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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mort" data-source="post: 5729681" data-attributes="member: 762">Some posters in the last thread wanted did not like the "general" nature of the question - stating that the answer is far too often "it depends."When my friend brought this situation to my attention it seemed like a pretty good example of a question with multiple answers - depending on the DM fielding the question.OK SO WHAT HAPPENED IN THE ACTUAL CASE?Also - the DM in this case fielded it in a way that was brought up in the last thread and (IMO of course) the game suffered as a result:When my friend stated he'd like to cast Expeditious Excavation to put out as much of the fire as he could the DM responded "I don't think so, but convince me."The DM expressed his concern as the spell not expressely saying a thing about putting out fires.The player then pointed out that dirt puts out fires, the spell flings dirt (a lot of dirt) at the fire so should do something to the fire.A half hour discussion followed with rule books being perused, arguments being made - and several other players just sitting there twiddling their thumbs.After the half hour discussion (the group plays for 4-5 hours a night) the DM "gave in" and decided the spell would work as the equivalent of one bucket of water (which btw, sorry but one bucket of water, when I guess 10-12 were needed - really?).But the bigger point, this is the first encounter of the first session and 15% was wasted on a (very) minor issue. It's a pretty bad message to be sending to the players that non-standard requests are likely to waste this much time - successful or not.It's interesting that the responses in this thread have consisted of varying levels of "sure why not," which leads me to think this one is a relatively clear cut case (yet not for this DM). Can you imagine what would/will happen if the request is more out of the box, or the result is actually important in some way?</blockquote>

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