Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="Sage Genesis" data-source="post: 6789448" data-attributes="member: 6706099">GFB doesn't turn the melee attack into fire damage. It's an otherwise perfectly normal attack which inflicts its normal effects, and some fire damage is dealt to a secondary character.At higher levels some fire damage is also dealt to the main target but this is separate from the attack itself, which still deals normal slashing/piercing/bludgeoning damage.The idea that a weapon attack bypasses nonmagical weapon damage resistance just because the attack was caused by a spell is completely unsupported by the rules....Or at least, it used to be.The new MM errata has clarified that all instances of &quot;nonmagical weapon&quot; resistance should instead read &quot;nonmagical attack&quot; resistance. And a magical attack it thereafter defines as:&quot;an attack delivered by a spell, a magic item, or another magical source&quot;The argument can be made that GFB delivers an attack by a spell. The action is spellcasting. The range is spell-determined instead of using weapon reach. The melee attack's results are defined/enhanced by the spell. They don't use the concept of a &quot;spell attack&quot; to explain what a magical attack might be but instead call it attacks delivered by spells, indicating that it might be broader.One can counter that a swung sword is not really delivered by a spell but rather by the wielder, but any touch-range spell relies on the person doing the Bad Touch moves so that's not very persuasive. Arguably Bob_n<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f635.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt="o_O" title="Er... what?&nbsp; &nbsp; o_O"&nbsp; data-smilie="12"data-shortname="o_O" />ni is correct. But I'm not sure. For some reason the 5e errata documents tend to raise as many questions as they answer.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Sage Genesis, post: 6789448, member: 6706099"] GFB [b]doesn't[/b] turn the melee attack into fire damage. It's an otherwise perfectly normal attack which inflicts its normal effects, and some fire damage is dealt to a secondary character. At higher levels some fire damage is also dealt to the main target but this is separate from the attack itself, which still deals normal slashing/piercing/bludgeoning damage. The idea that a weapon attack bypasses nonmagical weapon damage resistance just because the attack was caused by a spell is completely unsupported by the rules. ... Or at least, it used to be. The new MM errata has clarified that all instances of "nonmagical weapon" resistance should instead read "nonmagical attack" resistance. And a magical attack it thereafter defines as: "an attack delivered by a spell, a magic item, or another magical source" The argument can be made that GFB delivers an attack by a spell. The action is spellcasting. The range is spell-determined instead of using weapon reach. The melee attack's results are defined/enhanced by the spell. They don't use the concept of a "spell attack" to explain what a magical attack might be but instead call it attacks delivered by spells, indicating that it might be broader. One can counter that a swung sword is not really delivered by a spell but rather by the wielder, but any touch-range spell relies on the person doing the Bad Touch moves so that's not very persuasive. Arguably Bob_no_Oni is correct. But I'm not sure. For some reason the 5e errata documents tend to raise as many questions as they answer. [/QUOTE]

Verification