Holly Berry Bombs


Rules Questions


Here's the text of the Fire Seeds spell

Holly Berry Bombs: wrote:
You turn as many as eight holly berries into special bombs. The holly berries are usually placed by hand, since they are too light to make effective thrown weapons (they can be tossed only 5 feet). If you are within 200 feet and speak a word of command, each berry instantly bursts into flame, causing 1d8 points of fire damage + 1 point per caster level to every creature in a 5-foot-radius burst and igniting any combustible materials within 5 feet. A creature in the area that makes a successful Reflex saving throw takes only half damage.

What's to stop you from casting Resist Energy to get 20 points of fire resistance, keeping these in your pocket, and then walking into an enemy and blowing yourself up? The berries do individual damage so you shouldn't take any damage through your fire resistance. You could strap them to a fighter or animal companion too. Downside is any fire resistance of your enemies is going to be multiplied by 8 against this spell and even enemies with crappy Reflex save are probably going to resist something, but it's probably a neat trick against certain opponents.

Sczarni

Well, the "igniting any combustible materials" raises an eyebrow. You'd be fine thanks to Energy Resistance, but your clothing and a good amount of your gear wouldn't be. You could take it all off, of course, but the enemy might guess you're up to something when you walk up to them half-naked. Also if they survive the blast, or their allies were out of range, you're now without armor or gear and have incurred the immediate hostility of your target and his/her allies.


Resist Energy specifically states, that your equipment is protected as well.
I probably wouldn't keep them inside your pocket, cause that would mean no line of effect. You could glue 'em on your butt, though.

Silver Crusade

This is a fine approach. In old-skool D&D it was called the 'ground zero fireball'. Here's the lich Xykon using this tactic.


Speaking the command word would set a single berry off. That's a standard action if the GM treats the berry as a command word magic item, which would be reasonable given the text. Nothing in the text suggests a chain reaction would result, so, well, this doesn't seem particularly useful as a giant kaboom technique.

There's another spell that works far better for this when twinked out, though I can't remember the name.


What if the command word for all of the berries is the same?


Arachnofiend wrote:
What if the command word for all of the berries is the same?

You're in GM fiat land as to whether that's even possible, much less whether one command can detonate all the berries.


Actually... reading the wording again it sounds like my half-joking reply was really right. The text says that upon speaking the command word "each" berry bursts into flame; that phrasing would hardly make sense if the command word only detonated a single berry. The better reading would be that all eight of your berries explode upon speaking the word... no matter where they are.

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