Did my players just break the game again?
They have a wand of searing light.
One player blasted with it, then held it up as a free action.
Next player's turn, he moves adjacent to 1st, takes rod and blasts with it. Holds it out.
3rd player's turn, he moves next to 2nd player and grabs rod, blasts with it.
Everyone is 4th level, so they can't actually prepare the spell, but they DO have access to such magic items. They all have Searing light on their spell lists. Cleric, cleric and Oracle.
They almost killed an advanced hydra outright using this nonsense.
Is this legal? I can't think why not.
Moox
Did my players just break the game again?
They have a wand of searing light.
One player blasted with it, then held it up as a free action.
Next player's turn, he moves adjacent to 1st (move action), takes rod (move action) and blasts with it (standard action). Holds it out.
3rd player's turn, he moves next to 2nd player and grabs rod, blasts with it.They all have Searing light on their spell lists. Cleric, cleric and Oracle.
They almost killed an advanced hydra outright using this nonsense.
Is this legal? I can't think why not.
Moox
My only problem with this sequence of events is the action economy for handing off items. Taking an item from an ally is at least a move action. It might even be a move action for both the giving and the receiving players.
Other than that, I don't really see this as a huge problem. Three spellcasters are using three standard actions and three wand charges to get three uses of the spell. Seems fair.
One player blasted with it, then held it up as a free action.
Next player's turn, he moves adjacent to 1st, takes rod and blasts with it. Holds it out.
3rd player's turn, he moves next to 2nd player and grabs rod, blasts with it.Is this legal? I can't think why not.
Moox
Drop an Item
Dropping an item in your space or into an adjacent square is a free action.Can't find the rule for actually passing items but it was a free action in 3.5 and I suspect that it was not changed.
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Well, remember that as DM the ball is in your court when things like this crop up. So if it seems stupid, offensively stupid, or feels clearly wrong you can just say "no." (I probably put it in one of the last two.) Free actions take time, just not enough to be bothered with. Each round has a six second clock going, and I picture using wands taking more than a fraction of a second to use. Taken to the extreme we end up with a potential long line of people all passing a wand to the next guy to fire it (This is definitely in the last two categories above). I somehow doubt that a wand would take well to being fired fifty times in a row. It is nonsense that probably should be discouraged. If you could rapid shot a wand like this, there is little reason a lone caster could not do this. In the future I would probably just set the assumption that they can only be fired once in a round unless something else is going on, probably something magical.
Look at it like this. The rogue puts a stick of dynamite in his mouth and charges the enemies with the excuse "I have evasion and this has a reflex save for half and the DC is just 15. And even if I fail, I have the HP to deal with it since it only deals 2d6." There are times when the rules allow something that just should not be. It is the DM's right to tell the rogue "Your character will die anyway." or "No Dave, that is dumb as hell." or "I don't care what it says, you are cheating."
While it's technically legal, as far as I can tell, to transfer items between characters and use them multiple times in a single combat round (assuming you get the action economy right - I too would go with a move action to pick the wand off of a fellow PC rather than free action), I think it flies in the face of the game's assumptions.
D&D's segmented turns are not meant to accurately block out the time it actually takes to accomplish the actions PCs want to take. They're designed to be a way to operationalize multiple characters taking actions in a conveniently organized manner within a 6 second time frame. All actions may be adjudicated in a sequential manner, but they're all going on in a flurry of overlapping action. So the game assumes that single items are generally not available for full multi-character use over the course of a single round.
And if items were to able to be used in this manner, I'd have to say that they're far too inexpensive.
And if an appeal to reason doesn't work, hit them with a quartet of kobold sorcerers wielding a single wand of fireballs in a single round. I think they'll come around.
I would disallow it as it seems about as logical as characters sharing their sword of superpower to all attack with it in one round.
But while that wouldn't just be stupid but also kind of gamebreaking the example with the wand hardly is - a wand's value is more or less its number of charges, and (as AvalonXQ already stated) three charges used up, so not much of a problem.
Check out this thread along the same lines, but much more abused.
LOL, I didn't know that one. So that's what wand sharing would finally get us. Resist the beginnings!
I might allow it if all the players had quick draw. Otherwise I would say that taking it from someone else's hand is akin to pulling it from your belt and call it a move action.
There may be no actual official entry for what handing a wand to another counts as, action-wise. But plenty of examples are given that can be used to gauge it.
Think of the actions involved. One character, while dodging and weaving in combat, is trying to stand still long enough to hand a very thin and light item off to another. The other has to also dodge, weave, and pluck the item from his dodging friend's outstretched and bobbing hand. The thing to remember is that "holding it (the wand) out" is not the end of the first character's responsibility. He is not done when he sticks his hand out. He is handing this thing off. Which is some small effort at least.
On the really conservative end, attacking unarmed is a standard action that provokes an AoO. Aid another, likewise.
In the middle, drawing a weapon and picking up an item are move actions. Drawing does not provoke. Picking up the item, does.
On the other end, a free action is defined as speaking. Or dropping an item. Neither provokes.
My spider-sense screams that handing a wand off to your buddy is not so easy a task as speaking or dropping the wand would be. This smells like a move action.
That bit with the bowmen is awesome. Thing that's tricky is each inidividual is taking a full rounds worth of actions, just the actions are resolved in sequence as though they're consecutive for ease of gameplay. So if there's a 100 people acting in a round, a round is still 6 seconds long, not 600 seconds, and each individuals allotment of standard move and free actions still adds up to a 6 seconds long block, not 6/100ths of a second. So even though each individual's actions are being resolved in sequence, realy when guy 2 is reaching for guy 1's bow/wand/sword - guy 1 is actually still using it.
They gotta abstract it into turns to make the action manageable, but you'd be right not to let your players use that to bend space-time too much.
The rules also gives the DM a specific out for free actions: "However, there are reasonable limits on what you can really do for free, as decided by the GM."
It would be like a D&D version of an athletics relay race. Instead of 4x100, think 4 x 5. It doesn't matter how fast and smooth each individual transfer is, collectively they take up more than a round.
They are spending almost 700 gp a turn. Since they are using up resources, I don't see the problem with it. Mostly likely, they are using a large amount of consumable resources for a temporary power surge. (Sort of like a nova from a psionic character, except 8 hours of rest won't help them.)
OTOH, if there is something like a CR 10 vampire approaching them (who would take 5d8 damage per shot), this seems a sensible way to avoid a TPK.
OTOOH, if it was a line of fighters passing around their Sword of Awesome, that I would not allow, since they are not using resources that can be exhausted.