D&D 5E Burning doors with firebolt

[Oofta]

Bottom line, the rules don't say that there's a "chance" of flammable objects catching fire. It says they catch fire, period. There isn't a Save, a resistance check, a test to see if the spell did a minimum amount of damage or met some other special threshold standard. The spell does what the rules say it does.
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In a game mechanics discussion there is no doubt, no room for error. The spell says it lights the thing, so it lights the thing.
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All that's left is to determine how much damage being on fire does, and how many hit/break/structure/whatever points a heavy wooden door has.

Since the rules don't state how long the fire lasts or how much damage is caused by the ensuing fire, that part is left up to the DM.

I would rule that the door smolders for a moment, then goes out. Being lit on fire did 0 damage.

In addition, charred wood is not particularly flammable (I included a reference in my first post). Heck, steel is flammable under the right circumstances. But even ignoring that, I would rule that the best the spell could do would be to burn a fist sized hole in the door. Eventually you may burn down the door but it will take a long time. All while following the rules or lack therein.

Just like eventually you could probably break down a door with arrows.

But this really goes back to what type of game you want to play. I'm not a slave to the letter of the rules and sometimes common sense takes precedence. To each his own.

 

[Greenfield]

Agreed. Although it's up to the DM to rule if the door is flammable.

It's been pointed out by someone else that flammable means "readily combustible" and not simply "can burn." He provided technical specifications, too, but it's good enough for me to say a wooden door is not readily combustible, because we all know that it takes a fair bit of effort - and kindling! - to get a campfire burning.

Similarly, if a wizard wanted to use firebolt to start a campfire, I'd rule that kindling is flammable, but not the logs.

Just did a search of the SRD for the word "Flammable". It's mentioned only in spell descriptions. There isn't a definition of what qualifies, so we should probably check a dictionary.

Dictionary.com describes it as "Easily set on fire, combustible, inflammable"

So yeah, the DM could just say, "While the wooden door can be burned, it isn't "flammable' in that it isn't 'easily set on fire'."

And campfires still get to burn.

Good call

 

[Greenfield]

Since the rules don't state how long the fire lasts or how much damage is caused by the ensuing fire, that part is left up to the DM.

I would rule that the door smolders for a moment, then goes out. Being lit on fire did 0 damage.

In addition, charred wood is not particularly flammable (I included a reference in my first post). Heck, steel is flammable under the right circumstances. But even ignoring that, I would rule that the best the spell could do would be to burn a fist sized hole in the door. Eventually you may burn down the door but it will take a long time. All while following the rules or lack therein.

Just like eventually you could probably break down a door with arrows.

But this really goes back to what type of game you want to play. I'm not a slave to the letter of the rules and sometimes common sense takes precedence. To each his own.

You bring up a good point about the letter of the rules vs "common sense".

I'm relatively new to the 5e forums, so perhaps an introduction is in order.

I've been dweller in the depths (3e forums) for years and I've been playing D&D almost since it started. ( I still have my three-book set of Eldritch Wizardry, Chainmail, etc.)

Over the years I've run into players who will argue the letter of the rules, when it favors them, then turn around and argue "common sense" when the rules aren't so favorable, and they'll switch back and forth without hesitation. The only constant in their argument is that everything should favor them.

Over all, I tend to be a rules guy. As a DM or as a player, the one source everyone at the table should have equal access to is the written rules. They may not be "right" in a realism/common sense kind of way, but if I can point to the written rule that supports my position, it becomes inarguable. It lets us settle the matter, quickly, and move on.

I've known people who love the long and intricate rules arguments... when they're the ones involved. Nobody else at the table enjoys them though. They came to play, not listen to me or anybody else debate the placement of a period or comma, or taking time to dig up a dictionary.

If the DM, be it me or someone else, decided that a particular rule is wrong, he/she/we come up with a house rule to correct it, and we move on. If not, then we just move on.

Now I know that 5e is supposed to be less a set of rules and more "spirit of the game" driven, but that always presumes that everyone has that same sense of what the "spirit of the game" is or should be. Not a safe assumption, in my experience. YMMV, of course.

My wife has described playing D&D as cramming an hour's worth of excitement and fun into a brief five hours.

If we all agree on the rules, we can usually trim that to four.

So, for the people who are trying to figure me out, there's a chunk of it.

 

[S'mon]

You have to apply common sense instead of treating a statement as if it existed in a vacuum.

Bottom line, the rules don't say that there's a "chance" of flammable objects catching fire.
It says they catch fire, period.

Do you ever reread your posts?

 

[jgsugden]

I respect the rule of cool, but you probably need to draw a line somewhere. Is it cool for the bard to be able to persuade the door into opening? For some groups it might, but others will find it ludicrous.

It seems like a waste of animate object, but...

There is a huge leap between fire bolting and charming a door. All I'm really saying is when you have a choice to make on whether something works or not, pick the answer that is the bet balance of heroic fun and fantasy realism. Make the PCs feel like heroes.

 

[Greenfield]

Sure.

An example of "Reading a statement in a vacuum" would be "... doing 5 D10 of damage to the target", while ignoring the fact that damage has consequences, death being one of them. But that requires that you read and understand more than that one line of text.

Reading 3.5 rules without common sense, on the other hand, will reveal that the "dead" condition doesn't necessarily include any kind of incapacity. In theory, being dead doesn't render a character unconscious, nor stop them from acting normally. Having their hit points dropped to or below zero results in "unconscious", but spells like "Finger of Death" and "Slay Living" don't do hit points, they just kill. Therefore, letter of the rules, read while ignoring common sense, a character killed that way doesn't really miss much, in terms of action.

<Tangent> (yeah, I'm bad with these) I play tested the original Bard's Tale for Computer Gaming World magazine many years ago. I discovered that a character dropped to exactly zero hit points in that game was effectively immortal. The program, when assigning damage, saw a character with zero or fewer hit points as dead and left them alone. The part that dealt with whether on not the character was able to act apparently had "dead" defined as "less than zero" hit points. Zero was still functional.

Since I first noticed this oddity when the part Bard got twacked, I referred to it as "The Immortal Bard Bug" in my review. </Tangent>

So in the post I was responding to, when the author argued that the spell never said it could burn doors, it looked as if he was saying that it only affects items clearly and explicitly listed. (Probably not his intent, but that's what came out.) He seemed to be reading the spell as if there were no other rules to read or apply. I responded in kind.

 

[Fanaelialae]

It seems like a waste of animate object, but...

There is a huge leap between fire bolting and charming a door. All I'm really saying is when you have a choice to make on whether something works or not, pick the answer that is the bet balance of heroic fun and fantasy realism. Make the PCs feel like heroes.

IMO, a bard who can persuade even inanimate objects would feel pretty heroic. And there are myths where the character can do exactly such.

IMO, blowing a door apart with a thin beam of fire is just as silly as charming a door. For you, it isn't. That was my point. Different groups draw the line in different places. Heroism is great, but you also have to account for what makes sense.

 

[SilverSnake]

I found this thread a little late, so I didn't read all of the replies. If this has been covered, please forgive.

If you allow the door to be burned, you have to deal with the burned door. Yes, you get the noise and light, and a whole lot of smoke in an enclosed area. Especially if the doors are treated, I'd ask for CON saves. Also, you get ash on the floor. They'd be leaving little ashy footprints everywhere they go. They'd also smell of smoke, making them easier to detect. This can be easily taken care of with a few prestidigitation spells, but I certainly wouldn't point that out to them.

 

[TheNoremac42]

It seems like a waste of animate object, but...

There is a huge leap between fire bolting and charming a door. All I'm really saying is when you have a choice to make on whether something works or not, pick the answer that is the bet balance of heroic fun and fantasy realism. Make the PCs feel like heroes.

There was one game I played where our halfling fighter intimidated a building (rolled a nat 20) and all of its lights came on. Sometimes shenanigans like this happens in D&D. The most memorable and absurd things can happen spur of the moment, and I've found sessions like that are generally more enjoyable than others.

 

[Greenfield]

In the original D&D there was a rule that there was a 10% chance that anything spoke common.

Read literally, that meant anything, even inanimate objects. We had an encounter where the party thief was listening at a door. There wasn't anything on the other side, but the door (having met that 10% chance) hating to disappoint, started making sounds so the Thief would have something to listen to. And as each person stopped to listen it made a different sound. Just for variety, you understand.

Note that, just because something can talk doesn't mean it can see or move, so asking random objects where the Orcs went, or where the commander hid the key to the chest was a universally fruitless endeavor.

But it did make for a fun game.