I'm not sure if "Advice" is the right section for this thread, since the combat turn described here already happened and we're all happy with how it turned out. I'm just not exactly clear on where I diverged from RAW, and would like to know, RAW, how I should have adjudicated it. I am fairly certain I did it wrong, and in multiple ways.
Context: the fight against Orox and his slaves.
Situation: Orox - a large (10') four-armed, spiral-horned beast - was on a 20' wide ledge and surrounded by five adventurers. A druid controlling a Flaming Sphere moved it onto his square. The spell says he gets a reflex save to negate. He made his save. The players asked, "If he dodged the ball and the ball is on his square, where did he go?" The only unoccupied square (and not big enough for him) was the one through which the flaming sphere was let in.
I said I thought he would dive through one of them, charging horn first. They thought that sounded cool so that's what we did. He charged through the fighter's square. The fighter asked if he would get an attack of opportunity against the beast. I said sure, that seams fair. Orox rolled a hit and put a hole in the fighter's abdomen. The fighter rolled a 1. Something bad always happens on a 1, so I said "You fall prone one square behind you." Problem was there were two morlocks swarming him from behind. Fighter asked what would happen to them? I said attack of opportunity. He asked if he could try to pin them as he fell. It sounded unlikely to me, but we were so far off the reservation by then that I said sure, go ahead and try. I gave them a +2 bonus to CMD because they were working in concert. One of them hit him with its club, but he managed to take both of them down with him and had them grappled.
In subsequent rounds he bonked their heads together like the three stooges. For his part Orox took advantage of the fighter's grappled condition and ran him through with his swords. This is the same fighter who would later go on to slay the medusa. He was down to 6 hp out of a total of I think 70 by then.
By RAW, he makes his save but does not move (going on memory as regards flaming sphere). However, if the critter doesn't get away from the thing, he remains at risk of becoming brisquet having to make saves every round the mobile BBQ pit is in his space.
However, the way it played out sounds pretty awesome!
So am i getting this right, you had a whole lot of out-of-initiative actions because of a flaming sphere?
A character dodging a flaming sphere or any area of effect, doesn't actually need to physically move out of the way. They might just jump up, or move out of the way within the confines of their occupied space. A large creature is not a 10' by 10' by 10' cube that fills out its entire occupied space. There was no need for all those subsequent effects to happen.
So am i getting this right, you had a whole lot of out-of-initiative actions because of a flaming sphere?
A character dodging a flaming sphere or any area of effect, doesn't actually need to physically move out of the way. They might just jump up, or move out of the way within the confines of their occupied space. A large creature is not a 10' by 10' by 10' cube that fills out its entire occupied space. There was no need for all those subsequent effects to happen.
You're right.
Like the others said, I generally treat a successful save vs. flaming sphere as meaning that the creature has squeezed out of the way. Well, not using the official squeezing rules, but they're able to fit in the same square without harm for that round.
My group used to have debates like this, then we realized that the tiles on my kitchen floor are 1' x1'. Actually seeing a person standing in a five foot square helped us all conceptualize what the abstracted combat really looked like IRL. Its a fairly useful excercise, IMHO. Looking at the real space, and the amount of it actually occupied by a combatant has made the rules for things like this flow a lot more smoothly than previously. All of a sudden the movement, space, and reflex save stuff started working the way we thought it would, not because we better understood the rules but because our frame of reference had changed.
For the record:
"Something bad always happens on a 1, so I said 'You fall prone one square behind you.'"
... is also going off the RAW track. :)
Which part, the something bad always happens on a '1', or the falling prone, or the one square back, or some combination of several or all of the above?
Rolling a 1 = bad thing is just a house rule, critical fumble. Only on attack rolls though. Although if it leads to hilarity, a roll of 1 on other things such as skill checks may lead to bad stuff. We talk it out at the table in real time, and if something strikes us as funny or cool, we run with it.
For the record:
"Something bad always happens on a 1, so I said 'You fall prone one square behind you.'"
... is also going off the RAW track. :)
Well, not so much off the track. If you use the critical fumble and critical hit decks, this is the kind of effects that could very well happen. Not Core RAW I'll agree, but not so far behind. Though to apply a critical fumble, it demands a confirmation; if the fumbling character doesn't beat the AC of the opponent on the confirm roll, he gets the bad stuff, otherwise it's just an ordinary miss.
Just sayin'.
Wow. With the OP's rulings, flaming sphere just became a heck of a lot more powerful! Forced movement, even on a successful save?
That like, what? A 5th-level spell, minimum?
Wow. With the OP's rulings, flaming sphere just became a heck of a lot more powerful! Forced movement, even on a successful save?
Only on a successful save, actually. If you didn't make the save you're just in the square, getting toasted.
I've always hated the interpretation of Reflex save = Diving out of the way. Sure, it works for a lightning bolt or a trap, in some situations. But how do you explain diving 20+ feet (with no ranks in Acrobatics, wearing full plate?) to get out of the blast radius of a fireball? The rules don't say you move, so you don't move.
Fireballs aren't internally consistent. Some portions of the area are hotter than others, and some aren't even filled with fire. A good save or evasion just means you excel at being in the right place at the right time as the blast/heat/whatever envelopes everything else.
It's about as random as a grenade explosion. You're either dead, maimed, or perfectly unharmed.
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Wow. With the OP's rulings, flaming sphere just became a heck of a lot more powerful! Forced movement, even on a successful save?Only on a successful save, actually. If you didn't make the save you're just in the square, getting toasted.
I've always hated the interpretation of Reflex save = Diving out of the way. Sure, it works for a lightning bolt or a trap, in some situations. But how do you explain diving 20+ feet (with no ranks in Acrobatics, wearing full plate?) to get out of the blast radius of a fireball? The rules don't say you move, so you don't move.
Actually dodging fireball, especially wearing plate, would not be THAT difficult.
Drop to the ground, cover up the vitals. It goes boom.
You get some minor damage that isn't enough to disable you (ie not HP damage).
Or you can pin yourself to a wall, drop behind a door.
It's a fireball, not a hand grenade.
It's doing fire damage, not explosive damage. I can (and have) run through a field that was on fire. The flames licked my legs quite nicely but I didn't stay still long enough to catch on fire. Treatment of minor burns was all I had to take care of. Now, I DO NOT recommend someone do that. Trip and fall and you are a smore.
Though this does make me curious. Wizard A casts Create Pit directly under a group of four goblins. Two make their save. The two who failed have obviously fallen into the pit. Do the two who made the save stand on thin air above the pit? I think it's one of those certain spells whose successful save seems to demand that the characters who saved move off the area of effect. Randomly place them one square aside from the actual hole.
Well?
Any creature standing in the area where you first conjured the pit must make a Reflex saving throw to jump to safety in the nearest open space. In addition, the edges of the pit are sloped, and any creature ending its turn on a square adjacent to the pit must make a Reflex saving throw with a +2 bonus to avoid falling into it.
So in this specific case, a Reflex save means jumping to one side. The fact that it's called out explicitly for this one case however just reinforces the fact that a normal Reflex save doesn't involve any movement. If it did, this clause would be redundant.
It's called RAW because occasionally it doesn't even seem half baked.
In the Cleaves, if a closet is rolled as a room, and the glyph of the pit trap is rolled as a trap, there just isn't anywhere to jump to. Another experiment for when I finally manage to buy the program for minecraft. (In the meantime, place the pit trap on the bottom of the traps deck.)
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