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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6518703" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'd bet within a few days of practicing they can place a fireball within a 1/2" consistently.  Just because the players don't (yet) have a skill they have hitherto not needed, doesn't mean that such skills can't be developed.  You ask an experienced carpenter how big a room is just by looking, and they'll generally be able to tell you to within an inch.   Even more to the point, human subconscious spatial processing is incredibly precise - far more precise than there ability to measure - as evidenced by how accurately humans can throw a ball and how much processing an equivalent machine has to do to perform the same feat.However, if the player is just spatially challenged and never gets it, then this will be yet another reason to not use Evocation spells which - I must concur - is the weakest school in 3e.  Not only do its spells typically do damage that is weaker than the equivalent 1e spell while facing 3e foes with constitution bonuses and greater HD, but against opponents that matter they suffer from the triple whammy of having Reflex saving throws, facing spell resistance, and doing elemental damage.   Sure, it's spectacular to kill a mass of 20 goblins with a single spell, but by the time you can do that, 20 goblins represent a fairly small challenge anyway because they'll generally need 19's and 20's to hit and die to almost every blow.At 1st level, a Burning hands spell does just 1d4 damage with Reflex half - not even reliable kills on a goblin.  Average damage is under 2 per target.   By contrast, 1st level illusion spell 'Color Spray' is basically a win button that will drop even gnolls or sahaugin while you are still 1st level and is a likely game winner even against an Ogre.  Burning hands cap damage of 5d4 save half means you basically almost never see it used in play.  It's almost a wasted action in the tight action economy of 3e.  With your 2nd levels, you do get a nice single target spell in the form of Scorching ray that does 4d6 damage and is scalable and potentially abusable by abusing metamagic enhancers, but without optimization it caps at 12d6 (with miss chances) or a mere 42 damage.  Against a typical CR 12+ foe, this is pretty much pointless.   And even when you first get it, the 4d6 damage is basically just letting you pull weight in one round when a great sword or archer optimized martial character can do every round (with better AC and more hit points than you).  However, the second level illusion spell Glitterdust remains a potential win button, as blinding a foe will typically render defeating it trivial (to say nothing of negating most of the challenge of facing invisible and other stealth foes), optimizing Alter Self allows you to out melee most fighters when it first becomes available as well as solving any number of problems (like by giving you flight), Summon Swarm can be a win button against many foes as swarms are immune (immune!) to weapon damage and poison foes and steal actions and in many cases will out damage non-optimized Scorching Ray in the long run. Web is often an outright win button, and Hideous Laughter often is the same versus single targets.  In 3e, trying to kill foes by damaging them as a spellcaster is generally a suboptimal strategy which has style points solely because it's often harder to do than incapacitating them and then letting someone else cut them down while they are basically helpless.As you've defined your rule, it effects a very narrow case that rarely would come up.  It has small impact that rarely happens.  And it targets probably the weakest strategy that a 3e caster can use.  There is no game justification for the rule and its simulation justification is weak, since a ranged touch attack against a 5' cube is fairly trivial and your argument that a character couldn't estimate the range accurately because the player couldn't necessarily estimate the range accurately makes me wonder how anyone hits anything with a ballistic weapon.  As I pointed out, rarely is the caster actually shooting into space.  They are generally shooting at a target that is say "20' beyond that line of goblin skirmishers" or "5' to the left of that goblin war priest".   If it makes sense that this shot might be off by 5', then the same argument suggests that it ought to be off by 5' shooting at the goblin war priest directly.  If it doesn't make sense that shooting at the goblin war priest will miss by 5', and by your rules it doesn't, it doesn't seem to make strong sense that it misses would be likely in any case that doesn't involve concealment. That said, if you find the rule fun, by all means use it.  But in terms of improvement of the aesthetics of play, I can't see the justification.  For me it just reinforces sticking to the spells I know to be effective, versatile problem solvers and reliably game changing: charm person, color spray, grease, ray of enfeeblement, summon swarm, glitterdust, invisibility, alter self, web and the various defensive spells like mage armor, false life, mirror image, dispel magic, haste, etc.   This is especially true of low level.  Higher level starts bringing things like Black Tentacles, Wall of Force, Contingency and Force Cage.   Fireball is the last thing I'd worry about nerfing, and even in my rebalanced variant of 3e that is intended to narrow the gap between casters and noncasters, I felt no need to touch it.  Personally, my suspicion is that a DM that ad hocs a nerf versus fireball is just upset that a caster used a win button, but if fireball is the win button you are worried about, you've never seen a munchkined or even problematic caster in play.Ironically, it tends to be better used against PC's than used by PC's, as it's a far better trade in the action economy when its you versus a group than by a group against anything else, but even then, because it doesn't stop a PC from closing with you, it's usually a last gasp by a caster or an opening move from beyond 120' or so.   Just about the only good thing about the spell is its exceptionally long range, one of the few things that I did change about the spell but only as part of the overall reduction in range of almost every single spell (medium range is 1/2 RAW, and long 1/4).</blockquote>

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