The answer to the title question seems obvious. However, when I tried to look up clarification on the rules for splash damage recently I found that the only results I got were concerning alchemical bombs. See below:
Player Core pg. 292
A bomb deals any listed splash damage to the target on a failure, success, or critical success, and to all other creatures within 5 feet of the target on a success or critical success. Add the damage together before applying resistance or weakness, and don’t multiply splash damage on a critical hit.
GM Core pg. 244
Most bombs also have the splash trait. When you use a thrown weapon with the splash trait, you don't add your Strength modifier to the damage roll. If an attack with a splash weapon fails, succeeds, or critically succeeds, all creatures within 5 feet of the target (including the target) take the listed splash damage. On a critical failure, the bomb misses entirely, dealing no damage. Add splash damage together with the initial damage against the target before applying the target's resistance or weakness. You don't multiply splash damage on a critical hit.
:
For example, if you throw a lesser acid flask and hit your target, that creature takes 1 acid damage, 1d6 persistent acid damage, and 1 acid splash damage. All other creatures within 5 feet of it take 1 acid splash damage. On a critical hit, the target takes 2 acid damage and 2d6 persistent acid damage, but the splash damage is still 1. If you miss, the target and all creatures within 5 feet take only 1 splash damage. If you critically fail, no one takes any damage.
I was unable to find any generally applicable rules on how splash damage works, only how it works for alchemical bombs. Though I was wondering specifically how splash damage works with spells, they seem few and far between, especially since Caustic Blast (formerly Acid Splash) had its own splash damage removed. What spells do exist do not possess the Splash trait, and the Splash trait seems to specifically refer to bombs. I found two examples of spells with splash damage: Exploding Earth, and the Psychic's Amped Ignition.
Do we then assume that splash damage for spells follows the rules for alchemical items? That it does a flat damage amount on a Critical Success, Success, or Failure, no damage on a Critical Failure, and affects all creatures within 5 feet on Success or Critical Success?
Exploding Earth mentions specifically the effects of the splash damage on a Success or Critical Success, but does not mention the Failure result. Should it be assumed that the splash damage still applies, or does it not apply on a Failure where the spell is concerned? The spell description also does not mention the splash damage affecting multiple creatures. Should it be assumed that the splash damage affects only the spell's target, or do we use alchemical bombs as the model and assume creatures within 5 feet are also affected on a Success or Critical Success?
Since they reworked Acid splash i belive their intent is to go away from splash as a trait on spells. and have the spells tell you what it do in text.
making splash a bomb only thing.
Untill everything is remastered we prob need to flag this(the spells) as in need for a remaster Errata.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Maybe we got an errata for these spells in the future. But currently I rule splash as a general rule for all splash damage no matter if it's a bomb or not.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
There have been pre-remaster threads about this, and it is an area of the game where GMs are going to have the final say, so if you are a player thinking about taking these options, you will need to talk to them. Official feedback doesn’t exist and as pointed out in earlier responses, it seems like the remaster solution is to move away from using splash outside of as a trait for weapons.
The RAWest (and very unsatisfying answer for many players) is that splash is a damage type that some creatures have a weakness to. So it is possible (even if it feels anti-RAI) that spells doing splash damage don’t interact with the trait at all and just do a bit more damage of the splash type to the target.
Since they reworked Acid splash i belive their intent is to go away from splash as a trait on spells. and have the spells tell you what it do in text.
making splash a bomb only thing.
Firearms with the Scatter trait also deal splash damage. So that will either need errata in Guns and Gears to change the trait and make it not deal splash damage, or errata to better define how the splash damage works.
Because no, splash damage has been a long standing unanswered question.
Ninja'd ... by the author of those two linked threads.
Thank you all again for the help, and thank you Finoan for coming up with more obscure examples like Scatter. :)
I wondered, with the rarity in spells and the change to Caustic Blast, if they were trying to move away from splash damage as well. Seems a lot of people have noticed that. Maybe it will just be an alchemist thing. Curious to see.
To Unicore though, I thought of something yesterday that I wish I'd thought to put in the original post.
The RAWest (and very unsatisfying answer for many players) is that splash is a damage type that some creatures have a weakness to. So it is possible (even if it feels anti-RAI) that spells doing splash damage don’t interact with the trait at all and just do a bit more damage of the splash type to the target.
_
I had forgotten about the line on Amped Ignition that reads, "You are not harmed by splash damage from amped ignition." It doesn't say anywhere else in the spell anything about the splash damage applying to other creatures than the target, so there is at least some implication in that sentence. Paizo seems to take for granted here that readers will know that splash damage can harm surrounding creatures, and that the spell is exceptional in that it will not harm the caster.It still does not specify how far-reaching the splash is, or when it triggers, but the statement is made as if there were some set of rules people should know, so that is at least some sort of guidance, or acts as a bit of evidence to the direction of how splash damage is intended to work.
Thankfully, the rules for splash damage on bombs are pretty straight-forward. It's not official to say that they apply elsewhere, but they could be applied without much trouble, and that might be the easiest thing when you have spells like this that imply splash damage to surrounding creatures without saying explicitly how far away, or on which roll results.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Yes they wrote a definition of splash that only applies to bombs and weapons. Then went and used it for spells. This is the sort of error that comes up a lot.
We just have to suck it up as Paizo is terrible at erratering things like this as they think it is natural language and obvious.
I mean they have a point. Splash is undefined in this context so we have to import the definition.
Read Corrosive Body if you have any doubts about it. Spells with splash are supposed to splash.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
People have interpreted acid splash in multiple different ways, and I don’t think it is fair to call the correct reading obvious. You have to jump through a lot of logical hoops to parse through what is the specific text and what is the general text it might override to come up with what happens on a miss, a hit and a critical hit. I have seen at least 4 different readings of it by GMs that were all pretty sure their reading was the intended one. A huge factor in that is that the spell doesn’t even have the splash trait and “splash damage” is not a term defined anywhere as relating back to the weapon trait, hence why the OP question of “does splash damage even have rules?” Is a fair question that doesn’t have a concrete answer.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
You have to jump through a lot of logical hoops
Do you?
It seems like the main hangup is that the rules say "weapon" and "bomb" but sometimes there are things that aren't weapons or bombs with the feature. If you just assume it works normally regardless (which in and of itself isn't much of a leap) everything else kind of falls into place.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Or how the acid splash spell says it only does splash damage on a hit, which contradicts the splash trait, but then, if we are sticking to the spell text as the override, the critical effect of the spell is incredibly underwhelming as you don’t double any of the damage. Like I said, there are a lot of ways to interpret the spell and I have seen these disagreements at the table, to the end result of the spell being declared unusable at most tables.
Like I said, there are a lot of ways to interpret the spell and I have seen these disagreements at the table, to the end result of the spell being declared unusable at most tables.
Really? Everyone at our tables just go with what the GM says even if it is wrong. Sometimes that can be quite fun.
But I'm on your side it should be fixed.
The OP was asking if there were any specific rules for understanding how splash damage worked, since the splash trait is a weapon trait, and none of the spells that list splash damage have the splash trait attached to them.
They went on to ask a bunch of exactly the same kinds of questions that came up when my tables were asking about how splash damage works on spells when acid splash was first published, especially as some spells specify that it only does splash damage on a hit (like Exploding Earth in Rage of Elements, and how Corrosive body gives acid splash as an innate spell and was not errata’d to give corrosive body instead), but then the amped ignition just changes the initial damage to 1d10 fire damage plus 1 fire splash damage.
“Splash damage” is not a clearly defined PF2 term. Tables have to do some interpretive work to figure out how to arbitrate spells that reference splash damage. Rage of Elements is a fairly new book that is supposed to work seamlessly with remastered rules. Remastered splash rules are as nebulous right now as pre-remastered splash rules, but we haven’t seen the player core 2 book that would be the most likely place to address this issue, so it could still be in the pipeline to resolve.
For what it is worth, I personally think that it is best to try to apply the splash trait rules about how splash works only to the places where the spell doesn’t over write them.
So Acid Splash and Exploding Earth would only do any splash damage on a successful attack, not a miss like weapons with a splash trait, but they would do that damage to everyone adjacent to the target, like a bomb, and that damage would not double on a crit. Personally, even for acid splash, I would double the initial damage on a crit (even though that text is missing from the spell description), with the added 1 point of persistent damage for the crit and the 1 point of splash damage, because otherwise the spell really struggles to be worth casting. However, those are interpretation choices not clearly spelled out in the rules.
The amped Ignition splash damage I would let work on a miss, since it doesn’t have any overriding text about requiring a hit.
Or you could apply it exactly as if the whole thing was a splash.
People are still using acid splash?The new version is pretty good actually
A player of mine wants the old version to have a different option for spellstrike, since Caustic Blast doesn't have an attack roll.
Oh, remembered something: another rather nonsensical thing about splash is it's 5 ft around the target. So if it's medium, I understand that. Large? Ok. Now let's splash some Gargantuan creature. Now the whole perimeter of, I don't know, 40 squares gets splashed? That's rather stupid not only from narrative point of view, but from mechanical too...
The difference for a 5 ft aura between a medium and a large creature is 9 squares versus 12 squares. That is not nothing. But 90% of the time it will be. Reach is far more important than total squares.
Mechanically yes it is stupid suddenly we are covering a much larger creature and an even bigger area. But it is in keeping with the games simplified approach to size and encumbrance.
From a narative point of view , and for game play it is fine.
Yes personally I wouldn't have any problem if there were some minor size based effects - I think they really over simplified it. They could have down splash damage as a 3x3 grid rather than adjusted it for creature size and it would have worked OK.
Not exactly. You generally don't care about number of squares in both enemies' and allies' emanations: distance matters, area - not so much.
I mean you could say the same thing about what you're complaining about. Distance remains static in both cases.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, remembered something: another rather nonsensical thing about splash is it's 5 ft around the target. So if it's medium, I understand that. Large? Ok. Now let's splash some Gargantuan creature. Now the whole perimeter of, I don't know, 40 squares gets splashed? That's rather stupid not only from narrative point of view, but from mechanical too...
Firstly, this is basically a strawman. Yes, obviously counting splash per square would be bad. But nobody suggested that except you.
I'm confused.
Nobody complains that fireballs won't become bigger for gargantuan enemies though.
If fireball did damage in an area around a target and you suggested nerfing it they might.
Like the two abilities don't even work the same so ???
I did a mounted rogue with gang up. It worked fine and the lowered refex defense wasn't a problem