D&D 5E Moonbeam, Am I reading it right?

[DaveDash]

We have a Lore Bard who took this spell in our group. We do not allow you to 'sweep through' enemies with it, however it's still a great spell. The damage scales up very well.

I ran one encounter on a cliff face, with enemies climbing up the cliff. Moonbeam was particularly powerful in this instance.

 

[txshusker]

yes and no. It is a great spell, but you do not inflict damage when you move it onto a creature. If a creature starts it's turn in one, or moves into one, then it takes damage.

I would agree with Kamikazee on this one... you could move it to engulf a 5ft area and do the damage and not hope something walks into it... like flaming sphere that you can bang into creatures. I could see where your definition fits the description as well, but I think it defeats the purpose of being able to use concentration to move it.

 

[Tormyr]

I would agree with Kamikazee on this one... you could move it to engulf a 5ft area and do the damage and not hope something walks into it... like flaming sphere that you can bang into creatures. I could see where your definition fits the description as well, but I think it defeats the purpose of being able to use concentration to move it.

Flaming sphere is different in two ways. It does the damage at the end of the creature's turn, and it provides a means of overcoming that deficiency by ramming someone with it.

Moonbeam, Spirit Guardians, and other spells that do damage when a creature first enters the area on a turn or start their turn in the area only do damage in the named situations. If the damage was available as a creature moved it, then the creature could pass it over a group of creatures, do damage to all of them and leave it on 1 or more creatures who would automatically take damage on the start of their turns. This becomes even more ridiculous if done with spirit guardians and its 15' radius. A creature with this could run to a group, damage them, and let them take a second helping of damage on their turns.

The reason moonbeam allows a creature to keep it up with concentration and use its action to move the beam is to target different enemies. No intelligent creature will stay in the path of a moonbeam without very good reason. After a creature takes damage from the beam at the start of its turn, it is going to move out of the beam. The action to move the beam allows the caster to re-target the creature in its new location or target another creature.

 

[aramis erak]

M o o n b e a m
2nd-level evocation
Casting Time: 1 action
Range: 120 feet
Components: V, S, M (several seeds of any m oonseed
plant and a piece of opalescent feldspar)
Duration: Concentration, up to 1 minute
A silvery beam of pale light shines dow n in a 5-footradius, 40-foot-high cylinder centered on a point within
range. Until the spell ends, dim light fills the cylinder.
W hen a creature enters the spell’s area for the first
time on a turn or starts its turn there, it is engulfed
in ghostly flames that cause searing pain, and it must
make a Constitution saving throw. It takes 2d10 radiant
damage on a failed save, or half as much damage on a
successful one.
A shapechanger m akes its saving throw with
disadvantage. If it fails, it also instantly reverts to its
original form and can’t assum e a different form until it
leaves the spell’s light.
On each of your turns after you cast this spell, you can
use an action to move the beam 60 feet in any direction.
A t Higher Levels. W hen you cast this spell using a
spell slot of 3rd level or higher, the damage increases by
1dlO for each slot level above 2nd.

Moonbeam seems very powerful, and to me it means that you can trigger its damage each time on your turn (sweep through the enemies with it) and then just leave it on top of a juicy spot to trigger again on the enemy's turn. Am I reading it right? The spell seems insane to me!

It's only 10 rounds... and that's 10 rounds where you cannot cast another concentration spell, and want to avoid being hit. Every hit, ranged or melee, that does damage risks breaking it, so, cast then hide...

 

[txshusker]

Flaming sphere is different in two ways. It does the damage at the end of the creature's turn, and it provides a means of overcoming that deficiency by ramming someone with it.

Moonbeam, Spirit Guardians, and other spells that do damage when a creature first enters the area on a turn or start their turn in the area only do damage in the named situations. If the damage was available as a creature moved it, then the creature could pass it over a group of creatures, do damage to all of them and leave it on 1 or more creatures who would automatically take damage on the start of their turns. This becomes even more ridiculous if done with spirit guardians and its 15' radius. A creature with this could run to a group, damage them, and let them take a second helping of damage on their turns.

The reason moonbeam allows a creature to keep it up with concentration and use its action to move the beam is to target different enemies. No intelligent creature will stay in the path of a moonbeam without very good reason. After a creature takes damage from the beam at the start of its turn, it is going to move out of the beam. The action to move the beam allows the caster to re-target the creature in its new location or target another creature.

Well, I was just adjudicating it differently from Sacrosanct as to when the damage was done :

The quote is "When a creature enter's the spell's area for the first time on a turn or starts it's turn there..."
The first part wouldn't be necessary in the description if the spell was limited to the second part. You could easily make that mean when the beam is first moved on top of the targeted creature, since that is the initial point at which the creature "enters" the circle - which means you could adjudicate the damage as being done right then and not at the beginning of the target's turn, just like ramming the flaming sphere into a creature... as I said. If you wanted to wait until the creature's turn to roll the damage, that's your prerogative I would say, but not necessarily how I would do it. I wouldn't make the damage roll twice, but I don't see a reason not to roll the damage at the time it centers on the creature - in case that has a difference on the outcome.

I did not mention it, but my personal interpretation wouldn't/didn't allow for the beam to cause damage as it moves over a creature on its way to its ultimate destination - that was not in my mind. You can't ram a sphere into multiple creatures either...

but that would be pretty darn cool if someone created a spell that did that at higher levels.

 

[DaveDash]

If the moonbeam damaged foes when you moved it across enemies, the wording would be completely different, because in that case it's the beam entering the creatures space, not the creature entering the spells area.

"When a creature enter's the spell's area..." to me implies the it's the creature doing the entering, not the beam.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Flaming sphere provides some other tactical benefits - the potential to block a square and deal damage twice per round. The real question to me is - why does Call Lightning even exist given Moonbeam? Moonbeam scales to exactly the same damage, has far more favorable targeting, lacks the absurdly prohibitive spatial restrictions, and utilizes a generally superior energy type on top of it.

 

[Mephistopheles]

The way I read it there are only two circumstances in which Moonbeam is intended to do damage:
1. a creature starts its turn in the area of effect,
2. the first time a creature enters the area of effect on a particular turn.

The first case is straightforward. The second, combined with the ability to move the area of effect on subsequent turns, is where I think some are reading something into the spell description that isn't there.

The language used in the spell description is 'creature enters', meaning that the creature is the one entering the area, not that the area is being moved onto the creature. Further, while the spell description says the area of effect of the beam can be moved, it says nothing about applying its effect upon every creature it moves over between its former and new location - considering how significant an increase in potential damage this would grant the spell I'd expect it to be explicit about that.

 

[Sacrosanct]

yeah, you enter the sunlight by stepping out into it. You don't really "enter the sunlight" when someone opens a window and it happens to hit you, not with how we typically use that phrase

 

[I'm A Banana]

"When a creature enter's the spell's area..." to me implies the it's the creature doing the entering, not the beam.

The language used in the spell description is 'creature enters', meaning that the creature is the one entering the area, not that the area is being moved onto the creature.

The thing is that what happens is both. When the area is moved onto the creature, the creature then has entered the area. That the area is the one doing the moving doesn't matter -- you can enter a thing while remaining sedentary if it comes to envelop you. A critter that swallows you whole as it moves into your space is certainly something you "entered." If a gelatinous cube falls on your head from orbit, you have definitely "entered" it, even though you're not moving.

"The creature needs to be the one moving" is reasonable, but the alternate interpretation isn't unreasonable, either (and isn't even necessarily overpowered...it's pretty situational). It actually even makes more logical sense than the alternative. If the spell is summoning a beam of damaging radiant energy, it doesn't suddenly not do damage just because you're moving it around. It's still a beam of damaging radiant energy, after all. If it was a pillar of fire, it wouldn't stop burning just because the initiative order said it wasn't time for it to burn yet.

It could've also been fixed with a slight re-wording of the spell (something like, "you can cause the moonbeam to wink out and appear again at a new location within range"), but the beam explicitly is moved over the area, staying "on" the whole time.

There's a lot of assumptions and suppositions that go into any one of the possible interpretations.