D&D 5E Feather Fall hanger on

[5ekyu]

Maybe a little.

Are you saying that if I have been trained to cast a fireball into a particular 5' square, I should also have been trained to cast Feather Fall at the moment I am passing through a particular 5' cube? Because both spells would have received the same type of training?

i am saying that just as I assume training in fireball would include common "degree of precision" training that allows it to be accurate without need for roll to a degree of certainty defined as a 5' square (in the rules - obviously the training in-game would be far more accuracy based) so training in feather fall would include the training in timing needed to choose to pick a particular 5' square accurately too.

You could insert many number of other spells that require timing and placement, not just fireball. placement of a wall of force within a few inches of a door perhaps or various spells placed just right to interact with terrain in the heat of combat.

lets give an example that might be a little more clear... 70' corridors 5' wide ending in a T intersection with an also 5' wide crossing halway
you have seen an enemy just around the T, occasionally popping head out and doing their bowman thing
If your Hypnotic pattern 30' cube aoe is placed in that last 5' section that is within both the corridor you are looking down and the crossing path, its AOE will include 10-15' down each side and have an unobstructed line from orogin to target - the spell affects them.
if, however, you cannot place it accurately enough to pick a given 5' square and it is placed 5' back then the line of effect rule means it only covers like half of one 5' portion into each side and you have a much higher chance of failing to catch them in the area. This would even be true if Evards was being used with ready as a reaction.

Now, sure, that is not as critical life and death a bit as choosing which 5' spot to cast feather fall in, but i assume there was enough training for that spell and its placement to enable that choice to be made without roll for failure in the case of hypnotic pattern... just like i assume the same ability to pick the point at which feather fall is cast and its affected folks to within a 5' degree of accuracy.

i just do not see a reason why i should assume that one spell got its "training" to include 5' precision and the other spell did not?

 

[5ekyu]

No, not at all. I just don't buy that you wrote all that (including the dig about WoW) simply to demonstrate that the Feather Fall trick isn't "new", because the point we're debating doesn't hinge at all on whether or not it's new.

Ok, it's not new. People have been doing it for at least 37 years.

There. Now, how does that change the arguments that either of us have been making? It doesn't. So why did you bring it up? Hmmmm.....I wonder....

(Not that it matters, but by "new" I wasn't thinking "first person in the history of D&D to use it" so much as "not exactly the way the spell is intended to be used". Poor word choice on my part.)

EDIT: I'm done. If you're going to be all disingenuous about even this side point I'm not sure why I'm trying to debate this. It started off as an interesting discussion about application/interpretation of rules, but I clearly pressed a button for you because you got all aggro and now the whole thing is getting personal. Not interested. Bye.

BTW... i assumed "new" was referring to something like "innovative" or creative and the point that it has been being done this way for over three decades was to counter that point.

As for WOW and video gaming you yourself were the one who brought in that reference a few posts back with your use of WOW to show how difficult it is to time its analog to feather fall in dnd, right? So, if that was one of the examples you use to highlight and explain your decisions on how hard it is to accurately stop a fall with feather fall, why is it a dig for me to reference that i never played WOW in that "maybe if i had ever played even a second of WOW that would have made a difference in how i adjudicate DND." statement?

getting personal? have i called you disingenuous? have i claimed you were just using seniority as opposed to responding to a claim of "new"?

 

[Guest 6801328]

Grrr...I don't know why I let myself get dragged back into these tar pits.

The mistake you are making when you try to compare fireball accuracy to the feather fall trick is that you are only including the time dimension in one. Fireball targets a spot, feather fall targets a person (or persons). If you want to add "at a specific moment in time" then you have to do it for both of them.

So a more accurate analogy would be that you want to hit some people on a ledge with fireball just as a falling guy passes the ledge.

And, yes, I would require some kind of additional roll to do that.

 

[5ekyu]

Grrr...I don't know why I let myself get dragged back into these tar pits.

The mistake you are making when you try to compare fireball accuracy to the feather fall trick is that you are only including the time dimension in one. Fireball targets a spot, feather fall targets a person (or persons). If you want to add "at a specific moment in time" then you have to do it for both of them.

So a more accurate analogy would be that you want to hit some people on a ledge with fireball just as a falling guy passes the ledge.

And, yes, I would require some kind of additional roll to do that.

Except of course, fireball can be used as a ready action and that means as a reaction... just as a great many other target-point spells can.

So this fireball may be just as tied to a timeframe and a split second timeframe as any other reaction.

Do your players get to make checks against acrobatics to get many of their other reactions off?

Shield spell can go through the entire "do i want to cast" decision process and take also effect between the time you realize you are being attacked by an aimed spell (or magic missiles) and the time the effect hits.

Do you require die rolls for shield spells too? What die roll do you require for shield to take effect before the magic missiles hit?

Look, as is always the case, at your table you are free to invoke any rules, house rules or rulings your player will agree to. That is fine and dandy for all who agree to share those terms.

My own experiences with feather fall in play (and the vast majority of the discussions i have seen about feather fall) and the way reactions are presented within 5e have not led me to think that popping off FF at the bottom of the drop (last 10') or the middle of the drop or right away is anything "unintended" or "non-canonical" or "new" or whatever words you choose to use to put it into a box of "things i want to add the excitement of maybe dead if you try to." its a case of player/character choice which sometimes will be the right answer to a particular situation and sometimes would be the wrong one.

if you find that it helps your game to make the bottom of drop option have a chance of thud if used within say 30-40' of the end of a drop where you can see the bottom, thats just a sign of how different our games are.

For me, the way reactions work pretty reliably within the rules for other effects through the game and the way many other spells allow a 5' precision as a matter of course would make me feel that selecting FF out for not having it as an oddity, an exception and an inconsistency. i would need a good reason to do so.

And when it comes to player's trying unexpected things with their character's, as stated before I start from "say yes unless i have a compelling need to say no" because as a general rule i like encouraging the players trying things that may not be precisely what i was expecting or what the designer may have intended (not that FF as being discussed here IMO falls into that category. FF has been used this way for decades by many and so i doubt the designers were all ignorant of this when they made a choice to not include a safety crash range in FF if they did not intened it to work reliably.)

But hey, different GMs have different outlooks, different settings and different players all with different needs and preferences... so hey... it is what it is.

Enjoy.

 

[Guest 6801328]

You are lumping a whole bunch of things together as if they belong in the same category, and they do not.

A previous poster gave the example of holding an action until the guards "look the other way" before moving. I agree with that poster that doing so is putting too much precision on "hold action".

I would rule the same way here:

"I will Hold Action until the guy falls, then cast Fireball." Fine.

"I will Hold Action until the falling guy is at the exact point where the time it takes him to reach the ledge is the same as the sum of the casting time of fireball and the time it will take my fireball to reach the ledge, so that both arrive at the same moment." Not fine. You gonna have to roll for that.

Is this in RAW? No, it's not. Of course. I'm glad WotC didn't try to legislate every single edge case they could think of.

That's nice that you justify your approach as applying 5' square precision equally to all spells, but (again) Feather Fall doesn't have a spatial target, it has a creature target. You are adding time precision, not spatial precision.

The irony is that you don't need to justify it with a strange theory about spatial accuracy. It's your table, you can allow anything you want. If you want to make Feather Fall more powerful by both protecting against falling damage and having it all happen within one round so that enemies don't get to take any actions during the fall, you are of course absolutely free to do that. I think it makes a 1st level spell too powerful, and if players want to try to get fancy they'll have to make a roll. (The converse is also true: enemy NPCs using Feather Fall would have to make the same trade off.)

If you are taking an 80 foot fall, after 75 feet you are going about 70 feet per second. At that velocity you are within a particular 5' cube for about a 1/14 of a second. I just think it's a little too cinematic/superhero to assume a caster can time a spell so that he finishes casting in precisely the right moment.

Just because your group has been houseruling this since the Eisenhower administration doesn't mean it's anything but a houserule.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Uhm, Liberal Arts Major? I'm going to believe all of my lying physics professors, and there have been quite a few, instead of you. No offense.

Hmm. I'm actually sort of surprised nobody else has chimed in on this. It's just the sort of thing that gaming nerds (like myself) LOVE correcting other people on.

Anyway, I doubt your physics professors have lied to you (although I suppose it's possible) and I definitely think you should believe them over some random dude on the Internet, but I also think you forgot that they said, "blah blah blah...in a vacuum." Yes, in a vacuum mass has no effect on acceleration due to gravitational force. But unless I mis-clicked and I'm in the Star Wars forum I don't think we're talking about combat in a vacuum.

Also, the gravitational force is usually covered in about two weeks of a physics curriculum, so if you have had "quite a few" physics professors, and they've "all" talked about this...I'm having trouble parsing that. Have you taken intro mechanics quite a few times?

I use 1 round is one minute. It's an old school thing.

Ha! Another poster in this thread trying to play the "I've been gaming a long time" card. Funny.

Anyway, a round in 5e (and 4e, and 3.5e) is 6 seconds.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Mass has nothing to do with it. Ask Galileo.

What do you mean? Drop the mass to a feather's, and the resulting reduction in weight is going to mean a very low terminal velocity through the air. It also means that this would happen almost instantaneously since there would be no momentum or impact issues that an object with the mass of a person not under the effect of the spell at free fall speed would suffer.[/QUOTE]

Uhm, Liberal Arts Major? I'm going to believe all of my lying physics professors, and there have been quite a few, instead of you. No offense.

What Elfcrusher said was essentially correct. Where on earth were you educated, that your schoolteachers got away with lying to their pupils?

I use 1 round is one minute. It's an old school thing.

Do you adjust other timing and distances to take into account the difference between 6 second rounds, and 1 minute rounds?

 

[cmad1977]

I’d leave any game where the DM was a nit picky about this as you guys seem to be.


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[5ekyu]

You are lumping a whole bunch of things together as if they belong in the same category, and they do not.

A previous poster gave the example of holding an action until the guards "look the other way" before moving. I agree with that poster that doing so is putting too much precision on "hold action".

I would rule the same way here:

"I will Hold Action until the guy falls, then cast Fireball." Fine.

"I will Hold Action until the falling guy is at the exact point where the time it takes him to reach the ledge is the same as the sum of the casting time of fireball and the time it will take my fireball to reach the ledge, so that both arrive at the same moment." Not fine. You gonna have to roll for that.

Is this in RAW? No, it's not. Of course. I'm glad WotC didn't try to legislate every single edge case they could think of.

That's nice that you justify your approach as applying 5' square precision equally to all spells, but (again) Feather Fall doesn't have a spatial target, it has a creature target. You are adding time precision, not spatial precision.

The irony is that you don't need to justify it with a strange theory about spatial accuracy. It's your table, you can allow anything you want. If you want to make Feather Fall more powerful by both protecting against falling damage and having it all happen within one round so that enemies don't get to take any actions during the fall, you are of course absolutely free to do that. I think it makes a 1st level spell too powerful, and if players want to try to get fancy they'll have to make a roll. (The converse is also true: enemy NPCs using Feather Fall would have to make the same trade off.)

If you are taking an 80 foot fall, after 75 feet you are going about 70 feet per second. At that velocity you are within a particular 5' cube for about a 1/14 of a second. I just think it's a little too cinematic/superhero to assume a caster can time a spell so that he finishes casting in precisely the right moment.

Just because your group has been houseruling this since the Eisenhower administration doesn't mean it's anything but a houserule.

RE the bold...

"More powerful" than what?

"More powerful" than RAW? Not hardly. There is nothing anywhere in RAw to suggest that there is a risk to featherfalling when.where you want to. This is not some "additional power" it is just not adding a new non-RAW limitation where one does not exist.

"More powerful" than RAI? Not hardly. It has been being used this way for decades, not just in my games btw, though obviously cannot claim it to have been being used this way everywhere. I am sure i have seen references to it being used this way long before 5e... in various guides etc. So the imaginative notion that that the designers *intended* it to work differently, to have a safety limit or splat feature, but maybe just forgot it is also rather odd but definitely non-supported.

"More powerful" than Elfcrusher's house rule? Well, if Elfcrusher had a house rule that fireballs did zero on a successful save, I am not making "fireball" more powerful by keeping the normal rule in my game. i am just keeping it as is.

Temporal precision vs spatial precision -

folks seem to be harping on this distinction... and ignoring the other reaction timing comparisons BTW - but that is fine so let me ask - so what? One spell has a case where "where is it put exactly" matters a lot and the rules and (i believe) even the GMs here do not add rolls to that "spatial precision" as a matter of course within lets say the 10' distance level.

So, why is it that some folks want to somehow conjure up that there is apparently not the same degree of precision for "timing precision" for spells which can hinge on timing precision?

What additional not in RAW roll do you require for the entire "decide to cast" and "cast quickly enough" for the small amount of time between "they cast a guiding bolt at your character and it will hit" for the shield spell for timing vs that flash of light?

 

[Arial Black]

You slipped the very important pay where the DM arbitrates if a trigger is valid. Else your reasoning would be valid to say "I wait until the guards aren't looking and cross the hall" and, bam, it happens as soon as the guards aren't looking without a roll.

Just because you can say "my trigger is" doesn't mean the DM has to accept it.

First, what's wrong with waiting for the guards to look the other way? They might not actually look the other way in that round so the trigger does not occur, but I will certainly be 60 feet off the ground at some point during my fall!

Further, you can't ready a reaction to cast feather fall.

True, but I was referring to the fact that the game system already allows for this kind of precision regarding triggers and Ready actions.

In the game, what the Ready action is doing is effectively changing the casting time of a spell from '1 action' to '1 reaction, with a trigger'. Since feather fall already has a casting time of '1 reaction with a trigger' then the timing precision for each is identical: RAW, there is no issue!

As a reaction only spell, it already has a trigger, which is "falling". Not "falling and at an altitude defined by the caster". You can choose to ignore that trigger, ou'd you want, but you can't subdivide that trigger into arbitrarily small increments. You are falling, you may react to falling. Not reacting means you fall 500'. Seems pretty cut and dried.

Bollocks! 'falling while wearing mismatched socks', 'falling while whistling the tune of She'll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She Comes' are not different trigger conditions when the trigger is 'when you or a creature within 60 feet of you falls'. As long as you are falling, the trigger condition is still ongoing, and the socks you wear and the tune you hum and the moment you cast the spell are ALL during the trigger condition of 'falling'.