Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8694307" data-attributes="member: 6790260">That seems to lead down a completely different rabbit hole: by this standard, nothing in 5e is "natural language." That is, this seems to be saying that, for something to be natural language, it can't make even an appearance of being exhaustive or precise. The vast majority of 5e's rules do try for at least precision, and usually exhaustiveness. E.g. I was looking over the Scribes Wizard's Manifest Mind. It's absolutely not "natural language," given the extensive and highly-specific list of conditions for when the Manifest Mind ceases manifesting.If this is what "natural language" was supposed to be, then it would seem 5e rather seriously failed to produce much, if any, such language, and would (by this logic) mostly just have poorly-written rules.I'm not sure I understand how you can have a D&D game that is completely non-competitive when you have DM-run opponents facing off against player-run characters with the actual possibility of death, dismemberment, or loss that cannot be restored. That, necessarily, invites competition-type behavior, because the players are clearly given an incentive to perform the best they can, for their own sake and for their teammates'.Mostly quoting this so it's mentioned, as my real response comes to a later post.Sure. But when the language itself is unclear, it creates a significant burden on the group in general and the DM in particular. Players will naturally be inclined to feel cheated if a plain reading of the text (which is what I feel I've been doing) indicates they can do a thing, and the DM vetoes it, or in some other way "adjudicates" (really, rewrites) the rules to mean something wholly different from what the actual text says. Games have rules, in part, so that people can make informed decisions. Having a rules framework that poorly communicates to the players makes it difficult or even impossible to make informed decisions. It is certainly unfair (and IMO unrealistic) to expect DMs to meticulously articulate what every possible rule is supposed to say, meaning you are eventually guaranteed to run into a situation where the player is forced to deal with something where the rules (appear to) say one thing and the DM (explicitly) says something else, and suddenly a good plan goes up in smoke. That sucks. That is a clearly undesirable state of affairs--to have such a state of affairs be a nigh-unavoidable consequences of how the rules are written is not good.This would seem to contradict what you said above: the spell has affected those people, so they are targets. That is, your exact words were, "If a creature is affected by a spell, it is a target of the spell." For a wall of fire to do damage to a creature, it must affect that creature. Therefore, the wall of fire can only do anything if it targets a creature--which means your statement cashes out as saying you can't use wall of fire, because it's a spell that targets creatures.Your logic here, however, is that the targeting only matters (in effect) "at the moment of casting," not at any point thereafter. But that becomes complicated by things like delayed blast fireball. That spell could just as easily be used on a location with no creatures in it, and then the caster could run past that location, "allowing" their concentration to break once their opponents have followed them. Heck, they could even just hold the fireball for its full minute concentration and then lose concentration naturally, whether or not they know there are opponents inside.I'm not citing this because I would do such a thing, just to be clear. I, personally, do think that that would be exploitative and would probably disallow it. My concern is simply that with the huge variety of spells out there, your logic in this post could potentially be turned toward other ends, and with the way people seem to love ultra-deadly games, there's a strong incentive for players to think in terms of the greatest advantage they can acquire.(Incidentally, notice how this sort of crap is only required for spells? Yet another power reserved only for the magical: the ability to push, sometimes very hard, against the rules because you have all sorts of weird fiddly unique superpowers that can dodge and weave around the game's rules. When was the last time a bog-standard Fighter could do something like that?)</blockquote>

Verification