PC blasts him/her with Burning Hands, then that scroll is immune from being damaged or destroyed unless my GM makes a house rule? Is the non-house ruled default that, even if the mage lies dead and charred, the scroll is pristine and untouched?

Yes. That is what the rules say. If you're playing by the rules, burning hands does not ignite objects that are worn or carried. If you want to change that, you're changing the rules. They could've left it up to DM discretion, or they could've had rules for object saving throws or whatever (like 3e), but a designer made a conscious decision to specifically mention in all of these spell descriptions that they don't damage worn/carried objects.

 

[AnimeSniper]

Agreed. There are a lot of similarities, but there will also be a lot of differences. Some might have fireballs set trees on fire. Others might say the fire is over with too soon. Every table will be different with different rules on how they play the game.

Or the fireball explodes against the tree and a few seconds a dryad comes running out on fire... this also happened in one game.

RAW in the core books for one DM they will read them and run as they are written while another will read them and tweak i.e. houserule them to fit or broaden their usage and sadly the third will invoke the Mad Hatter of Wunderland and Cthulu combined leaving the players bashing their heads against the table.

RAW comes down to the interpretation of the DM... for example firearms in d20 Modern/Future I houserule rolling a set of number of d10, d100, or mix of them for heavy belt-fed weaponry like the M2 Browning .50 caliber HMG... the rolled results is how many rounds strike the target. Sorry NPC #13, Bullet Magnet, is dead

Scene- PC #2 dropping the torch on the trail line of gunpowder does it immediately ignite or for 1d5 seconds before catching fire and leading to powder magazine resulting in an impressive explosion.... yes, but sadly a stray ember catches the little 3 lbs. keg on fire exploding it and killing PC #2

Roll another Red Shirt character Jim!

 

[AnimeSniper]

Yes. That is what the rules say. If you're playing by the rules, burning hands does not ignite objects that are worn or carried. If you want to change that, you're changing the rules. They could've left it up to DM discretion, or they could've had rules for object saving throws or whatever (like 3e), but a designer made a conscious decision to specifically mention in all of these spell descriptions that they don't damage worn/carried objects.

True and like in the Fallout game moments of "I just turned that raider in to Laser Ash/Plasma Goo! Lets loot their corpse!" or the whole NPC #7 just got hit by the 120mm tank shell and not turned into a fine bloody mist... but yet I can take all their gear and equipment and its not damaged at all.

Publishers want to get the product out to the consumer ASAP and its up to us as the DM to tweak where needed or run a previous editions rule in place.

 

[pemerton]

If you're playing by the rules, burning hands does not ignite objects that are worn or carried.

The rules don't say that at all!

The say that flammable objects that are neither worn nor carried ignite (SRD, p 123).

And they say that "Characters can also damage objects with their weapons and spells. Objects are immune to poison and psychic damage, but otherwise they can be affected by physical and magical attacks much like creatures can." (SRD, p 87)

And the say that "Red dragons breathe fire, and many spells conjure flames to deal fire damage." (SRD, p 97)

Nothing there says, entails, implies or even suggests that a Burning Hands spell cannot ignite objects that are worn or carried. It says, without any ambiguity, that a scroll suspended from a thread directly in front of the wizard will ignite. And it says that a scroll which the NPC wizard holds can be damaged by the spell, much as the wizard can be. It also tells us that the sort of damage that Burning Hands does is the same as from a dragon's fiery breath - not to mention the spell description itself referring to "a thin sheet of flames" - which tends to suggest that the damage, if it occurs, will be due to being burned.

There are things which are unanswered - for instance, is the "thin sheet of flames" which is also described as a "15-foot cone" basically a triangle (as the "thin sheet" suggests) or literally a cone (as the AoE description suggests). Page 103 (on areas of effect) does not really clarify this. But until that question is answered, we can't know whether the scroll at the wizard's feet is in the AoE or not.

Another thing that is unanswered is what exactly happens in the fiction if the wizard succeeds at his/her DEX save - does s/he twist out of the way (and the hp loss represents exertion) or nevertheless burn, but less seriously, or . . . ? Depending on your view of hp loss, the same issue might arise on a failed save, especially if the wizard has many hp and the spell only knocks off a few of them.

A further complication is that objects always fail DEX checks (SRD, p 87), and this rule - at least as stated - is not confined to objects that are neither worn nor carried.

I don't think it's easy to decide what happens to the scroll the wizard is holding, because of all these factors - what is the AoE, is the scroll within it (if the wizard saves? if the wizard fails to save?), how many hp does the scroll have, etc? But the fact that the answer is not easy to determine, given the state of the rules, doesn't mean that the default is that nothing happens to the scroll. As I've said, the rules neither state, nor entail, nor imply, nor even suggest that to be so.

EDIT: One thing that this shows - at least, I think it shows it - is that when the rules are all described in terms of in-fiction geography and physical processes, there is a heavy burden on the GM not to be unfair. (Alternatively, there is pressure to add rules like item saving throws and the like, which significantly increase GM overhead.)

A quite different way to do it would be to have a success roll for Burning Hands, and on a moderate success the player gets to choose - your spell does full damage, but destroys one flammable item worn/carried by the target; or your spell does half damage. But D&D has tended to eschew such overtly metagame mechanics.

 

[Maxperson]

I made this point in the other thread.

There's also another way to put it: back in the late 19th century Lewis Carrol published an article in the journal Mind, called "What the Tortoise said to Achilles". In the article, Carrol made the point that every inference requires application of a rule which, if it were written down as an express premise, would then require another rule of inference to move from premises to conclusion. If one insisted that this new rule of inference be written down, the same issue arises - etc, etc, giving rise to an infinite regress.

The lesson is that every application of a rules requires drawing upon a rule of inference which (on pain of regress) can't itself be written down as a premise in the reasoning.

In maths and logic, the rules of inference are modus ponens, modus tollens etc.

In applying the rules of D&D, which aren't formal logical rules and which draw upon natural language and rely upon intuitions about the imagined circumstances within the fiction, the "rules of inference" include things like the imaginative/interpretive process that allows the making of comparisons and extrapolations, the drawing together of similar but not identical cases (eg lit torches, burning oil and alchemist's fire all do fire damage, and also are all capable of setting things alight in virtue of being aflame), etc.

If this counts as houseruling just because it draws upon intuitions and principles that aren't written down, then every moment of adjudication will be houseruling.

I addressed it upthread (though with reference to scrolls rather than torches, and with reference to Burning Hands - which contains the same rules text - rather than Fireball).

Self-quoting:

If what you decide only applies to your table, it is a house rule. You may decide that the scroll burns. I may decide that it doesn't. Both are going to be consistently applied in duplicate circumstances in our respective games. That qualifies as a rule for our house.

 

[Maxperson]

Where do the rules say that? How is that not a house rule, according to your sense of that phrase?

It's a house rule. Torches and fireballs are both fire damage, but fireball does many more times the damage in the same amount of time.

But it doesn't say that that is all that it will burn. Treating that as an exhaustive list requires adding in something (eg the world "only") that is not written down. Hence, by your standards, that is a house rule.

You don't include something like that if it can burn everything. You either say it can burn everything flammable or you leave it alone. It's crystal clear that fireball is not supposed to burn worn or carried items.

Those aren't disagreement over whether or not a fireball is capable of setting things alight, though. They're differences over what the threshold of combustibility is. To put it another way: they're not disagreements over the content of the rules. They're disagreements over what, exactly, the rules require of the imagined situation in question. Which is to say that they're differences in adjudication.

It doesn't matter if it's just a matter of degree. You are establishing one rule for your game and I'm establishing another. Our two rules are different from each others house rule by virtue of the different thresholds.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

If what you decide only applies to your table, it is a house rule.

I think I have finally realized why discussing the rules of the game with you is such a difficult task; your definition of the phrase "house rule" includes literally all applications of any rule, even those written in the book, because however I (or another) might interpret that rule and apply it considering that to be the "written rule", it fits your definition of "house rule" because you are able to interpret and apply that same rule differently, rather than my decision applying to your table too.

 

[pemerton]

You are establishing one rule for your game and I'm establishing another. Our two rules are different from each others house rule by virtue of the different thresholds.

But deciding that (say) the scroll is burned along with the wizard who was holding it isn't establishing a rule at all. It's applying a rule (or, rather, a conjunction of rules: I've cited the relevant passages of the SRD upthread).

The fact that you might construe the rules differently doesn't change the fact that what I'm doing is construing and applying the rules of the game.

If what you decide only applies to your table, it is a house rule.

But anything that I decide applies only to my own table.

That's not a point about the content or source of rules, though. It's a point about authority. Unlike in some other systems of rules (eg legal systems administered by court hierarchies) I have no authority to make my construction of the rules binding on anyone else.

In circumstances like that it's natural that varying interpretations and table practices will flourish. That doesn't mean that everyone is house-ruling, though. That just shows us that even reasonable minds can differ over the interpretation of natural language rules and over their application to (imagined) empirical circumstances.

At least in common law countries, judges disagree all the time over rules that are (generally) drafted with far more care than the D&D ones, that have received far more skilled analysis and commentary, and in cases where the stakes are much higher and hence much greater effort is made to get it right. They are only held to some degree of uniformity by rules establishing hierarchies of authority and rules for casting votes on the bench. Why would we expect the D&D RAW to produce any greater uniformity of interpretation and application?

You don't include something like that if it can burn everything. You either say it can burn everything flammable or you leave it alone. It's crystal clear that fireball is not supposed to burn worn or carried items.

Obviously I don't think it's crystal clear at all. I've quoted the text on p 87 that says that objects can be damaged by attacks, including spell attacks, in much the same way as creatures can. The same text also mentions that objects always fail their DEX saves. Given that a big chunk of the damaging spells that involve DEX saves are the fiery ones (Fireball (including the delayed version), Burning Hands, Flaming Sphere, Fire Storm, Flame Strike, Incendiary Cloud, Meteor Swarm, Wall of Fire, maybe some others I'm missing*), that text would be fairly pointless if those spells couldn't damage objects.

Of the spells I've mentioned, three have no text about damaging objects (Flame Strike, Incendiary Cloud and Wall of Fire): it would be odd if that absence of text meant that they could damage worn/carried objects though Fireball, Burning Hands and Flaming Sphere cannot. Delayed Blast Fireball, Fire Storm and Meteor Swarm all have text noting that the spell damages objects in the area, as well as igniting objects that are neither worn nor carried. Few other spells have such text: does that mean that the passage on p 87 is meant to be applied only in the context of 7th and higher level spells?

I think the text on p 87 is clear: the GM adjudicates damage to objects caused by spells, and - given that text - there is no general presumption that spells don't damage objects. (Nor is there any general presumption that weapons don't damage objects: a GM who narrates a slash in the clothes of a hobgoblin who is cut down by a PC's sword is not houseruling either!) Some spells have text that, as far as they are concerned, eliminates at least some elements of GM adjudication by stipulating outcomes for certain classes of objects.

[size=-2]* In the SRD, the following spells do damage and involve DEX spells but don't deal fire damage: Acid Splash, Black Tentacles, Blade Barrier, Call Lightning, Chain Lightning, Disintegrate, Ice Storm, Sacred Flame, Storm of Vengeance, Wall of Ice, Wall of Thorns - that's 11 spells, compared to the 9 I've mentioned above (and Lighting Bolt also has the text about igniting flammable objects that are neither worn nor carried). Explosive Runes and Prismatic Spray/Wall have both fire and non-fire options.[/size]