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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TiQuinn" data-source="post: 9481964" data-attributes="member: 4871">So this is something that I’ve seen come up in games, and it can be a bit weird and tricky to navigate. I feel this is where “Rule of Cool” rears its head. Say the party is in a fight in a large hall, and the wizard PC sees the the BBEG is standing directly under an ornate metal chandelier - you know the kind, the one with a big pointy spike on the end of it like we’ve all seen in the movies. And if you’ve seen those movies, you know exactly what the player wants to do next, they’re going to cut the rope holding the chandelier, and have it come crashing down on them and impale the bad guy.The player may be envisioning this as an amazing move that will surely do massive damage. The DM may be looking at this thinking what rule covers this, and more importantly, what damage to apply to it. Should an improvised move do as much damage as one of the actual abilities that the PCs have? The DM may think, no, it’ll do damage but not as much as a spell attack, or as much as if the Barbarian PC walloped the bad guy with his great axe and uses some improvised damage. The rest of the party is going nuts because they also think this is going to be awesomely damaging move.The result? Because it’s kind of a “rules light” improvised thing in D&D, the DM in their caution makes the damage weak because they don’t want improvised rules to outshine the actual rules of the game. So now those players don’t use improvised maneuvers. Why would they? They know it’s not going to do as much as if they swung their sword, went for the backstab or cast a spell.The flip side is the DM lets the crashing chandelier do a lot of damage, and NOW the players are always looking for ways to create maximal damage through improvised moves - the infamous “called shot to the eye” scenario, we called it - where now everyone wants to do something super cool above and beyond what the rules typically allow.</blockquote>

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