D&D 5E If you use thunderstep but teleport less than 10 feet do you take damage?

[Vaalingrade]

My god, the hyperbole.

Thunderstep is timed against itself. It is designed to blink-boom-blink.

You can't cast another teleport spell perfectly timed with someone else's instantaneous effect.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

My god, the hyperbole.

Thunderstep is timed against itself. It is designed to blink-boom-blink.

You can't cast another teleport spell perfectly timed with someone else's instantaneous effect.

Why couldn't you? You could ready an action.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You disappeared from that location.

And then, after the fact, reappear somewhere else. Try for a moment to imagine the horrifying visual of someone literally 'porting from one spt to another with literally no time in between.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

And then, after the fact, reappear somewhere else. Try for a moment to imagine the horrifying visual of someone literally 'porting from one spt to another with literally no time in between.

I have no problem imagining it and it is not horrifying at all.

 

[Maxperson]

Basically the reading depends on if you're just straight up out to get the player for daring to use this spell.

Or not. This perspective seems overly paranoid to me and ignores a lot of playstyles out there that many players find fun.

 

[Lyxen]

Oh, and let's consider the other ramifications of the "a teleportee is for a moment nowhere" interpretation. Now you can potentially use any teleport spell to avoid any damage or other effect that happens in an instant. You can just briefly blink to nowhere when the effect is about to occur.

Since you can literally teleport away anyway before the instant effect occurs, I'm not sure what the advantage is, exactly. And in any case, this would require you to have a teleport ready as a reaction, meaning basically losing your turn for that effect. But I'm not even sure that would work. Contrary to the Thunderstep in which everything is in control by the caster as per Xanathar, it's not the case for that type of avoidance, so there is no guarantee of timing anyway.

 

[Maxperson]

I think the intent is pretty clear.

"You teleport yourself to an unoccupied space you can see within range. Immediately after you disappear, a thunderous boom sounds, and each creature within 10 feet of the space you left must make a Constitution saving throw..."

The intent is that there is straight up a period of time where the caster is nowhere. They blink out of being for a split second like most teleportation in any media ever and in that moment, which is clearly delineated by the spell saying something happens the moment you disappear and noticing your reappearance as part of the process, the boom happens, damaging the point of origin for the teleport.

Prove that's the intent is what you say it is and that the intent was not to cause a thunderclap from the vacuum left by the caster. Or that the intent was not just to determine the location of the thunderclap.

 

[Umbran]

Eventually in every D&D debate, the full stop for any attempt to rationally debate.

Have you considered the possibility that the question is simple enough that if the debate takes 9 pages something about that debate is clearly not rational already?

 

[Maxperson]

Why couldn't you? You could ready an action.

Yep. I ready an action for when he disappears, which is a perceivable circumstance. Now, after he disappears(perceivable circumstance), but before the thunderclap, since @Lyxen said that's how ready works, my fighter can stroll 30 feet and attack something, taking 6 seconds worth of time to do it, all before you instantaneously reappear and the thunder goes off.

 

[ECMO3]

There is no clearly about it. There is nothing to indicate that appearing and disappearing aretemporarily separate rather than just spatially separate. The rules specify the spatial difference, they do not specify a temporal difference. Thus there is no reason to assume that one exists.

The the duration being instantaneous does not mean they can't be temporarily separate events and there is no reason to assume they aren't

All four things are essentially a true impulse with no time extent (putting aside for a moment that sound can't be temporarily instantaneous). They can go one after another without being spatially separated in time because the time for each individual element is 0. Looking at this in the frequency domain; the sequence has infinite bandwidth so the subcomponents can be separate and distinct.

To put it another way, instead of looking at 0 time as the floor, look at it as the ceiling - For the three events to be temporarily distinct (disappear, boom, reappear) the sum of the individual times associated with each individual event plus the time between events can equal but not exceed the total time for the entire sequence. In this case each event takes 0 time, the time between them is 0 and the entire sequence together takes 0. So from a theoretical point of view they can happen in a certain order and still all happen simultaneously because there is no extent in the time domain for any of the events, or the sum, and the sum is not larger than the entire sequence.

IRL there is no way to actually measure 0 time. The fastest clocks in the world can't measure time increments below 1E-20 seconds and with that level of precision you will have different measurements for different observers, but if we assume that this actually takes zero time, then there is no reason they can't occur one after another.