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tl;dr: Is it ok to cast an AoE spell that could possibly leave another PC unable to do anything for the rest of the game without his consent or knowledge if it is to neutralize a threat to your own PC. My answer is no, but I would still like input from the community.
You're a level 1 arcane caster at full health. Adjacent to you is a dog that missed you on its last turn and likely to attack you next turn. 15ft away a thug is engaged in melee with your party members. You plan on using color spray to take out the dog and the thug on your next turn, but keep it to yourself. One of your party members moves into your cone and severely hurts the thug to where its visible that he will fall in one more hit. You use color spray anyways because you want to stop the dog from hurting you (because like any good arcane caster, you're not wearing armor). Both enemies and your party member fail their will saves. The player spends the last hour of gameplay unconscious because you're not out of initiative yet, as enemies not immediately visible hear the fracas going on and are alerted.
Was casting that color spray the right thing to do if it results in you shutting out another player? On one hand, yes, you neutralized two threats, but on the other hand you've also taken agency away from the player who has to sit twiddling his thumbs until he can get back up. Unfortunately in the case of the aforementioned scenario, which is based on real events, that doesn't happen because it happened about an hour from when the game was supposed to end.
Now there's arguments to be made about how tactful it was to use that color spray. The color sprayed player did not know the spell was in the pipeline and had already taken his action by the time he was alerted to what the arcane caster had planned on doing. On the other hand the caster was looking to neutralize probable threats. I just want some opinions on the matter because this question has been burning me since my game last night.
Full disclosure: I'm that melee character, and I tried to represent both sides of the argument to the best of my abilities, given I'm still sore about the whole situation.
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It's a group dynamic thing. Had I been the fighter in the described scenario I wouldn't have minded. Had I been the GM I would have patched things such that the one playing the fighter will have something to do for the reminded of the session. Had I been the arcane caster I would have promised to give more consideration to such things in the future. Every component of the entanglement has a reasonable way to solve it.
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I would be annoyed as a player by this. The whole sceanario assumes that casting colorspray is the only option available. In character as the fighter type i'd have some serious trust issues with the caster going forward. Yes the caster diabled two combantants but also disabled the fighter to do it. That could have gone awry with the fighter down and the combtants on their feet and swinging. Would you trust a caster who plays fast and loose with the lives of their compatriots?
Of course I imagine this wasnt a two person party so some context is missing. Why didnt anyone wake the fighter up?
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Of course I imagine this wasnt a two person party so some context is missing. Why didnt anyone wake the fighter up?
Was told by the GM it was a magical unconsciousness effect so no one could wake the fighter. I don't have rules mastery and didn't want to hold up combat to look up if that was actually a thing or not.
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Well there are other factors in there. A level 1 caster at full health has 6 hp... that's low enough for a dog to take out in one chomp (assuming he dumped con like alot of blaster casters). So I can see the argument for self preservation, especially if the rest of the party wasn't there to back him up. (as in able to deal with the dog and the thug equally.) Could he have handled it differently? Maybe, but that depends on his spell list, and what he had prepared at that moment. If he was a spontaneous caster, he should have checked all his options beforehand. Prepared casters don't have MUCH of a choice.
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He was an Arcanist, so he was a little bit of column A, a little bit of column B in regards to his spell options.
Now, as far as positioning, the thug and dog were in kind of an L shape with the fighter character. I'll try to recreate the situation here The arcanist was west of the Dog. The Fighter was 5ft south of the dog, the thug was 5ft west of the fighter and 10ft to the west of the thug was a cleric. The thug was standing in a doorway.
Arcanist-5 Feet-Dog
_________________________Fighter-5 Feet-Thug-|Door|10 Feet-Cleric
Now last turn, the dog attacked the Arcanist but missed, then on the fighter's turn he uses acrobatics to get into the position where he is now, in an L shape with the dog and thug and I suppose an inverted L shape with the arcanist and dog and attacks the thug, visibly hurting him. The arcanist takes a 5ft step back on his turn and casts color spray, flooring the dog, thug, and fighter. Hope that helps give a better idea of what happened.
Also bites typically do 1d4 + Str modifier, particularly at low levels. So I doubt there was much of a chance the Arcanist would've gone down on anything other than a critical hit.
Of course I imagine this wasnt a two person party so some context is missing. Why didnt anyone wake the fighter up?Was told by the GM it was a magical unconsciousness effect so no one could wake the fighter. I don't have rules mastery and didn't want to hold up combat to look up if that was actually a thing or not.
This is correct. Color spray leaves its victims unconscious, blinded, and stunned, not asleep.
I once had a Superstitious Barbarian color sprayed by a party member. The player in question left the group shortly afterward, or it would definitely have been an on-going issue within the party. My barbarian hated that PC, and my feelings toward the player weren't too terribly dissimilar, especially when the IC response was "What are you complaining about? It didn't hurt you."
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I once had a Superstitious Barbarian color sprayed by a party member. The player in question left the group shortly afterward, or it would definitely have been an on-going issue within the party. My barbarian hated that PC, and my feelings toward the player weren't too terribly dissimilar, especially when the IC response was "What are you complaining about? It didn't hurt you."
Was it during battle or as part of a squabble? I'd like to keep it unambiguous that the guy who color sprayed the fighter in my scenario did have a reason, though I don't think it was a very good one.
Eh, it was a "meet cute" with a replacement PC we had to find in enemy territory, so she "mistook" my halfling for a gnoll. So, verisimilitude yay? :P
Oddly enough, we had an actual gnoll PC in the party that she didn't blink an eye at.
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I can't be sure, but it looks to me that the arcanist could have moved differently, gotten the dog, and left both you and the thug out of the spell. If that is true, it would have been better for him to ask if it was OK before attacking you.
It may have been that the player was trying to end the fight as quickly as possible and felt this was tactically the correct move. Likely he didn't consider the possibility that it took another player out of the game and it certainly sounds like he didn't anticipate reinforcements right away.
I hope you get a chance to talk with the other player at some point, point out how his actions affected your enjoyment of the scenario. Try to get him to ask before getting a party member with an AoE next time.
I would be rather unhappy with this, unless asked, either OOC or IC.
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I can't be sure, but it looks to me that the arcanist could have moved differently, gotten the dog, and left both you and the thug out of the spell. If that is true, it would have been better for him to ask if it was OK before attacking you.
It was a pretty narrow space, about 25ft across. He had the option to use a crossbow but instead chose to use the Color Spray. He choice just so happened to be the one that shut my character down for the rest of the game.
He and I talked and I pretty angrily told him exactly why I wasn't cool with what he did though he tried to justify it as him choosing a tactically superior option. He apologized, vaguely, so we'll see how the rest of our sessions go. That was our first game together, both as characters and as a group so he was pretty much a stranger to me until last night. I'm going to talk to him some more now that I've cooled down about it. I just wanted to get some outside opinions to know how I should approach him about it because I really don't want to bump heads as players again in the future.
What would have happened if both the dog and thug had saved, but your fighter failed? TPK, no?
And, D&D is a Game. Games are supposed to be Fun. It's hard to have Fun without Playing.
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What would have happened if both the dog and thug had saved, but your fighter failed? TPK, no?
And, D&D is a Game. Games are supposed to be Fun. It's hard to have Fun without Playing.
I agree 100% and I think he realizes that he was out of line because he contacted me afterwards. I'm going to talk to him more about this before our next game to make sure most OOC issues are ironed out.
Eh.... Friendly Fire is fine when it comes to damaging spells, depending on which ones. I play a tiefling paladin tanking a bunch of mooks? Sure, throw a fireball at me.
SoS spells, on the other hand, would require some serious OOC chatter on the other hand. SoD, like Color Spray, are right out.
Friendly fire? Is that when you kill your teammate in mid-backswing, right as he is about to decapitate the bad guy so you can swoop in and hound the glory?
That's totally cool to do all the time, anytime.
All the time every time! Of course it depends on the players, their relationships and maturity. My best friend and I have a running joke that his arcane casters will inevitable light my martial on fire at least once in every campaign. Such as green slime falls on my player and he lights me up or I can't get away from a swarm and he lights us both up. I charge the white dragon and he softens it up with a fireball unfortunately he softens me up too.
Quite fun actually.
In the Second Darkness game I was in I was playing a LN Monk and I tended to get in the thick of it. The cleric of the group tended to cast an alignment based spell. I forgot what it was but it hit Lawful and I always seemed to be in some part of the range of the spell. He said Sorry when he cast it and I always shook my head when he did it. I wasn't exactly happy that he couldn't figure out another spell to cast knowing he was going to hit a party member. I really didn't roleplay my character very well but I always thought of him like the shoulin Monk from the Kung-Fu TV show and we were friends outside of the game.
I would say the guy still has issues with tactics in the current game but fortunately he is playing a fighter. I am playing a Magus but I'm not going to get back and cast Color spray or something. :)
When the person is question is a rogue of question and you have a fireball itching...
Wizard: hey! Its not MY fault you failed your reflex save! You got Improved Evasion and high dex! And heck! Reflex saves are the only thing you got going for ya!