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When making a spread spell, and it says a 20ft radius, do you HAVE to start the spread at a corner of a hex or square, or can you pick a hex, and then it radiates out? more or less, when you put a creature at the center of a fireball, can you target their square (or hex), or must you pick a corner of it? all the examples in the OGC use corners so i wanted to ask.
When making a spread spell, and it says a 20ft radius, do you HAVE to start the spread at a corner of a hex or square, or can you pick a hex, and then it radiates out?
Spread: "Some effects, notably clouds and fogs, spread out from a point of origin, which must be a grid intersection."
Best way to sort this is to make up scale templates out of card then just put them on the map as you need them
Anything under the template is effected then you can centre it where you like
Area: Some spells affect an area. Sometimes a spell description specifies a specially defined area, but usually an area falls into one of the categories defined below.
Regardless of the shape of the area, you select the point where the spell originates, but otherwise you don't control which creatures or objects the spell affects. The point of origin of a spell is always a grid intersection. When determining whether a given creature is within the area of a spell, count out the distance from the point of origin in squares just as you do when moving a character or when determining the range for a ranged attack. The only difference is that instead of counting from the center of one square to the center of the next, you count from intersection to intersection.
You can count diagonally across a square, but remember that every second diagonal counts as 2 squares of distance. If the far edge of a square is within the spell's area, anything within that square is within the spell's area. If the spell's area only touches the near edge of a square, however, anything within that square is unaffected by the spell.
Every Area spell. Every time.
I don't think hexes vs. squares changes anything for this.
If you target a character and not an intersection, then I would count it as you targetting the middle of the area occupied by said character: if they are Large, then that maps to the intersection of the squares they occupy, if they occupy an odd number of squares, then you are effectively targetting the middle of a square (re: where the radius emanates from).
Based on the following rule from Area spells (and effects, since that's all we have):
I would say that a 5' radius effect that is centered on the middle of a square (i.e. a Medium character) would only partially extend into adjacent squares, and thus not affect anything in that square. Basically, radius effects centered on creatures lose out somewhat vs. intersection centered effects.
That doesn't apply for bombs, because their splash damage isn't a radius effect per se, but says:
so... what's the point of a five foot radius targeted on a creature?
Like what?
so... what's the point of a five foot radius targeted on a creature?
I think you didn't quite understand the difference in language -- but it is important here and rather... odd so I'll try to step you through it.
First the bomb doesn't do a five foot radius splash. This part is very important to catch because it means that we aren't dealing with intersections of the grids with them.
A hit deals direct hit damage to the target, and splash damage to all creatures within 5 feet of the target.
Now it states that you directly hit the primary target and anything within five feet of the primary target takes splash damage. If we only had this language then it would be best to target large or bigger creatures as you hit more creatures adjacent to them with the splash... but we also have the following line:
If the target is Large or larger, you choose one of its squares and the splash damage affects creatures within 5 feet of that square.
Which means in the event that the creature is large or larger you only hit one square it occupies and splash everything near that.
Fair enough -- the closest spell I can think of is flame sphere which gets around this by being a 5 foot diameter sphere that moves like a pseudo-creature (it isn't of course but kind of like one).
But in case there is a 5' radius effect, you do effectively lose out in area covered if you choose to target a creature of odd square size, compared to targetting an intersection (which even square size creatures equate to). Of course, in some cases you might WANT to cover less area, or they may be other benefits to targetting the character themselves - such as destroying Mirror Images, which aren't destroyed if you are just targetting the area.