Items exposed to the spell’s effects must be rolled for to determine if they are affected.” Hitting PCs with collateral damage hurt enough, but players hated seeing treasure within their grasp destroyed. “Besides causing damage to creatures, the Fireball ignites all combustible materials in the burst radius, and the heart of the Fireball will melt soft metals such as gold, copper, silver, etc.
Worse than damage, Fireball destroyed treasure. “After years of applying this, let me offer a heartfelt mathematician’s ‘Aaaarrgghh!!!’” D&D blogger and college mathematics lecturer Delta dutifully did the math. This drawback not only threatened PCs, but it also weighed the game with complicated volume calculations. “Fire Ball will generally conform to the shape of the space (elongate or whatever).” This meant a Fireball confined to small dungeon places could easily blow back and damage player characters. When players started treating bolts as billiard balls and demanded to hit every foe using a trick shot, I suspect many DMs gave up on the bounce-back rule.įireball proved most popular and suffered the worst side effects. Lighting bolts could hit a wall and double back on the caster.
Haste aged its target a year, which forced a severe downside on humans, but an insignificant one on elves-and on humans in casual games without either bookkeeping or a reckoning of calendar years. By third edition, players could skip the mini-game by selecting a wish from a menu of approved options.Ī few irresistible spells included punishing side effects that DMs often ignored. Players countered by attempting to phrase their wishes to avoid any punishing interpretations. Wish brought a mini-game where the dungeon master to tried grant the letter of the wish while perverting its spirit. Apparently, few players like risking their character to a random chance of insanity. I’ve never seen anyone cast Contact Higher Plane. Sometimes, avoiding side effects meant avoiding the spells. And when Polymorph Other threatened system shock or a loss of individuality, party members never volunteered to fight in the form of a dragon. The risk of instant death tends to limit teleportation to safe, familiar locations. With some spells, players could simply avoid the side effects. Spells with punishing side-effects qualify as another nuisance that D&D players learned to skip. Unless your group plays D&D in a deliberately old style, you don’t draft a player as a mapper who struggles to translate room dimensions to graph paper. The original Dungeons & Dragons game featured some activities that most players didn’t enjoy and eventually came to skip.
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