Can a Large creature blast itself?

Evilhalfling

Adventurer
pg 272 PBH
a blast fills a area adjacent to you ..
later " the blast is adjacent to the origin square which must be a square in your space..."
 

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I would say that first quote kind of answers the question, at least in an 'official' sense. A blast must be adjacent to the space of the caster. So, strictly speaking, no. The second quote is just telling you that the AoE of the blast originates from a specific square in the caster's space, it doesn't conflict with the first part, it is just telling you how to determine the AoE.

There are of course 2 real questions:

1) Why would a larger sized monster (or any monster) have a NEED to blast itself? Perhaps in order to avoid hitting some of its allies I suppose. which leads to 2.

2) Is there really a situation where that would be a good tactic for a monster? Possibly, but it sure sounds like a rare occurrence. Perhaps more to the point, how many monsters are both sufficiently tactical adept to do it and how many of those are WILLING to damage themselves to benefit an ally?

3) How many monsters physically COULD logically blast themselves? Many probably couldn't just because of the way the monster generates the effect. Others possibly can, like it isn't too hard to imagine a dragon breathing on itself. It is a bit harder to imagine a beholder hitting itself with an eye ray...
 



In that case, I would probably go with no. There's no reason a dragon can't blast from any of its squares - I mean, there's no "facing" - so the only reason they would want to include themselves in an attack is to shoot in such a way as to hit PCs on two sides of them; for example, left side and behind (and possibly right, too, depending on the size of the dragon and the blast). And because that's a bit too ...something (powerful?), and because it doesn't seem to follow the spirit of the rules, I wouldn't do it.

Dragons are tough enough without blasts that can hit everyone on three sides of them. Besides, that's working into "burst" territory.

Now, area effects - sure, that's no problem.
 

a flanked dragon, which probably has resistance to its own breath, has pretty good motivation.
It just happened in one of the PbP games...

This happened yesterday to me too, though we decided it did not seem right. No idea on the actual rules - the original quote seems to allow but it would allow any backwards firing blasts too.
 

'A close attack is an area of effect that comes directly from you'
'A blast fills an area adjacent to you that is a specified number of squares on a side.'

A gargantuan figure that used a corner as origin and blast 3-ed 'inwards' would be using the tactic described above, but would fail both of the statements above.

Ergo, while the rules text may be interpreted to allow declaring a corner and doing a larger blast so as to hit flanking creatures, I do not believe it is rules as intended or described, so would rule against it.
 



No, but if you observe several things you can see that a blast cannot overlap the space of the caster.

1, both the caster's space and the blast effect are squares by definition. 2 the blast effect is 'adjacent to you'.

Now, if you go take two squares of any size and place them 'adjacent', that is edge to edge or corner to corner in any configuration, they will never overlap. So technically a creature blasting itself is not playing by the strict letter of the RAW. Obviously it is up to a DM to decide, and one could logically make a case for a dragon using this tactic, possibly a few other creatures as well.
 

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