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<blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7617766" data-attributes="member: 16814"><p>Does it? Describe a fireball. Is it a raging inferno of fire that sits in an area for six seconds, or is it a brief flash of high temperature? Describe the damage done to a character with 103 hp that is inside the blast of a 42 hp damage fireball. Do the same for a 30 hp character in the same fireball. Now, describe the damage to the iron anvil in the same fireball. To the heavy wooden door. To the ancient wall hangings. To the wooden crates. To the pile of papers.</p><p></p><p>You can't find a common thread to do this because it's all abstract. The rules of the game say that a fireball will ignite flammable objects. Flammable means 'burns easily'. This is a concrete thing you can decide. I'm not saying there's room around the edges for judgement calls on what burns easily, but the match test is a great one for a rule of thumb that doesn't involve inventing rules about how much damage the spell does affecting the flammability of the objects the spell interacts with. Flammability is a property orthogonal to the damage the spell might do.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>If a target has 1 hitpoint, the spell kills them. If the target has 100 hitpoints, the spell kills them. This isn't a 100 fold difference in power, it's about the nature of the target. HP damage is abstract and always relative <em>to the target</em>. A 30 hp fireball is not 25% less effective at setting things on fire than a 40 hp fireball. They both ignite flammable objects.</p></blockquote><p>Except not. A fireball blows up and hits everything in a 20' radius. Scorching ray creates 3 rays of flame 120' long. Those are objectively on a scale that dwarfs a match. There is no possibility that the damage is a measure of application and not scale. A match won't even do 1 point of damage to something. It literally takes a fully lit torch to deal 1 point of damage.[/QUOTE]</p><p>Well, duh, of course they're bigger than a match. I never said this was a comparison for spell area. I said it was a good rule of thumb to determine "flammable." Both scorching ray and fireball ignite flammable objects the same way, but they're very different in scale between 3 instantaneous bolts of fire and a 20' radius instantaneous eruption of fire. Are you suggesting that your metric for what catches on fire is going to be different between a fireball and scorching ray? If so, you have much bigger issues that the match test, good luck with them.</p><p>[/QUOTE]</p>
[QUOTE="Ovinomancer, post: 7617766, member: 16814"] Does it? Describe a fireball. Is it a raging inferno of fire that sits in an area for six seconds, or is it a brief flash of high temperature? Describe the damage done to a character with 103 hp that is inside the blast of a 42 hp damage fireball. Do the same for a 30 hp character in the same fireball. Now, describe the damage to the iron anvil in the same fireball. To the heavy wooden door. To the ancient wall hangings. To the wooden crates. To the pile of papers. You can't find a common thread to do this because it's all abstract. The rules of the game say that a fireball will ignite flammable objects. Flammable means 'burns easily'. This is a concrete thing you can decide. I'm not saying there's room around the edges for judgement calls on what burns easily, but the match test is a great one for a rule of thumb that doesn't involve inventing rules about how much damage the spell does affecting the flammability of the objects the spell interacts with. Flammability is a property orthogonal to the damage the spell might do. If a target has 1 hitpoint, the spell kills them. If the target has 100 hitpoints, the spell kills them. This isn't a 100 fold difference in power, it's about the nature of the target. HP damage is abstract and always relative [I]to the target[/I]. A 30 hp fireball is not 25% less effective at setting things on fire than a 40 hp fireball. They both ignite flammable objects. [/quote] Except not. A fireball blows up and hits everything in a 20' radius. Scorching ray creates 3 rays of flame 120' long. Those are objectively on a scale that dwarfs a match. There is no possibility that the damage is a measure of application and not scale. A match won't even do 1 point of damage to something. It literally takes a fully lit torch to deal 1 point of damage.[/QUOTE] Well, duh, of course they're bigger than a match. I never said this was a comparison for spell area. I said it was a good rule of thumb to determine "flammable." Both scorching ray and fireball ignite flammable objects the same way, but they're very different in scale between 3 instantaneous bolts of fire and a 20' radius instantaneous eruption of fire. Are you suggesting that your metric for what catches on fire is going to be different between a fireball and scorching ray? If so, you have much bigger issues that the match test, good luck with them. [/QUOTE]
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