Aim, fireball, attack rather than save... Need for help !

[Aloïsius]

I just had an idea : what if we consider the attack roll of area attacks to be some kind of "aim's rule" ?

I always has a problem with players taking a few minutes to place their fireball, so that they can hit a maximum of foes without wounding friends.

I was happy when I read that saves were removed, because I hoped there will be only one attack roll when the wizard cast his fireball. This is not the case, but...


So, I'm trying to figure an house rule mechanic that would resolve both the "player takes hour to aim its area effect" and "player takes hours to resolve its area attack".


Obviously, it means that the attack roll should be used to determine how many targets you can hit, and if they are able to avoid some damage. And this house rule should not require the use of a computer.

The rule should allow for some kind of (rare) fumble or miss, when the party wizard says "oops, sorry !"

Ideally, such a rule would make playing without figurine easier.


The problem is that I have a hard time designing this rule... Because I end either with ignoring the target reflex defence (and that's not fair) or having to make two separate rolls (one for the determining who will be affected by the fireball, another to know how badly the targets may be affected).

I will probably muse with this idea some time, but if someone has a solution for this...

 

[Piratecat]

I'm not entirely sure I understand. The caster picks a target square, then rolls an attack roll for everyone in the square. If he hits their reflex defense, they take full damage. If he misses, they take half damage.

I think that the 4e method of "select a whole square" instead of 3e's "select an intersection" might speed up the target selection, but I haven't really found delay to be a problem in my game. Is this something that needs a house rule?

 

[jeffhartsell]

THe fact that fireball will now be a square instead of a wierd pseudo-circle will help quite a bit.

 

[Surgoshan]

If nothing else you can construct a square out of toothpicks (or popsicle sticks) to speed things up.

 

[Aloïsius]

THe fact that fireball will now be a square instead of a wierd pseudo-circle will help quite a bit.

I did not knew... Sure, firecube will eliminate the long calculations*... But... Nevermind, I will post back when I have something more solid to discuss.

(*note that the loss of time was not the biggest problem : it was about someone placing a fireball hundreds of feet away with one foot precision to grill his enemy without hurting his friends... talk about sniping, but with 100% accuracy...)

 

[hong]

I assume the problem is players being able to place a fireball with pinpoint accuracy, since there's no "anticipate people's movements" rule. What this means is you can hit the bad guys with 100% assurance you won't hit the good guys, for example.

What you could do is, for anyone who wants to cast an AoE spell, have them specify the target square at the end of their PREVIOUS turn. Then everyone moves as usual, and when their turn comes round, they drop the spell on the square that they specified. If they correctly anticipated where the bad guys would go, that's good. If they got it wrong, or some friendlies wandered into the AoE, them's the breaks.

 

[Shabe]

Lets see a few options for you

Let magic only target creatures, say that magic needs "blah life force blah excuse" to target things, then your wizard has x number of choices instead of all the grids on the battle field.

Don't use a battle grid, then get the player to place the fireball and use a piece of string to calculate who is in it.

To hit area, give area effect spells range modifiers like ranged weapons used to, say perhaps a DC to hit of 10, then increase the difficulty by 2 for every increament, if he misses he doesn't hit exactly where is was aiming for, use scatter of d3 time number of increaments he fired. This allows expierenced wizards to hit exactly where they want.
As an option for even more "fun", on a crit let the area be twice as big

 

[That One Guy]

I thought I saw somewhere that wizards could get a feat to control the aoe such that it didn't hit allies. If you want to roll once, assume a hit is a miss on allies (Half damage) and a miss is a total miss (no damage). Will that work for the house rule?

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Op asked for "Ideally, such a rule would make playing without figurine easier." ? I think without using figs or maps would be the fastest resolution anyway....


If you want to add a bit of imprecision on a map board to the longer range magic area of effects, try something like:

At 60' or less, caster selects a square to target as per RAW
at 60' and greater, caster selects an intersection. Then:
step 1 - if over 200', randomly select a nearby intersection by rolling 1D4*
step 2 - randomly select a square touching that intersection with another 1D4

That gives a bit of variance without completely nerfing the spells and would be fairly rapid to handle in game.


{* 1D4 results as: 1 = long and left, 2 = long and right, 3 = short left, 4 = short right }