D&D 5E The Gloves Are Off?

[Lanefan]

Again, that's an interpretation. And like I said, you're entitled to it, but it seems so dissatisfying to you that I'm not sure why you won't consider others.

There's nothing that says that casting counterspell is always done exactly the same way by everyone who uses it.

Someone with more specific 5e knowledge can jump in here about this, but isn't it still true with arcane spells that they are written out in meticulous formulae with specific instructions etc. thus requiring arcane casters to carry around spellbooks containing such for each spell known?

If yes, then the counterspell must at the very least be done the exact same way each time any one caster uses it, as per the instructions in that caster's book; and if I'm playing a caster and another caster counters my counter by casting it faster you can be sure I want to get my mitts on that caster's spellbook and learn that quicker-to-cast version.

That said, I'll concede that this all might work when talking about spontaneous casters as they kinda make this stuff up as they go along, and might never cast the same spell the same way twice. I'll also go on record as saying I'm not a fan, as non-book arcane casting allows yet another workaround to an otherwise-reasonable limitation on casters.

There's nothing that says that the counterspell cannot be interrupted. In fact, we've been told the opposite.

Told wrongly, IMO.

And on a broader level, the flaw with any sort of LIFO structure is that the advantageous position is always held by the person who waits the longest to (re)act, where from an action-first derring-do mentality it would seem better that the advantage go to the first to (re)act. This also shows up in situations where someone wants to provoke combat by doing something sudden (i.e. acting first) and can't due to the way the initiative/turn model works.

There's nothing that says that magic spells cannot interact with each other in mysterious and unexpected ways.

Agreed - and this is where wild magic surges are born.

There's nothing that says that the person casting the second counterspell didn't intuit what the other was doing and beat them to the punch... that the order of events for the characters MUST match that of the players. A lot happens in a round, and expecting that every participant is just standing around in stasis except on their turn is bonkers.

Thing is, the only way to circumvent this at the table level is to go to some sort of "everyone declares actions then they're all resolved at once" setup, which has its own bevy of issues.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Do you have a link to those rules for initiative? Sounds like the exhausting approach I sketched above, but made to work!

Edit: Found 'em!


Yeah such a thing should be across the board.

Lol. Sry I was doing it on my phone and was scrolling back rather slowly by the time I was ready to provide the link you had already found them.
Our table has had fun with them.
In the thread where he posted them I asked some questions for clarification purposes.
Obviously amend them to suit your campaign.

 

[niklinna]

Do you have a link to those rules for initiative? Sounds like the exhausting approach I sketched above, but made to work!

Edit: Found 'em!

Those dynamic initiative rules look interesting. They don't deal with the counter-reaction thing being argued about here, but I could see a couple ways they could accommodate that.

 

[Mort]

I will admit that “you can’t interrupt casting a spell to cast another spell” is a convincing house rule. It limits counterspell cheese and just makes sense in terms of how I imagine casting to look.

See I rather like the option. It means you have to think a bit when facing a caster. And it has a large built-in limitation since only 1 reaction per round. If you counter his counter, you CAN'T counter his next spell, or cast shield or endure elements - it injects thought and risk.

 

[Lanefan]

New thought experiment: there's a character at one end of a 20' long corridor. At the other end, in an open room, is a caster controlling a flaming sphere, which they are currently standing behind.

1) On the first character's turn, they use their 30' of movement to go down the corridor and into the room. They use their last 10' to go sideways into a corner.

2) On the caster's turn, they move their flaming sphere down the 20' corridor to the other end.

According to the rules, the first character didn't encounter the flaming sphere.

Does it bother anybody that the only way for that to be true is for the turns to actually be sequential, not simultaneous?

Yes! This is a great example of the "mini-teleport" movement that strictly turn-based rules tend to end up with.

Here it would make sense to get granular: use movement rates and measure out how far the character moved on each initiative pip (assuming the movement started on its rolled init), and how far the sphere moved once the caster got it rolling (starting on the caster's rolled init.), and see where (or if!) they met.

Or, if speed of play is foremost, give the character a saving throw to see if it got down the passage undamaged either by getting to the corner before the sphere entered the passage of by leaping over the sphere en route or whatever.

 

[niklinna]

See I rather like the option. It means you have to think a bit when facing a caster. And it has a large built-in limitation since only 1 reaction per round. If you counter his counter, you CAN'T counter his next spell, or cast shield or endure elements - it injects thought and risk.

Plus as I mentioned you are burning a second spell slot to counter the counter. It's a costly and risky move, especially with your higher-level spell slots.

 

[Lanefan]

I agree. The rules allow it. The rest is twisting the fiction to match those rules, since the fiction wouldn't allow it to happen if you relied on the fiction alone.

There isn't 6 seconds. RAW explicitly says that reaction spells take a fraction of a second.

That fraction being, one assumes, 6 seconds divided by 20 initiative pips, as reactions take place within the same 'pip' as whatever is being reacted to. This would make it 0.3 of a second.

 

[niklinna]

New thought experiment: there's a character at one end of a 20' long corridor. At the other end, in an open room, is a caster controlling a flaming sphere, which they are currently standing behind.

1) On the first character's turn, they use their 30' of movement to go down the corridor and into the room. They use their last 10' to go sideways into a corner.

2) On the caster's turn, they move their flaming sphere down the 20' corridor to the other end.

According to the rules, the first character didn't encounter the flaming sphere.

Does it bother anybody that the only way for that to be true is for the turns to actually be sequential, not simultaneous?

It doesn't bother me, because that's the way the game is designed at a root level. To figure things out as simultaneous, you'd have to change a lot of other things, and get lots more complicated. And I'm not just interested in this level of tactical, second-by-second minutiae for tabletop gaming; we have CRPGs and MMOs for that kind of play.

 

[Lanefan]

Lightning bolt the spell =/= a lightning bolt the natural phenomenon. There’s overlap, but you simply can’t assume anything true of one must be true of the other.

For example, the spell has a range of 120 feet. A natural lighting bolt is like, ten times that.

And can be a lot more. A few years ago there was a single lightning bolt that crossed three states in the southern USA.

Megaflash: Longest lightning flash ever breaks record

Two lightning megaflashes have broken new records for the longest lightning flash and the longest lasting lightning flash.

www.guinnessworldrecords.com

 

[Maxperson]

That fraction being, one assumes, 6 seconds divided by 20 initiative pips, as reactions take place within the same 'pip' as whatever is being reacted to. This would make it 0.3 of a second.

Divide it by 30. Initiative is d20+dex+other modifiers. It can get to 10 or more I think. So 30 down.