Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
You'd obviate any stealth check or perception check based on this declaration, though?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!
It does not, actually. No other reaction or trigger relies on timing to a precision of less than half a second.True, but I was referring to the fact that the game system already allows for this kind of precision regarding triggers and Ready actions.
Dude, you're usually on top of rules, so I'm a bit shocked at how badly you have this. When you ready a spell for a reaction, you cast it on your turn and hold the release, subject to concentration checks, until your trigger moment. The time to cast is not shortened, it's lengthened (if you consider casting from start of casting to release of spell, at least).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!
Yes, they are, and if the spell had any of those triggers, you couldn't use it while whistling Dixie in matched socks. They are distinctly different. The issue you're stating here is that since falling is the trigger that many other things that aren't falling can be added and won't affect the trigger. To that, we agree -- the trigger is still 'fallis'. However, that's not what's going on here, you're not adding uncessecary specificity to 'falls' you're adding more granular specificity and changing how the spell actually triggers. Feather fall triggers on 'falls,' and you're changing that to 'being within 10' of the ground.' You can, for sure, but this entails you doing a number of other things to 'falls' that increase granularity unnecessarily.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'.
To expound, can you instead, under your understanding, state that you will cast feather fall:
10' from the ground?
1' from the ground?
1" from the ground?
.1" from the ground?
Some infinitesimally small distance from the ground?
At the very instant that you actually touch the ground?
At some point where you've made initial contact with the ground, but have yet to suffer any damage from compaction?
At the point where you've suffered half of the falling damage from the first half of your body hitting the ground, but while the rest of your body is still falling?
Where, praytell, would you draw that line? According to your arguments, I see no difference between 60', 10', and 1" or the fraction of almost nothing above the ground -- they're all still while you're falling and within the instantaneous casting you're preferring. Which will you pick?
And this matters because you're now breaking the fall into chunks, where you can essentially say, "I'm ignoring all of those falling triggers at 10.9', 10.8', 10.7'. 10/32344423312411441354564635233413424'" and so on until you hit the trigger point you're chosing. Because you have to do this if you're going with your interpretation because you cannot set a trigger at '10' above the ground,' because that's not the trigger for feather fall -- it's only 'falls.' So your ruling instead insists that there are any number of divisions of that trigger that are continuously checked and only bypassed because of a table convention to not run through them all and see if the player wants to use their reaction that that particular slice.
I'm also curious as to when you declare this falling happens -- do players fall on their own turns only, or do you stop every initiative count and declare that those falling have fallen another increment or 12?
You can cast feather fall when someone 'falls' as is within 60' of the caster. That's the same as saying 'is falling' to any degree I'd care to discuss, what with the imprecision of our shared language. So, that's the trigger, and you can argue it only occurs once in any given fall -- if you chose not to react to that trigger, you chose to forgo reaction to that trigger for it's entirety. You don't get to call back a AO when your opponent leaves your threatened area only to change your mind and use it in the last 1" of their movement -- you forgo and it's for that entire leaving, not just the last little bit.
Counterspell. Imagine a caster in the process of casting a spell with a casting time of 1 minute. You are able to cast counterspell when its trigger occurs, which is, "when you see a creature within 60 feet of you casting a spell". Tactically, if the caster wasn't casting that ritual then he would be casting nasty spells against you and your mates. If you counterspell his ritual as soon as you can then he will subject you to 9 rounds of nasty spells. If you spend 8 rounds casting your own spells against his allies and wait until round 9 to counterspell his ritual then you have saved yourself a load of hurt. This is because you timed your response to the trigger intelligently.
And it is just an intelligent use of feather fall to cast it within the last 60 feet if you can see the ground. It's not cheating or twisting the rules or deliberately mis-interpreting the trigger. I am falling, I am still falling, okay, I cast it....now!
Well, that's commendable, especially on the Internet.
I look forward to your reconsideration in light of counterspell's trigger very definitely not being a discrete, instantaneous event.
Again, counterspell. Done and done.
How long does it take to cast a spell, then? Is it .7 seconds? Where in the 'cast a spell' action does counterspell come into effect? Is it's timing important otherwise? If I counterspell, say, in the first .2 seconds of someone casting a spell, is the outcome at all different than if I counterspell in the last .2 seconds of their casting? Do I gain any advantage for casting earlier as opposed to waiting for the end?
All rhetorical questions, of course, the answer being 'timing doesn't really matter, you react to the trigger.' If the trigger is 'falls' and 'within 60'', then when you fall, that's the trigger, if you fall from 10', well, that trigger is 10' from the ground, good for you. If you fall from 500', well, that trigger is 500' from the ground. There isn't a new trigger unless the falling creature stops falling and starts again, because the trigger is 'is falling' and you've ignoring it. Later, when they've fallen 490', they are still in the same triggering fall that you've already ignored.
Now, all of that is fascinatingly nitpicky about the rules. You can go there, but I'm not going to bother thinking about that at the table. What I am going to do is realize that the player trying to cast feather fall in the last 10' of a fall is seeking an advantage from doing so, and that's cool -- I want them to do such things. But free advantages aren't handed out because you imagine that you can just do these really cool things -- if you could, they wouldn't be really cool -- so that sound likes it's an easy task for an adventurer, and timing is the purview of initiative, so, if you want to seek that advantage by pushing the spell, awesome, DC 10 init check to time it right. Because that's the kind of choice that's meaningful and interesting. Want to avoid that? Sure, cast it at a safe altitude and there's no check.