D&D 5E Zone spells and amazing damage potential

[Uchawi]

"RAW legal via official channels" is pretty straightforward.

Sage is sage.

No matter the medium, sage is sage.

A DM can (and should!) change any rule or ruling as they deem fit, but sage is still sage.

Errata is errata. I don't think we are going to change each others minds on the subject.

 

[PnPgamer]

Bearded, hair-chested, female dwarves: there is no substitute.

Who said anything of them being female?

 

[evilbob]

It's simple grammar, folks. "When a creature enters" means the creature is the agent that is moving. It's too bad that WOTC doesn't understand the rules of English, but it would never hold up in a court of law. For a similar example, look up the most costly missing comma in US law.

The issue with this interpretation is that you can chuck someone into a cloud of daggers and it does nothing to them.

Also, it's hard to reason that if you walk into a cloud of daggers it hurts, but if the cloud were to pass through you it wouldn't.

Not saying they couldn't have figured out a better way to handle the spells - just that it's not as simple as "it's simply this, QED".

 

[Sword of Spirit]

The issue with this interpretation is that you can chuck someone into a cloud of daggers and it does nothing to them.

Also, it's hard to reason that if you walk into a cloud of daggers it hurts, but if the cloud were to pass through you it wouldn't.

Not saying they couldn't have figured out a better way to handle the spells - just that it's not as simple as "it's simply this, QED".

You're right, it is a bit of a stretch of the imagination. Still, I think it's likely the easiest way to get mechanically consistent and balanced results.

Conceptualizing that everything is happening more or less simultaneously helps out in the visualizations here.

If you intentionally move into a zone, you know what you are doing, and you are clearly in the zone.

If the zone moves onto you (and stays there), you have the same effect of being in it, you just wait until the start of your turn to mechanically apply the effects. Same thing happens, the turn sequence just controls when you run the numbers.

The only real exception is when you somehow get removed from an area between the time that the zone moves onto you and the time your turn starts. Say a friend shoves or thunderwaves you out of the zone. Since everything is happening more or less simultaneously, it's fairly easy to imagine that in that case the zone didn't really make it to you before you were gone. A friend saw the zone bearing down on you and pushed you out of the way before it could get to you.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Also, it's hard to reason that if you walk into a cloud of daggers it hurts, but if the cloud were to pass through you it wouldn't.

It's more that hanging around inside of the cloud, for more than a second, causes damage significant enough that it's worth tracking. If someone pushes you into the cloud, but then you get pulled out before you even get to act, then you weren't in there long enough for the damage to accumulate.

If these daggers only cause X amount of damage to someone who stands there for six seconds, then it should deal significantly less damage to someone who only stands there for significantly less than six seconds. And because we're using turns as our way of resolving nigh-simultaneous actions, we just say that the threshold for whether you were in there long enough is if you happen to start your turn there.

 

[Jeffrey Kesselman]

Your mistake is taking a Crawford tweet as anything more then 3 in the morning random ranting.

In general Crawford seems to think about his tweets before sending them ALMOST as much as Donald Trump does.

 

[Al'Kelhar]

...So imagine a halfling cleric in a wheelbarrow with Spirit Guardians up being pushed around by his team member on each of their turns while they take the Disengage action avoiding all attacks of opportunity.

Such an image certainly DOES NOT invoke my sense of heroic fantasy...

It's heroic if the halfling is wearing a Holocaust Cloak.