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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cognomen's Cassowary" data-source="post: 7108662" data-attributes="member: 6801445">They are relevant when you have said, "Being a force attack, it can impact armor and still do damage. It has no need to zip around to some sort of opening and hit there like you suggest." They are spells that also deal force damage, and yet they do not automatically strike in the way that magic missile does. You need to account for this if your handling of spells is going to be consistent.They are also relevant when you separately insist that it is the aim of the caster, not something intrinsic to the spell, that allows magic missile to unerringly strike. Again, for your position to be consistent, you have got to account for the caster being unable to unerringly strike with other spells, for there being rolls to determine how well the caster aims and how well the target evades with them.This really is getting comical. First you were offended, then you didn't say it, and now it's not arbitrary because you thought it up. Ipse dixit. One begins to develop the impression that you are incapable of accepting criticism. Your definition of "arbitrary" is pretty arbitrary. If I cared to, I could run up to the reference section and find ten definitions in ten different dictionaries which ran along the lines of "determined by personal preference" or "based on individual will," and some contrasting that with the "intrinsic quality" or "nature" of a thing, and under any of which your rationalizations of magic missile's behavior would qualify.Your "it just does" (home without discerning) is no more definitive than anyone else's "it just does" (find the target in a swirl of images). The latter is reconciling the narrative to the mechanics, while yours is complicating the narrative to rationalize mechanics which would contraindicate a preconception of the narrative. Yours, that the spell avoids things that it cannot discern to unfailingly strike a target that it cannot discern, is also, to my mind, impracticable.So, third time around: if you ever want address the logical inconsistencies of your rationalizations, you might begin by explaining, to yourself if not to the rest of us, your "reason for everything [you] say and do." Just remember that if your reason stems from your own narrative of how the spell works or should, and not directly from the spell or rules as written, it is arbitrary. (And, again, I don't have a problem with people using whatever house rules they like, though I don't like this one particularly for reasons of verisimilitude and balance. What irks me here is the continuing assertion that your own visioning of what happens being different from what the rules say happens is evidence of a problem with the rules.)</blockquote>

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