D&D General A LA CARTE Errata

Scott Christian said:

People can take the rules and bend them. Use errata or not. Hold true to Sage advice as if it were sacrosanct or an ad-lib. No one ever seems to debate this. Yet...

There is always debate.

The primary reason is D&D is a group game. And groups need to agree. So when you keep changing things, it has a tendency to make disagreements at the table. Not arguments, but disagreements. Things like, let's use ASIs or I am playing a yuan-ti. This causes consternation within the players and/or DM.

The secondary reason is the larger gaming culture. People like it when a culture is built. That is what D&D has done. But when you consistently change things, you are bound to upset part of the culture. Are the changes New Coke or getting rid of cocaine as an ingredient? Only time will tell.

PS - And for anyone that is about to pull up to the keyboard and use the "The DM has the final say" argument. Please... for the love of god... just don't.

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Scott Christian said:

...
PS - And for anyone that is about to pull up to the keyboard and use the "The DM has the final say" argument. Please... for the love of god... just don't.

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Lyxen said:

I think the elephant in the room is that the proponents of "the caster can include himself in the cube" conveniently assume that by doing this the caster will not suffer the effects of the spell himself, something that there is no reason to suppose.

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Lyxen said:

I think the elephant in the room is that the proponents of "the caster can include himself in the cube" conveniently assume that by doing this the caster will not suffer the effects of the spell himself, something that there is no reason to suppose.

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BlivetWidget said:

The caster of a spell with a cubic area of effect may of course exclude themselves from the effect. It’s in the 5e definition of a cubic area (see also cone and line). Do you think you hit yourself with lightning bolt every time you cast it? It has a range of self, but crucially, it’s a line, so you can exclude yourself from the effect. I want to hear your argument for this one.

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Lyxen said:

You're not following the discussion properly. Of course, the caster can exclude himself from the area, but that means that the cube will only affect one side of it. Some people, however, want the area to affect all sides around the caster, and for that the caster has to include himself in the area, in which case I'm just pointing out that he will take damage, something that these people conveniently forget in their argument, that's all.

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BlivetWidget said:

I think I see what you’re saying. That the cube, line, and cone areas of effect allow you to effectively shift their “templates” back one grid space to overlap the caster if you choose. So for thunderwave, you can cast it straight up but shifted down one grid space to include the caster and all neighboring cells, in which case the caster must suffer the effects. And if you don’t want to include the caster, the template must begin at the outer edge of their grid space, which in this case means choosing one direction. I can buy that.

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cbwjm said:

I remember making the same mistake with thunderwave, which had a cool use of the spell when the druid player barrelled into a pack of ghouls in bear form, changed back to their original elf form (which removed the ghoul paralysis) and then thunderwaved hitting all the ghouls surrounding them. It wasn't until much later that I reread the descriptions of the AoE of spells that I realised the mistake and later reading of other spells showed that if it is an effect that surrounds you, they explain the AoE as Self (Xft. radius). It was still cool though and clearly I wasn't going back to retcon it, but I believe I corrected the spell's AoEback to how it was meant to be.

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