Well, it would be really hard to enforce a rule about not measuring. A good player could count the grid spaces when its not his turn and be able to point to location without getting out a template. So, all you would be doing is hurting players who don't have good spatial reasoning skills. Remember the character in question might be an INT 25 wizard. I'd think that level of spatial reasoning wouldn't be beyond their capabilities.
From a magical world perspective I've always just imaged as ordering a fireball to explode involved nothing more than just willing it to happen.
From a game perspective, I usually draw the line at taking out a template and spending five minutes with it to find just the perfect location. If it is slowing down your game then that's a problem. If its just "I can't see how a character can do that in six seconds" you just need to relax and say it's just a game and these characters are supposed to be heroic.
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If fireballs were like grenades and there was some variance in explosive power I would agree, but in the game all fireballs have the exact same "kill radius". It is not much different than a quarterback being able to throw the ball 70 yards down the field to a moving target while making sure the ball is not intercepted by 1 or 2 other people. Generally the "window" he has to fit the ball into is not much bigger than the football itself. That requires an extreme level of precision while also accounting for the wind's affect on the ball in some cases. Once the caster knows how to judge 5 feet it is not that hard since a 5 feet cube is a good about of space in real life.
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And how many hours a day that quarterback spend training for that move only?
How often he misses?
For the swarming monkeys example, remember that a fireball explode if it hit something solid. I would require a touch attack to hit, like when trying to put it through a arrowslit, with a variable difficulty depending on the situation.
You point your finger and determine the range (distance and height) at which the fireball is to burst. A glowing, pea-sized bead streaks from the pointing digit and, unless it impacts upon a material body or solid barrier prior to attaining the prescribed range, blossoms into the fireball at that point. An early impact results in an early detonation. If you attempt to send the bead through a narrow passage, such as through an arrow slit, you must “hit” the opening with a ranged touch attack, or else the bead strikes the barrier and detonates prematurely.
Sometime I use a spellcraft check as it better reflect the caster capability to bend its magic to the task at hand.
Even H.S. Quarterbacks can do this, and they probably don't spend any more time training that a caster does using his spells or figuring out ways to judge distance so that he knows opponent X is out of the range of his spells. My point however was that it is certainly possible, and people have the ability to make such judgements. Those fantasy humans do things we real humans can't really do so I would not worry about it. The archer releasing 6 arrows accurately with a composite bow is an example. I have seen youtube videos of people firing arrows with great speed, but not with the accuracy, distance, and the amount of pull needed from a compound/composite bow.
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For me it just works, as a game construct, otherwise I am unfairly penalising ranged spell casters over other players.
Its like adding a second to hit roll for ranged attacks for archers or melee attacks for fighters (and you could make the same realism argument that they have less points of reference to guide their aim).
From another angle: A 20th level wizard can send a fireball 1200 ft accurately (2400 ft if enlarged). Which implies it is within 2.5 ft of where it needs to be at that distance, in 3 dimensions, as terrain is never perfectly flat. 2.5/1200 = 99.8% accuracy.
A 5th level wizard can put it 600 ft accurately. 2.5/600= 99.6% accuracy.
When I start to think about realism in D&D the very first thing that pops into my head is "level based hit points". After that everything seems perfectly normal ;-)
I don't even bother. They are adventurers. They've trained for this enough to know range at a glance. Yes, even the 6 int sorcerer.
If your arguing for realism, then: It's a game!
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Once you've mastered the brain-melting arcane philosophy and planar calculus necessary to make a fireball in the first place (through the innate understanding that comes with spontaneous casting or the mind-numbing rote and practice that is the hallmark of prepared casting), getting it to 'splode where you want it to 'splode is kind of like 'See Spot Run.' by comparison.
It's magic.
Just be thankful you no longer have to account for all 33,000 cubic feet of it expanding to fill a volume, or for a lightning bolt rebounding into your face. :)
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Once you've mastered the brain-melting arcane philosophy and planar calculus necessary to make a fireball in the first place (through the innate understanding that comes with spontaneous casting or the mind-numbing rote and practice that is the hallmark of prepared casting), getting it to 'splode where you want it to 'splode is kind of like 'See Spot Run.' by comparison.
It's magic.
Just be thankful you no longer have to account for all 33,000 cubic feet of it expanding to fill a volume, or for a lightning bolt rebounding into your face. :)
I can assure you that having a degree in Physics and being a university professor don't help you in any way in ball parking the distance between you and a target.
A military grunt or a farmer with little scholarly training would be way more precise.
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Once you've mastered the brain-melting arcane philosophy and planar calculus necessary to make a fireball in the first place (through the innate understanding that comes with spontaneous casting or the mind-numbing rote and practice that is the hallmark of prepared casting), getting it to 'splode where you want it to 'splode is kind of like 'See Spot Run.' by comparison.
It's magic.
Just be thankful you no longer have to account for all 33,000 cubic feet of it expanding to fill a volume, or for a lightning bolt rebounding into your face. :)
But calculating ricochet angles is everyone's favorite use of an hour. How else will I kill all the goblins and "accidentally" fry that good-for-nothing princess at the same time?
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But calculating ricochet angles is everyone's favorite use of an hour. How else will I kill all the goblins and "accidentally" fry that good-for-nothing princess at the same time?
Friendly fire accidents are a tragic consequence of the fog of war, your majesty...
Anywho, of all the spells that might benefit from a little adjudication to tame their unruly behavior, fireball surely isn't one of them. In the earlier editions when a 7th level Fighter was *happy* to be doing 1d8+6 with each of his three attacks / two rounds, a 7d6 fireball was all that and a wedge of cheese. These days? Not so much.
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If fireballs were like grenades and there was some variance in explosive power I would agree, but in the game all fireballs have the exact same "kill radius".I must admit that would be an interesting addition to the AoE rules, roll a d4x5ft spread
you'd have to fudge the maths a bit for simplicity's sake so a
5ft spread 4x dmg
10ft spread 2x dmg
15ft spread 1.5x dmg (it should be 1.3 recurring but nobody wants to sit and work that out)
20ft spread x1 dmgYou could even extend it outward so it has a chance of spreading too far but doing less dmg per creature
of course bigger AoE effects the maths becomes even more of a headache...you know what, nevermind.
Not every fireball has the same radius, it's just that every fireball radius is between 20' and 24'. That's a pretty big realistic difference, but doesn't have a mechanical difference. I don't think grenades have explosions between a few feet and several yards.
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From the flavor text of the fireball spell, I would assume it's as easy as pointing in the desired direction and making it explode when it has reached the the spot you want. The worst case scenario is that you have to pick a distance beforehand, but this should be as accurate as other spells. When was the last time you told a wizard that he was actually 31 feet away and that his scorching ray stopped just short?
I think the bigger problem with unrealistic targeting to catch all the bad guys and miss all the friendlies is that all the targets are really moving all the time. Unlike the simplified round/initiative structure we use in the game to keep track, in a real fight everyone is moving at the same time, which would complicate things immensely.
Again, realism. I'm betting making a system to implement quick combat for a tabletop game would be EXTREMELY difficult if not impossible. And may not even be fun. (I'm imagining it would make combats longer actually. And if everyone got to act at once, it just becomes a mess.)
It is not much different than a quarterback being able to throw the ball 70 yards down the field to a moving target while making sure the ball is not intercepted by 1 or 2 other people. Generally the "window" he has to fit the ball into is not much bigger than the football itself. That requires an extreme level of precision while also accounting for the wind's affect on the ball in some cases.And they fail, what, 80% of the time?
Not in the games I watch. Just to be clear I am not talking about "hail mary's"
see that's what it boils down to = a combat where there's a chance of friendly fire is more fun to me than a combat where there's not a chance due to precision measurement.
What about the idea that if an arrow misses a target it does not travel beyond that square. That is a lot more unrealistic than being able to judge distance. :)
Not every fireball has the same radius, it's just that every fireball radius is between 20' and 24'. That's a pretty big realistic difference, but doesn't have a mechanical difference. I don't think grenades have explosions between a few feet and several yards.If fireballs were like grenades and there was some variance in explosive power I would agree, but in the game all fireballs have the exact same "kill radius".I must admit that would be an interesting addition to the AoE rules, roll a d4x5ft spread
you'd have to fudge the maths a bit for simplicity's sake so a
5ft spread 4x dmg
10ft spread 2x dmg
15ft spread 1.5x dmg (it should be 1.3 recurring but nobody wants to sit and work that out)
20ft spread x1 dmgYou could even extend it outward so it has a chance of spreading too far but doing less dmg per creature
of course bigger AoE effects the maths becomes even more of a headache...you know what, nevermind.
By the game rules all fireballs are the same. As for grenades they have kill zone, and injury zones. They give you a basic guideline when you are in the military, but if they say it is 20 feet as an example for the injury zone I would not chance it and stand at 21 feet.
hey! Some of my favorite computer games have no HUD (or a limited one). You throw a meteor storm in a general area and Minsc screams, or Allister, or Khelgar Ironfist.
For the record, I virtually never use fireball in Baldur's Gate because the damage doesn't kill anything except low level enemies who the archers can rip apart in very short order, and because it is difficult to aim the spell correctly because there is no explained measurement by which to judge your spell except much trial and error which makes it more of a hassle than it is worth which gave it a very bad taste to me.
Instead, I just used spells like sleep (anything fireball would 1 shot, sleep would too, and sleep didn't target your allies in BG I & II). If I wanted damage, liberal use of magic missile, acid arrow, or flame arrow were the norm, though it was rare that I wanted damage with the likes of hold person, haste, stinking cloud, and monster summoning I-III available. Oh look, those are all spells considered powerful and requiring little to no aiming in tabletop as well.
In more recent playthroughs, I've used it much more liberally but that is also due to using wands of fire and throwing fireballs "off-screen" at enemies or oncoming enemies (the fireball wand is more useful 'cause you don't have to spend time in the spellcasting animation). Even then, I often just forget I have the wand equipped. In fact, skull trap has become my #1 replacement for a damaging spell in BG. It can effectively nuke anything with prep-time, doesn't target saves vs magic, is not elemental (thus hard to resist) and can be chucked in combat just as easily as fireball can, making it ideal for taking out lots of weenies if I just want to flex my arcane fingers.
In dragon age, I don't turn friendly fire on because the NPCs are damn stupid sometimes and can't take three steps to the left to bother freezing Allister to the ground with their cone of cold spells, so I consider it a more of a counter to a clunky combat system and bad AI. Of course, I also became very irritated aiming spells in that game and ended up using spells that weren't AoE (my main character in Dragon Age is pretty much always a spell knight who just melees everything to pieces while my two backup mages heal, cast single target spells, and keep elemental weapon buffs active).
In tabletop D&D, I don't use spells like fireball not because they're difficult to aim but because they suffer from problems of being near useless in so many cases. Their damage is poor vs NPCs but damn good vs surrounding objects, which means that even if you can easily avoid your fellow PCs (which is not an issue in tabletop, thank god) you still have to deal with destroying anything and everything not attended when you do so.
Here's an example. The only time fireball really gets to shine is when you have lots of weenie enemies who the party's martials would 1-shot with each attack, who are all squeezed into a nice tight little pack. So let's say you have a group of 15 goblins packed into a room in a 5th level game. These are all your garden variety CR 1/3 1 HD goblins with around 7 hp. They're guarding a room that is considered very important (hence why there are 15 goblins guarding it).
Okay, so you chuck the fireball into the room. You roll your average 17.5 fire damage and even the ones who make their saves get toasted. Hooray, you're a cool member of the party again! Except, everything that was in the room -- IE the stuff they were guarding -- also just got wiped. Even at half damage vs objects, Fireball just destroyed most objects made of wood, set fire to anything that would burn, nuked items such as spellbooks, scrolls, potions, wands, books, and the 3,000 gp of assorted tapestries on the walls. It destroyed the bad guy's journal revealing the clue to his scheme and potential weakness, etc, etc, etc.
Places you cannot effectively use fireball in tabletop D&D include (but are not limited to):
1) Virtually any population center.
2) In a forest (Smokey the Bear and his Druid Order will murder you).
3) In an open field with lots of dry grass (brushfires, yay).
4) Underground in tight spaces (like a dungeon).
5) Inside a building you don't want burning down around you.
Ironically, the least invasive place to stick a fireball is in fact underwater, but then you have to make a DC 23 caster level check to get the spell to function (superhot steam is the result) and the surface of the water blocks line of effect.
A desert is another place fireball isn't so bad. Basically anywhere that is already dead, barren, open spaced, and absent of treasures you'd rather not set on fire.
EDIT: It's also inappropriate for fighting...
1) Any fiendish creature (via the template).
2) Most evil outsiders (including demons and devils).
3) Incorporeal enemies (shadows, wraiths, ghosts).
4) Any NPC or creature with fire resistance 10 or more (which includes NPCs who have access to resist energy which is on more spell lists than not, or can afford 50 gp potions of resist energy).
5) Anything with spell immunity (or great spell resistance).
6) Things with Evasion. Or anything with Improved Evasion.
7) Creatures with hardness (rare but animated objects have this).
As your level increases, the opportunity to use fireball effectively goes down. A 5d6 fireball deals about 17.5 damage. A 10d6 fireball deals about 35 damage. The difference is negligible to any enemy you'd care to damage (in fact, enemy HP generally scales faster so relatively you will deal less damage) but now you will destroy most metal objects in the area as well (about 17 damage to objects in the area, which is enough to destroy or severely damage even objects made of iron).
For a good alternative, fire snake is much harder to accidentally destroy all your treasure with, as you can fold it around as you need to (folding it in 3 dimensions or criss-crossing it can seriously help if you are in tight spaces). Unfortunately, fire snake is both 2 levels higher and much shorter range.
IMHO, fireball is an NPC-friendly spell. It is the ideal spell for evil NPCs who just wanna drop damage on the party, or the tool of lots of low level NPCs to deal a little damage to the party, or the tool of fire-retardant enemies to harass the party with (such as an evil wizard who attacks the party with hell-hounds or fire elementals and happily throws fireball into the ranks of the party because his minions surrounding them are immune).
Yeah, fireball is way more useful for NPCs, who ironically are likely to get a lot less flak from the GM for not screwing up their aim for the sake of "interesting".
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"I don't turn friendly fire on because the NPCs are damn stupid sometimes and can't take three steps to the left to bother freezing Allister to the ground with their cone of cold spells"
OK, so we are obviously very different people, as that's exactly the sort of game play that I love. War is hell, and I like the idea that the ability to suddenly release elemental forces from my fingers *might* put my friends at risk too.
I suppose so. See, I like games for having real difficulty, not fake difficulty. Real difficulty is where the enemies are smart, the challenges are tough, and so forth. Fake difficulty is stuff like "Well this game would be easy if the controls didn't suck, or your NPC allies didn't kill you faster than your enemies, etc".
Real difficulty would be the BG games after you install things like the improved AI and challenge packs, that make NPCs (both allies and enemies) smarter (archers target casters, ranged NPCs do not walk into melee to speak to you before initiating combat, enemies will stop casting spells you're immune to after they find you are immune, etc). Now that is something I LOVE. Give me a good tactical game any day of the week. Let the mages you stumble on start tearing me apart with minute meteors whilist I struggle to dispel their protection from arrows so Khalid and Minsc can fill them full of arrows.
Morrigan mocking you and calling you stupid and then standing directly behind you to cast cone of cold through your main tank to hit 1 enemy is not real difficulty. It is bad AI. It has nothing to do with tactics, and it is the result of a clunky combat system. A good AI might check to see if there are allies in the way of your targeting radius, then attempt to move a few feet over and and try again. Leading the NPCs to have some semblance of being real breathing creature with a few brain cells between their pixilated ears at least on the level of a pack of Intelligence 2 wolves not choosing to eat through the ass-end of the wolf in front of him to get to the prey on the other side.
My NPC's often screw up their aim- if they aren't very bright NPCs. A chaotic evil caster with a fairly low int who crisps some of his own kobolds is good stuff.
So what you mean is your NPCs don't care about their aim. If you cane nuke a few more PCs in the radius who gives a poo about goblin #32, right? Thing is, it doesn't make much sense in most cases. Spells have very specific effects. You know how big your spell is going to be. You know how far you can toss it. It's not even a ranged attack roll or a splash weapon. It goes where you will it to go. All you need is line of effect. Suggesting your NPCs blow up their allies because of their Intelligence scores is dishonest. Animals can work together better than that. If you have a Chaotic Evil caster he or she is blowing up their allies because the want to, not because they are stupid.
"because it is difficult to aim the spell correctly because there is no explained measurement by which to judge your spell"
I know! It's great isn't it! You throw some flames in a direction and hope for the best. I love me the taste of chaos in the morning.
Given that there are no clear benchmarks for a spell's radius or distance throughout the game, nor any tutorial giving an example as to what a measurement of, it's not exactly logical. There are plenty of benchmarks that people can use. Standard widths, distances, and so forth. The thing is, they never show you during the tutorials how big spells are, so all you have is a spell description. It doesn't show an AoE on the map, so you learn a spell that clearly says "fireball in a 20 ft. radius" but you have no idea how big a 20 ft. radius is in-game, until you throw a fireball and nuke your party and have to reload, because the game doesn't give any way of simply measuring 20 ft. outside of casting the spell.
Hence fake difficulty. After you KNOW how big it is, then it's not an issue. I can't recall the last time I used fireball and actually hit an PC, or even a summoned monster for that matter. It just took learning how big the radius was, and there is no clear scale issue. In the Bandit Camp you can chuck a fireball that is nearly the size of the main tent in BG I on the outside, but when you enter the tent you could fill it with 3 fireballs (tent of holding?).
Not in the games I watch. Just to be clear I am not talking about "hail mary's"It is not much different than a quarterback being able to throw the ball 70 yards down the field to a moving target while making sure the ball is not intercepted by 1 or 2 other people. Generally the "window" he has to fit the ball into is not much bigger than the football itself. That requires an extreme level of precision while also accounting for the wind's affect on the ball in some cases.And they fail, what, 80% of the time?70 yard passes? As in 70 yards from hand to hand, not 70 yard completions.
If they were so easy to perform, why don't they happen all the time?
Because you got what amounts to a few 1st-3rd level NPCs making exceptionally long ranged touch attack rolls to land a thrown object in a 5 ft. space, and another low level NPC making touch attacks vs a diminutive object to try and grab it. The statistical probability of this happening frequently is very bad (at 70 yards, even if the ball had a 20 ft. range increment, the thrower is dealing with a -6 to lob the ball, which with a +1 dex and +1 BAB would bring you to a net -4 vs AC 5, which means only a about a 60% chance to actually get it to the guy at all. Then the guy on the receiving end has to make a readied touch attack to grab the ball (likely another +2 vs AC 14).
When you account for soft cover (the ball's line of effect has to pass through spaces of others), the chances of successfully lobbing it into the 5 ft. space AND the other guy catching it drop significantly. Other situation specific circumstances (such as visibility, ground conditions, moisture, and so forth) may provide an additional +2 or -2 to your check.
EDIT: Now replace NPCs with heroic PCs with feats, high base attack, better ability scores, and so forth and you will find that your average Fighter, Barbarian, or Paladin would probably rock such passes constantly. A ranger with a +6 BAB and a +3 Dex would be hard pressed to fail the throw. A fighter with a +6 BAB and +3 Strength would be able to easily catch the ball (or the Fighter could have snatch arrows and the ranger just throws it at the Fighter directly), and then they begin charging down the field, laughing at all the silly NPCs as they overrun them with their big sexy CMBs like Popeye cartoons.
Or instead, you have a wizard who doesn't have to aim anything at all, and wills the ball 600 feet in the direction he wants and places it in the spot that he wants, with no attack roll needed unless he's trying to proverbially thread a needle. Replace ball with fireball and we have a similar situation here.
Because you got what amounts to a few 1st-3rd level NPCs making exceptionally long ranged touch attack rolls to land a thrown object in a 5 ft. space, and another low level NPC making touch attacks vs a diminutive object to try and grab it.I like the cut of your jib, but I suspect Tom Brady makes more on a Day Job roll than most average 1-3rd level NPCs...
If he is an exceptional individual then he is likely just that. Exceptional. The reason he stands out amongst his peers is because he stands out, essentially.
If exceptional athlete is a couple levels higher, put more emphasis on his game -- say weapon focus {football}, better physical statistics, slightly higher BAB -- then he's going to stand out. Your average warrior (at least I see football more as a warrior sport than a profession, craft, or performance skill) will probably have a 13 Strength, 12 Dexterity, 11 Constitution, then a mixture of Int / Wis / Cha elsewhere, more than likely with 3 point buy total. The +2 from being human might go somewhere to shore up a weakness, or might go into Strength to make a powerful tackler or defender vs overrun, while Dex might make for a more accurate ball tosser / punter.
Then you might have one guy who stands out of the crowd. In game terms, maybe this guy doesn't have 1-3 levels of warrior, but instead has 1-3 levels of Barbarian. He's bigger, stronger, and more hardcore. He doesn't look different from the others, but he can fly into a rage and plow through other players before taking a breather and chugging some gatorade between plays. Or he might use that 15 point buy vs 3 point buy to really sweeten the deal on his statistics. Maybe he uses rage powers like the +hit or +CMB powers to get exceptionally awesome throws beforehand.
Not in the games I watch. Just to be clear I am not talking about "hail mary's"It is not much different than a quarterback being able to throw the ball 70 yards down the field to a moving target while making sure the ball is not intercepted by 1 or 2 other people. Generally the "window" he has to fit the ball into is not much bigger than the football itself. That requires an extreme level of precision while also accounting for the wind's affect on the ball in some cases.And they fail, what, 80% of the time?70 yard passes? As in 70 yards from hand to hand, not 70 yard completions.
If they were so easy to perform, why don't they happen all the time?
Would it be better if I say 55 yards? That is still a small window. They don't happen all the time because big guys that are 300 plus pounds and run a 4.6 40 are trying to smash the QB so the time may not be there, and on top of that if the defender(cornerback) is good and/or had help that window I mentioned earlier gets smaller. My point however stands that being highly accurate is very possible, before you even get to fantasy land.
Anybody with PC class levels is above the norm and there are a lot of quarterbacks with good arms, that don't possess the other skills needed to succeed. I would say there are more than 40 capable of that level of accuracy, but accuracy alone does not make you a star QB. Not all QB's are good athletes(as in athletic) either. You need the ability to not misread a defense more than you need to be accurate, and throw the ball far.
In short being an NFL quaterback is not what is needed to place the ball in the window. You need a decent amount of natural talent, and training.
Having levels in a class gives you both.
I completely misread your argument.
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Not to go off onto too big of a tangent, but given that essentially any starting quarterback in the NFL is going to be among the 40 best quarterbacks on the planet and is, moreover, an exceptional athlete, I'd suggest that modeling such a player as a 1st-3rd level NPC with average stats is pretty silly. If they were low-level generic mooks, they'd be doing something else for a living, pretty much by definition.
That said, I don't see any reason to imagine there being some kind of imprecision with spells that don't ask you to make some kind of attack roll to see if they go where you want them to.
I'm of the believe that 5th level as approaching superhuman status, and IMHO that's pretty accurate. Look at the sort of things that 5th level characters are capable of, how much punishment they can take, and so forth.
Average statistics are not unreasonable. However in the case of athletes their physical statistics are more than likely the highest end of their statistics, while other statistics are dumped (and given the controversies of sports vs education, I'd even be willing to say I could pin down a few key dumpstats as well).
I think I'm giving professional athletes a pretty big honor here in even suggesting they are above 1st level and not commoners. That's pretty huge in the scheme of things. Suggesting that most of the professional athletes are 3rd level warriors who have emphasized physical prowess for the purposes of a sport revolving around throwing, catching, grappling, and overrunning opponents while being able to sustain large quantities of nonlethal (and sometimes lethal) damage from what amounts to powerful impacts.
So let's look at this for a moment and map it out a bit.
Your average person will have about 3 hp, a +0 BAB, and a +0 Strength/Dexterity. In our society that emphasizes mental capability above physical capability, it's probably not unfair to assume that the average American has slightly below average physical statistics offset by slightly higher mental statistics (so perhaps 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13 with a floating +2), which means some of us would probably actually have more like 2-3 Hp, -1 to hit, etc.
Now let's say someone becomes more athletic. Their emphasis on their time and development slides their statistics more in the other direction, leading to stats looking more like 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, 8 with a floating +2). Instead of commoner, some have a level of expert or aristocrat. They're a bit tougher (average 4 hp before Con) but not that much more physically coordinated (but their physical stats are more impressive). Then you get into your more rigorous athletes who have a level of warrior who are even tougher (average 5 hp before Con), have enhanced BABs, and so forth.
So then you have a lot of these individuals that are interested in playing professionally. Some of them get scouted. Most likely the commoners go off to get normal jobs. The experts may continue on for a time, but are likely to get their scholarships and branch out into other activities. The warriors are scouted for being the most talented of the bunch in physical prowess. So then you have stuff like college football, where the best of this first tier of adult athletes have been filtered into.
Then they filter some of the best of these football players who gain more practice, undergo more rigorous training, and get even better at what they do. At this point, they begin gaining more levels in warrior. Suddenly, the college football star is a 2nd level warrior. He averges 11 Hp before Con modifiers (and gets more from his Con), has a stronger fortitude save (which helps with avoiding saves vs fatigue when being pushed in rigorous play), and he is at least 5% more successful with his BAB (and thus throws, catches, bull rushes, overruns, and resisting the same).
Then the cream of this crop goes on to play in the NFL. Now you have truly elite individuals. These guys are perhaps 3rd level warriors who have about 16 base hit points, get triple their constitution bonus, have enhanced reflex and will saves, a +15% bonus from base attack to throws, catches, combat maneuvers and combat maneuver defense. The best of these individuals then might have feats that improve their ability to play (such as toughness, endurance, and now at 3rd level a 3rd feat to further set them apart as being the best, perhaps fleet to make them run faster, or some sport-specific feats that allow you to do things like take a -4 penalty to your CMD to get a +4 bonus to your throwing the ball).
So now we go back and look at normal people.
3 HP, +0 BAB, +0 Fort, 2 feats (which likely aren't pro-sport feats).
+0 Hp, -1 to throw/catch, -1 CMB, -2 CMD from abilities.
+1 skill point from favored class.
Verus Professional A-Tier Athlete.
16 HP, +3 BAB, +3 Fort, +1 Ref, +1 Will, 3 feats (likely all pro-sport feats)
+3-6 Hp, +1-2 to throw/catch, +1-2 CMB, +2 CMD from abilities.
+3 Hp from favored class (or +3 skill points, distributed in things like Acrobatics, Bluff or Perception, or a more "practical" skill).
Truly an elite individual!
And then, then my fellas, if we assume that the S-Tier of the sport includes PC-classed characters, then we end up with extraordinary individuals indeed.
Versus Professional S-Tier Athlete (a 3rd level Barbarian).
25 Hp, +3 BAB, +3 Fort, +1 Ref, +1 Will (+3 raging), 3 feats (likely all pro-sport feats)
+6-9 HP, +2-3 to throw/catch, +2-3 CMB, +3-4 CMD from abilities.
+3 Hp from favored class (has enough skill points without favored class)
Fast movement makes him harder for anyone else to keep up with and makes his jumps something that make people stand and cheer.
Rage allows him to "get the spirit" and preform incredible acts of physical prowess, plow through 2-3 other warriors, and have epic adrenaline rushes.
1 Rage power allows him to either be a powerful "wall", an incredible offensive tackler, or allows even more accurate and impressive throws across the field.
Trap Sense is likely traded out for a football archtype.
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The moral of this mental exercise is that in reality people are not fantasy superheros. The highest anyone on the planet likely reaches is 5th level in anything. Most of us will never go past 3rd level in our entire lives. We are not individuals who are capable of fighting hydras with only 4 individuals. We do not face ogres and trolls in single combat with swords. We are not making 40 ft. jumps off cliffs onto hard ground below and walking away from it with a few bruises. We are normal people, and our most exceptional individuals are the most exceptional normal people.
Normal people can do some pretty amazing things. You don't have to be even 5th level to be the best example of humanity has to offer in your chosen field in the whole world. You have to remember that the benchmarks of the d20 system are much closer to reality. For example, the 3.x rules and other d20-derived systems note the following ruler for difficulty classes.
DC 0 = Effortless.
DC 5 = Easy.
DC 10 = Average.
DC 15 = Tough.
DC 20 = Challenging.
DC 25 = Formidable.
DC 30 = Heroic.
DC 35 = Nearly impossible.
I think it's a mistake and a disservice to call 1st-3rd level people in reality mooks, just as much as it is a mistake to suggest sports players (or anyone else for that matter) would be anything other than mooks to the fantastic individuals that are D&D characters. Truly elite individuals might be seen as mooks to heroic characters in D&D, but that's because heroic D&D characters are akin to comic book superheroes with swords (a 6th level barbarian can casually leap 25 ft with a short running start, or jump 17.5 feet from standing position with no running start), and a 6th level Fighter can tear his way through a stone wall with his bare hands (1d3 unarmed, +4 strength, +2 weapon specialization, +1 weapon training, +2 power attack, 2 attacks per round, -8 damage per hit due to hardness = 6 damage per round of beating a stone object, stone has 15 hp/inch of thickness, so in 1 minute a Fighter can destroy a 5 ft. space of stone wall 4 inches thick).
That isn't to say that normal people can't do awesome things, but it is to say that we should at least get a good idea where our scales are resting, and not assume that normal people are multi-level superheroes.
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Each part of the game is unrealistic in different degrees, which is fine.
If you use lifting to determine someone's strength, people would have much higher strength scores than you would expect. I sit behind a desk all day and would still land at 16-18 strength based on the chart. I had an uncle who would have been a 24 STR based on carrying and about a 34 STR based on lifting. That's a rough guess since I don't know how much the car weighed.
Things like that make it really hard to map even the more mundane parts of the game to real life.
That said, fireball is anything but mundane. The spell says it only requires an attack roll under a very few circumstances, so I think placement should be fairly easy.
I have given this issue some thought for house rules in a possible future game. To me it is not a matter of knowing exactly where your spell goes, but being able to exactly estimate where it should go.
My solution is based on the range rules in the Hero System. In Hero, range increments are standard for every ranged attack. -1 for every x (I forget exactly how many) meters with an additional -1 penalty for each doubling of the range increment.
Different type of weapons are capable of different range multiple. A dagger can go up to 3, while a long bow can go up to 10 or 12 (I don't have the documentation in front of me right now). Magical attacks can go up to the range given in the description.
My solution is to give every ranged attack, including magic, the same penalties for range. range penatlies would go a follows:
- 10 ft = 0 range penalties
- 20 ft = -1 to hit
- 40 ft = -2
- 80 ft = -3
- 160 ft = -4, etc...
For a ranged AoE attack (e.g. fireball), the AC would be the AC of a specific square (I think it is AC 5). They would roll a ranged attack as normal using range modfiers. If they miss, roll a random direction (like throwing a splash weapon) and move the point of origion a number of squares equal to how much they missed by.
Another thing that alwas bothered me (and I think this was discussed earlier in the thread) was the exacting size of the AoE. My feeling is that the AoE should be somewhat variable and the exact location of combatants is fluid. I am planning a house rule that anyone within 5 ft of the edge of an AoE has a chance to be partially affected.
Taken together, these proposed rules discourage casters from trying to exactly place their spell so that they just include foes while narrowly missing allies who are engaged in melee with the bad guys.
But what's the point of that? Are you trying to discourage blasting? If you do that, you might as well have all ranged attacks roll to hit someone else if they miss. They're similar principals.