Would a maximized chaos bolt continue to bounce infinitely?

[The Crimson Binome]

I agree with everyone else, about maximizing being mutually exclusive with rolling, but...

It might be a fun hypothetical scenario to explore. You cast a spell at an orc, and it rebounds to another orc, and so on until that entire orc warband is dead. An orc cast that spell at your town guard, and it rebounds around the city until everyone in the city is dead. Some genius with metamagic develops a more powerful version that kills everyone in the world who doesn't have at least 16hp. Fun stuff.

It reminds me of the old Awaken spell, from third edition, which gave a newly-awakened animal a 3d6 roll for Intelligence. Someone argued that a maximized Awaken should always give them an 18, which met with similar debate.

Currently, the game world that I'm developing involves a war between humans and the various animal species which they had maximize-Awakened to serve as soldiers, but which had secretly developed psychic powers as a result of their enhanced intelligence.

 

[jaelis]

Would everyones reply had been the same if he had just asked if maximizing damage on a 2d8 damage ability was the same as rolling 2 8's?

Why does it matter? The actual question is about how to deal with this spell. Do you actually think we are wrong?

You seem unsatisfied that the answer to a question would depend on context, but that’s how most question are. I wouldn’t call that weaseling, I’d call it life.

 

[Bacon Bits]

I love how we always weasel out of bad outcomes.

The Player's Handbook is not a suicide pact.

 

[FrogReaver]

The Player's Handbook is not a suicide pact.

No one said it was. I didn't say play it any differently. I simply observed that the answers given were forcibly trying to manipulate the rules to make for a more pleasant outcome instead of simply ignoring the actual rules in favor of a more pleasant outcome.

 

[jaelis]

No one said it was. I didn't say play it any differently. I simply observed that the answers given were forcibly trying to manipulate the rules to make for a more pleasant outcome instead of simply ignoring the actual rules in favor of a more pleasant outcome.

There's a few different situations you could imagine here.

If a rule said "Treat damage dice for the spell as if they had rolled their maximum amount," then the rule would be clear. In that case I would probably still roll the chaos bolt dice to see the effect, but I think people would be pretty up front that this is ignoring the rule in favor of playability.

If a rule said "Do not roll damage dice for the spell, but instead the spell deals its maximum possible damage," then IMO it would be pretty clear that we should still roll some dice for chaos bolt to determine the effect, we just wouldn't treat them as damage dice. Otherwise there is no way to run the spell. In this case the damage dice serve another function besides determining the damage, and the maximizing rule would force us to separate those effects.

The actual case of wild magic says "maximize the damage of the next spell you cast." That is I think ambiguous, it could mean treat the damage dice as their max value, or it could mean don't roll and use the max damage instead. Here the rules don't clearly tell us what to do, so I disagree that it is like the first case. We're just interpreting an ambiguous rule in a sensible way.

At least that's how I see it. Perhaps you feel that "maximize the damage" can only mean to treat the dice rolls a showing their max value. In that case I guess that your response would be more along the lines of case 1. That's fine by me, but I don't feel the need to adopt your interpretation to decide if I'm being weaselly or not

 

[Dausuul]

Would everyones reply had been the same if he had just asked if maximizing damage on a 2d8 damage ability was the same as rolling 2 8's?

If you phrase the question in a way that's designed to elicit a quick, ill-considered answer, then a quick, ill-considered answer is what you'll get. Doesn't change what the right answer is.

In this case, the answer depends on how the "maximizing damage" ability is worded. If we are talking about the wild magic effect, the text of that ability is: "Maximize the damage of the next damaging spell you cast within the next minute."

Nothing in there mentions dice. You still roll the dice normally*; the surge just steps in at the end to overwrite the final damage number with the highest possible value. So maximizing chaos bolt won't result in infinite bounces. Contrast the sorcerer's Empowered Spell feature: "When you roll damage for a spell, you can spend 1 sorcery point to reroll a number of the damage dice up to your Charisma modifier." That ability does mess with the actual roll. If you used Empower Spell to re-roll a die and got doubles as a result, you'd get the extra bounce off.

[Edited: I originally said I'd be tempted to make a house rule for wild surges. Changed my mind. The surge effect lets you decide in advance what damaging spell to cast, so you can see the 33-34 result and decide then to cast chaos bolt. That takes away the "crazy crit" fun of the house rule.]

[SIZE=-2]*For most spells, the dice have no effect other than damage, so physically rolling them is a waste of time. But in a case like chaos bolt, the roll still applies.[/SIZE]