D&D (2024) What is the lowest damage Fireball could deal where you would still prep/use it?

[ECMO3]

People don't actually play the way you are suggesting. Fireball gets dropped where it can deal the most damage at the least cost unless there is a good reason for it to include allies. The combat you are suggesting is a speedbump that does not create a good reason that justifies including the rogue just for giggles. That remains true until you start including things like "well what if the veterans are focused on an actually squishy pc who needs to be rescued asap or die & that requires including the rogue because we both know he's going to just cunning action disengage"

I agree it gets dropped where it can deal the most damage at the least cost. The thing I am arguing about here is that least cost generally means NOT fragging your allies. Unless the Wizard wins initiative AND the enemies are grouped together that will mean only a few enemies are going to get hit.

In the LMOP example - 2 bad guys on both sides of the road, a wagon with horses and civilians in the middle - that will be 2 bad guys you get, not all 4 and certainly not the 33 or whatever number was being thrown around above. You could get the same 2 guys with lightning bolt if you moved to line them up. For the same slot you could als have got 2 bad guys with fear, hypnotic pattern or upcast hold person, you could have got 3 of them with upcast Cause Fear on a 3rd level slot.

Cunning action disengage does not keep him from getting attacked in melee. It keeps him from taking AOOs that is all. He has to dash if he does not want to get attacked in melee the following round and if you have played a Rogue (or a Goblin) in 5E you should know that and cunning action disengage does nothing at all on someone else's turn.

 

[tetrasodium]

I agree it gets dropped where it can deal the most damage at the least cost. The thing I am arguing about here is that least cost generally means NOT fragging your allies. Unless the Wizard wins initiative AND the enemies are grouped together that will mean only a few enemies are going to get hit.

In the LMOP example - 2 bad guys on both sides of the road, a wagon with horses and civilians in the middle - that will be 2 bad guys you get, not all 4 and certainly not the 33 or whatever number was being thrown around above. You could get the same 2 guys with lightning bolt if you moved to line them up. For the same slot you could als have got 2 bad guys with fear, hypnotic pattern or upcast hold person, you could have got 3 of them with upcast Cause Fear on a 3rd level slot.

Cunning action disengage does not keep him from getting attacked in melee. It keeps him from taking AOOs that is all. He has to dash if he does not want to get attacked in melee the following round and if you have played a Rogue (or a Goblin) in 5E you should know that and cunning action disengage does nothing at all on someone else's turn.

The LMOP n00b tpk opening encounter was referenced because it can so easily fall into the realm of a terribly designed rocks fall type encounter where the party doesn't stand a chance. Unfortunately the design of 2014 5e is one where the risk to players is none at all ->none at all ->c'mon GM I'm trying to get killed so I can play my new PC ->we got this healing word -> wow this is a long fight healing word ->the players never stood a chance but the GM made them suffer through it till the last meeple died. That & bounded accuracy combined with the excessive 6-8 medium to hard combat encounter expectations makes for a number of contributing factors that I already mentioned earlier

• The GM is pressured to throw in lots of monsters just to meet the budget because fewer stronger monsters are still not a threat but so totally overwhelmed by the action economy that they are incapable of doing anything at all given the poor abilities attached to those giant sacks of hp.
  • With the removal of things like 5 foot step/shift or suffer AoOs there is no longer any mechanical reason for either the players or the gm to do anything but immediately close to the squishy MVP type targets.
    • That's fine for players closing on the bbeg who now requires a gobton of useless zero threat mooks to hide behind in order to last more than a round or two without tarrasque type stats. It's fine though because the game is rigged more towards a setting on the dial where the players can win than some kind of dark souls style nintendohard thing where the player with unlimited dragons gets to kill the PCs
    • For the GM controlled monsters though it's absolutely a reprehensible catch 22 situation forced onto the gm by the social contract. On the one side the GM needs to provide an interesting combat that seems fair with a possibility of failure/ On the other though there's no longer any reason preventing all of those monsters from just ignoring the crunchy melee types in order to immediatly geek the mage all the time every time other than a desire to avert the adversarial arms race that goes with "man bob's a killer gm" & "man bob's really got it out for alice & her cleric/wizard/etc".
      .
      In order to accomplish that the GM directs all of those useless minions to fan the crunchy types who face basically no risk right up until crossing the knife edge into a situation where they never had a chance. Doing that creates a situation where the monsters are almost guaranteed to cluster up.

 

[ECMO3]

The LMOP n00b tpk opening encounter was referenced because it can so easily fall into the realm of a terribly designed rocks fall type encounter where the party doesn't stand a chance. Unfortunately the design of 2014 5e is one where the risk to players is none at all ->none at all ->c'mon GM I'm trying to get killed so I can play my new PC ->we got this healing word -> wow this is a long fight healing word -

I agree the LMOP ambush is extremely difficult, especially for newbies who it is designed for,

I do not understand your point when you say that 2014 5E is "no risk" to the party and then providing an encounter example from 2014 where the "party doesn't stand a chance".

I had a 2nd level character die in Princes of the Apocolypse on Wednesday. The as written encounter went like this:

1. Priest casts Shatter and downed 2 (out of 4) PCs, the characters downed were an Artificer and a Sorcerer-Warlock.

2. Sorcerer Warlock makes death save (1 good)

3. Fighter puts two crossbow bolts into bad guy

4. Artificer makes death save (1 good)

5. Ranger casts cure wounds on Artificer, Artificer now up. Ranger is out of spells because he cast another spell earlier.

6. Priest casts shatter again, hiting Ranger, Artificer and S-W giving S-W a failed death save (1 good, 1 bad) and putting artificer down again and severly damaging Ranger

7. S-W makes a death save (2 good, 1 bad)

8. Fighter misses bad guy twice

9. Artificer rolls a 1 on death save (2 bad)

10. Ranger hits bad guy with arrow

11. Priest casts shatter on downed artificer and S-W. Artificer now dead, S-W 2 good saves, 2 bad saves

12. S-W makes death save - stablized

The rest of the fight goes like this - the Ranger and Fighter kill the bad guy and then they find the unused healing potion on the dead artificer and administer it to the Warlock. Nothing had to be "thrown in" to the encounter to kill a party member and it was 1 failed death save away from killing two PCs which is half the party. All that had to be done as DM was to try to kill the party when the opportunity presented itself (casting shatter on 2 downed PCs instead of the ones walking around) and that was in a fight with only 1 bad guy vs 4 PCs.

In any case we are way off topic here as this has noting to do with Fireball.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I would reduce fireball to 6d6, but only if enemies will get less hp overall. That's it. Lower damage for everyone. Try to bring monster HP and Party HP more in line.

I totally want to go back to 2e hp with a small boost up front...

start 1st level with 3HD (no con mod) at level 2 you get a set HP (1 2 or 3 like 2e did at 9+) then at level 3 you get a 4th HD (still no con bonus.
when you spend HD to heal you get the con bonus to what you heal...

Then knock (almost) every class down a die code... wizard back to d4s fighters down to d8

a 20th level fighter would have 12d8+30 max 1 for 11d8+38 and average the 5e way of making the d8 5hp makes that 55+38=93hp even a fighter would not have 100hp

(I said almost all 1 die code cause I would bring monk back down to d4s BUT give them +3 at even levels, and I would keep the paladin at d10 (with the barbarian going to the d10)

 

[ECMO3]

I totally want to go back to 2e hp with a small boost up front...

start 1st level with 3HD (no con mod) at level 2 you get a set HP (1 2 or 3 like 2e did at 9+) then at level 3 you get a 4th HD (still no con bonus.
when you spend HD to heal you get the con bonus to what you heal...

Then knock (almost) every class down a die code... wizard back to d4s fighters down to d8

a 20th level fighter would have 12d8+30 max 1 for 11d8+38 and average the 5e way of making the d8 5hp makes that 55+38=93hp even a fighter would not have 100hp

(I said almost all 1 die code cause I would bring monk back down to d4s BUT give them +3 at even levels, and I would keep the paladin at d10 (with the barbarian going to the d10)

If you did this why wouldn't everyone just dump constitution?

 

[GMforPowergamers]

If you did this why wouldn't everyone just dump constitution?

where I see Con becomeing less important, it is still a good save to have and still the healing. I doubt it will be 'dump' but it will be mid.

edit: I would also change cure wounds to be heal as if you spent a HD, and add your caster stat mod. at higher levels heal as if you spent additional HD. and healing word would be spend a HD, and at each higher level add 1d4 I go back and forth it that should add caster stat mod.

 

[Clint_L]

We could argue all day about things that aren't going to happen. Shouldn't this sub-forum be for discussing realistic changes for OneD&D, which is expressly keeping the basic 5e toolkit? Like, there is no way they are dumping Wizards down to d4 hit dice, etc., there is no way Fireball is becoming a 2d6 damage spell, etc. At this point folks are just arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Edit: Fireball does have a problem in that it is currently treated as a no-brainer spell. In other words, by feeling like a required spell, it kind of limits player choice, which I think is bad. I like the suggestion that the way to fix it while staying true to the OneD&D mantra of keeping 5e fundamentally intact is to add more consequences to it. Fix the tactical implications of Fireball to make them more consequential and dangerous like a big explosion should be, rather than changing the base damage of the spell.

 

[Dausuul]

We could argue all day about things that aren't going to happen. Shouldn't this sub-forum be for discussing realistic changes for OneD&D, which is expressly keeping the basic 5e toolkit? Like, there is no way they are dumping Wizards down to d4 hit dice, etc., there is no way Fireball is becoming a 2d6 damage spell, etc. At this point folks are just arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Discussions on this forum aren't going to have any noticeable impact on the design of 1D&D anyway, so there's no reason to limit ourselves to the "realistic."

The people who might actually do something with the ideas floated here are third-party publishers and homebrewers, who have no such constraints.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Discussions on this forum aren't going to have any noticeable impact on the design of 1D&D anyway,

not directly but indirect the conversations we have here go to our game tables, our game stores, our other social media, cons ect... As our ideas go longer if others like them they will spread them.

Someone said LFQW once somewhere... and it spread
Someone was the first to say "4e is an MMO" and it spread
Someone on here might say something that 5 people take to 5 others... if the people who those 5 take it to then each spread it to 4 more, then each of them 3 more, then each of them 2 more, then each of them 1 more... that 1 idea that people like went from someone typing on enworld (and diminishing returns keep in mind) 5+25+100+300+600+600=1,630 you just reached that many people in the D&D community.

Someone brought up the idea of making a potion drink be a bonus action instead of an action and it spread MUCH farther then that.

People dismiss what talk on here means because we aren't the right age, because we are too small... but small is where grass roots movements start.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

I want the 4e cantrip "scorching burst" back... heck make it d4s

10ft diameter 5ft radius is 4 squares make it save for none like all other cantrips... start it at 1d6 is my preference but like I said I bet people would use it at d4s