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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6425267" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, well that's a big break through.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.  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. 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.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.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.</blockquote>

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