D&D General "that you can see", "line of sight", glass, mirrors, ~clairvoyance, blindsight, and anything else.

[tomBitonti]

Unrelated to the main topic, this rule has never made any sense to me.

That's a hold-over from 1E. Magic missile has a skein of specific considerations:

Shield explicitly blocks magic missile.

The missiles always hit, in contrast with other spells such as Scorching Ray.

As a force effect, magic missiles ignore damage reduction and hardness. Allowing magic missile to target objects would allow equipment to be targeted, meaning equipment could be sundered. Combined with always hitting, that would be too good.

TomB

 

[Lanefan]

That's a hold-over from 1E. Shield has a skein of specific considerations:

Shield explicitly blocks magic missile.

The missiles always hit, in contrast with other spells such as Scorching Ray.

As a force effect, magic missiles ignore damage reduction and hardness. Allowing magic missile to target objects would allow equipment to be targeted, meaning equipment could be sundered. Combined with always hitting, that would be too good.

If one goes by the idea (and not sure if this is a houserule or came from somewhere official in the past) that ten points of h.p. damage = 1 point of structural damage, that's asking a lot from magic missiles.

The question, of course, is what happens when a mage casts MM when there's no creatures around, e.g. just for practice or on a target range. Does she have to shoot herself?

 

[greg kaye]

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