time stop spell and delay spell feat?

[Celebrim]

I stand corrected. You're quite right, neither spell is a "Line Effect".

Ok, well that's a big break through.

The Blade Barrier doesn't extend damage to adjacent squares. It only affects creatures in the squares it actually occupies.

Only on the first round that the barrier comes into existence. After that, the spell offers no provision for a creature to be in contact with the wall at all. Strictly speaking, any ruling that causes the creature to maintain contact round after round with the wall, however reasonable from the color (and I've given examples of what I think are incontrovertibly reasonable cases) is still a house rule. As written, after the first round, the creature is on one side of the wall or the other purely as an abstract state - the rules make no provision for the creature to make a 5' step or any sort of shift to leave the area of the wall. As far as the spell is concerned, 'left/right' or 'front/back' or whatever you call it is just a flag that only comes into play when the character declares he's flipping the flag to the alternate position. The rules leave the DM to work out how best to handle the color of this, but just as a reflex save to avoid a fireball doesn't shift the character out of the area of the fireball, the reflex save to avoid the blades doesn't actually move the character except in abstractly.

That's what the RAW reads. Everything else, like you treating the spells as line effects and restricting them to being vertex to vertex, and well everything else you've done is a house rule designed to create consensus and remove ambiguity and the need for DM fiat or situational rulings. And that's all fine, and if that is what your table prefers, that's fine - but its not RAW.

Spells like Wall of Ice list a definite thickness because it's relevant to the spell: They have a Hardness and a number of hit points per inch of thickness needed to break them. But while Blade Barrier isn't classified as a "Wall" spell, it is described as a "wall of whirling blades" (as opposed to a "plane"), and the last time I looked, blades have a non-zero thickness. So the Blade Barrier does take more space than an imaginary line on the battle mat. Exactly how much more is subject to debate, of course, but for purposes of my argument any non-zero thickness lets my combination work.

What I think you are imagining is a wall of horizontally rotating blades. But the spell description specifically says this is a vertical wall of blades and its reasonable to think that they are all rotating in a vertical plane. As such, there is no reason to believe that the thickness of the wall is any greater than any other blade - say at most 5/16". In point of fact though, as blades made of "force" they could be no thicker than a sheet of paper. The point is, the thickness of the wall is trivial and makes no difference to any calculations we may make, and per the RAW, irrelevant because the rules are silent on how far a person needs to move to escape the area of effect of the wall when its initially erected. The answer would appear to be zero.

As for medium sized creatures taking a single five foot square: I refer you to page 149 of the PHB, in the section on Creature Size. It's pretty specific. And yes, it's also in the SRD.

Sure. I agree. A medium sized creature takes normally takes a single five foot square. But the rules don't prevent the creature from occupying a smaller space, they just give you increasingly severe combat penalties for being squeezed into a small space. The 3.5 rules here again prove inferior to the 3.0 rules, because they offer no graduation between DC 0 fitting into a space 1/2 your normal footprint and DC 30 fitting into space smaller than your body (but not smaller than your head). As a caver and former member of the National Speological Society, I can only smirk at whoever thought this was a good idea (probably someone that thinks in terms of battle maps and not spaces), but none the less, it doesn't really matter. One way or the other you are on either side of the wall, and whatever space exists between you and the barrier of blades and the wall of force cannot be smaller - by definition - than the space you can fit into else the wall of force spell would have failed. This proves that regardless how you arranged the spells, unless every medium sized character was already squeezing, every medium sized character had at least 2 1/2 of space to one side of the wall of blades that they could stand in. Not that it matters, because as I earlier said, they don't have to move to leave contact with the blade barrier.

As for the nature of your argument: While complaining about me abusing the "color of the spell", you argued about "Generally they will be in a fighting crouch with 40" of blade extended in front of them...". Please tell me that that wasn't a color argument of your own? A reach for some way to say "no"?

I don't have to reach for some way to say no. All I'm trying to do with arguments like that is address your ruling however you come about it - whether thinking in terms of battlemaps or thinking in terms of the real spaces that those battle maps abstract. Neither approach supports the ruling.

You obviously don't like this combination. Too nasty, too powerful (as in continuous damage and difficult or no Save), too plaid, whatever. But it's a four spell combo requiring a 9th level Arcane spell, a 6th level Clerical spell and two 5th level Arcane spells. It's insanely difficult to pull off and uses top tier spells. It *should* be nasty, powerful and plaid.

Bah. We're done. As soon as you conceded that the spells weren't in fact 'line effect' spells, you'd lost the rational basis of your argument - the one that supported the particular mental image you had constructed and took pains to relay to me (unnecessarily, as it happens). Deprived of that you are just going for the ad hominem here, and projecting your various ideas of my mental state on to it. I have no concerns regarding the 'nasty' of the combo.

 

[Greenfield]

Okay.

Although the rules specify that every spell has an origin point, and that that point of origin is always a vertice on the battle mat, and that spells with a range or length are always measured vertice to vertice, let's play it your way. Absolute freedom in spell placement, and measure length on the battle mat with a ruler.

Let's further concede, for the sake of argument, that a Medium creature may very well use less than their full 60 inches (five feet) of space.

These rulings you've argued for effectively say that I can place those Walls of Force less than 5 feet apart. (If we wanted to use a ruler, I could go vertice to vertice diagonally and leave less than a map inch (5 foot space) between them. but let's keep things simple.)

Moving on, let's further concede that a blade is a fraction of an inch thick (we'll ignore pommel, grip and guard widths, they're all flat throwing knives.)

So now I place WoF at top and bottom of row A (even though I can select my spell placement to his narrowest orientation. I have the "time", even if I haven't taken the moment to observe him/her ahead of time.) Since I can run my BB right up the middle, ignoring normal rules for point of origin and measure of range/length, let's do that. The person standing on either side of that barrier has less than half a square of space to stand in. How much less? Half the thickness of a blade, since you've defined the spell as a plane, rather than the "wall" or "curtain" descriptors that the spell description actually uses. But it's less, which is all that matters, in the strict rules sense.

The Save you're counting on to displace to one side or the other may not be possible, under the rules. (See my previous post.)

And the rules do cover situations where the target can't move out of the way. Think Hold Person, a Paralyzed person, or one who is simply unconscious. There are many situations that keep someone from moving, and thus denying them a Reflex Save. Having no free space to move to would have to be one.

Consider this situation: You're the DM. My opponent is in a square right by the wall. I decide to drop Blade Barrier right along that wall, just a finger's width or two away from the stone, to shred anyone who tries to enter through a door or other opening in that wall.

Would you rule that the opponent can make the Save and decide to move into that finger's width of free space between the BB and the stone wall? Can you rationalize their "abstract" position so abstractly that they can reside in a spot that isn't big enough for their hand to slide into? If so then I concede your "abstract placement" point. If not, then please accept your own ruling as a game-practical limit on how "abstract" that location can be.

 

[delericho]

is it possible to use delay spell feat to cast a few offenses spells against a target.

Not against a target, no - the time stop description specifically rules that out. However, the spells you list are actually area spells, so that is valid.

for instance first round you cast time stop which stops time for lets say three rounds. then in your next time stopped round you cast fireball delayed for 3 round, then on your second time stopped round you cast lightning bolt delayed for two rounds. at the end of your time stop spell would both spell go off?

By my count they would trigger on the round after your time stop ends. But otherwise, yes.