Quick Question on Fireball

[AeroDm]

It has always bothered me that while using a battlemat casters have an uncanny ability at geometry and physics to place their fireballs on intersections to weave around allies and max out the number of enemies.

It never occured to me before now, but seeing as casters need line of sight to aim their spells, can they still have LoS in the midst of a melee? Through debris? Through a rock? Or baring any of those, are there any rules governing so precise of placement of ranged spells?

 

[Veritas]

Hmm.. maybe that's what wizards spend all their time doing instead of learning weapons and armor?

 

[IronWolf]

I have to agree with Veritas. The mages have supposedly spent quite some time studying the arcane not only to learn the spell but hopefully learn how to place the spell accurately. Granted the old days of "Ooops! I just fireballed half the party's frontline!" was fun, but it is fairly easy for me to just assume the mage has studied placement and knows just where to drop that fireball for maximum effectiveness.

 

[shilsen]

What Veritas and IronWolf said. The same applies to NPC casters too, so it's not a problem. One house rule I've started using, when casters try to catch one of two people in melee with an area effect spell like fireball, is that the person just outside the blast radius gets a Ref save at +4 bonus for half damage.

 

[Thanee]

I usually just give the other person a 50% chance to also get caught inside the blast.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Daedrova]

Provided they can see what or where they are wanting to aim/center a spell effect, they do have line of sight to it. Concealment and cover only provide a chance that a character might not hit the target. I suppose it would be reasonable to require a ranged touch attack to center a spell in the proper place. Admittedly hitting a non moving 5 ft square would be nothing more than a near meaningless extra roll, but it provides a couple sensible draw backs. There is always the chance to roll a 1. Second, concealment and cover could come into play, making it somewhat of a challenge for a caster to properly place ray and fireball type spells. This wouldn’t apply to targeting spells.

 

[0-hr]

I found a nice solution in d20 Modern with respect to gernades:

The caster picks a target square and then rolls a d4 to determine which corner of that square is the center of the effect.

So if a wizard is trying to have a fireball end between the orc and the adjacent elf, he has a 50% chance of getting it right.