Fire Seeds Stacking?

[Gaiden]

So if every one of the 8 berries (using the detonation method) was in the same square does the damage equal 8d8+(8*level) dmg on a failed save?

What if you cast the spell twice and had all 16 berries in the same square: 16d8+(16*level) dmg?

I only ask because my 11th level cleric with the sun domain just dealt 122 points of damage to a poor half fiendish stone giant which even with his fire resistance turned him to ash - literally. There was nothing left of him. Even the ash had burnt away. Our group is not used to that kind of damage. I mean this was smackdown potential if we had played our cards right.

I am cool with it and thinks it makes sense. However, I fear what it means in retribution by our DM. Now that we have opened this door, it means it can be used against us.

I am shaking, shaking I say.

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Looks like it.

The only thing I can point to would be the spell Meteor Swarm, which has specific text covering a similar situation:

If a creature is within the area of more than one sphere, it must save separately against each.

Someone might argue that, because the spell Fire Seeds lacks the same or similar text, that there's no effect of being caught in an overlap.

Note that, using the Meteor Swarm example, Fire Resistance would apply against each seed separately, although that not have been enough to save the giant in your example., it would have significantly reduced the damage done.

EDIT: To respond to my above comments, I think your DM might have goofed a bit...

Each seed does 1d8+11 fire damage.

A Fiendish Stone Giant has, at a minimum, Fire Resistance 10. That makes each seed do, instead, 1d8+1.

Of course, there's still 11 of them, so you'd end up doing 11d8+11. At maximum, that'll be 99 points of damage, with an expected average of roughly 60 damage.

*And* that's assuming he fails 11 saving throws in a row.

 

[Gaiden]

Looks like it.

The only thing I can point to would be the spell Meteor Swarm, which has specific text covering a similar situation:



Someone might argue that, because the spell Fire Seeds lacks the same or similar text, that there's no effect of being caught in an overlap.

Note that, using the Meteor Swarm example, Fire Resistance would apply against each seed separately, although that not have been enough to save the giant in your example., it would have significantly reduced the damage done.

EDIT: To respond to my above comments, I think your DM might have goofed a bit...

Each seed does 1d8+11 fire damage.

A Fiendish Stone Giant has, at a minimum, Fire Resistance 10. That makes each seed do, instead, 1d8+1.

Of course, there's still 11 of them, so you'd end up doing 11d8+11. At maximum, that'll be 99 points of damage, with an expected average of roughly 60 damage.

*And* that's assuming he fails 11 saving throws in a row.

That's a bit odd - he would get 11 saves?

 

[Patryn of Elvenshae]

Yeah, 11 saves. I'm assuming that, in this case, it would work like Meteor Swarm. When you're caught in overlapping blasts from the meteor swarm spell, you save against and take damage from each individually.

Similarly, you'd save against and take damage from each Fire Seed individually.

 

[Gaiden]

Damn It!!!

I think you are right. Each berry does damage individually so the way resistance works, it would be subtracted from each berry.

Let's see. At 122 dmg, each berry did an average of 15. That means 40 or so points of dmg from the spell instead of 122. I don't know if that would have killed the giant - and this is assuming that he only had FR 10. I was thinking he might have resistance closer to 30 meaning the spell would have done nothing to him.

DAMN IT, DAMN IT, DAMN IT. I thought we had beaten him fairly.

IDHMBWM to check what the resistance is for a half fiendish creature. I can tell you that this was definitely more than your average stone giant and I am assuming he was half fiendish because he pulled out a blasphemy and unholy blight. He merely laughed at our psion using energy current though when he was using the fire form. So I don't know what he had exactly.

Is there a way with Fire Seeds to make 1 berry instead of 8? Alternatively, can you detonate the acorn version?

Solid Snake - totally my bad - because this has never come up, do you want to make a ruling that damage in this way does stack as you suggested in terms of defeating fire resistance so long as the sources occur simultaneously? It might not be a bad ruling anyway?

So several flasks of alchemists fire to use the example we talked about if hitting the creature count as one larger attack.

AH HA,

There is actually something to argue for the contrary ruling where the damage would stack - namely the alchemist's fire. Let's compare two separate scenarios:

You have a volume of alchemist's fire equal to 10X where X is the amount normally in one flask. If you divided out the 10X volume into 10 separate flasks you could throw them each individually each doing 1d6 dmg. However, if you threw a giant flask with the volume of 10X, arguably, you would deal 10d6 since it is the same amount as the 10 individual just all at once. This would mean 10d6 with one attack rather than 1d6 10x. You could consider the berries to work in the same way since they all went off in the same square at the exact same time. If the had been separated or went off at different times, splitting them up would make sense. But they all off at the exact same time which might argue for the 10X scenario.

There are a few things to this - they did not all occupy the exact same point in space so technically it is a bit different than the alchemist's fire example.

Another point is that I think alchemist's fire is actually specifically detailed for this scenario where one uses a larger quantity and IIRC the effects do not stack but scale in a similar way to weapon damage scaling as you increase the size of a weapon.

I am grasping at threads to come up with a possible ruling that would have made what my cleric did legitimate.

Solid Snake, I suppose we could just house rule the spell as well - just say that as with the acorn, allow you to make however many berries you want with a total damage of 8d8+(8*level) in dmg with multiples of 1d8+level required divided up among the berries however you see fit meaning that the maximum you could get would be 8. Really this change would only affect FR. Other than that, you could just place multiple berries in one location to get the same effect.

Ahhhhhh, sorry man about the misruling.

Patryn of Elvenshae, thanks for the rapid replies.

 

[Hypersmurf]

IDHMBWM to check what the resistance is for a half fiendish creature.

Fire Resistance 10.

An average Half-Fiend Stone Giant will have 133 hit points.

-Hyp.

 

[Gaiden]

Fire Resistance 10.

An average Half-Fiend Stone Giant will have 133 hit points.

-Hyp.

Well, perhaps he'd be dead anyway then. I know he took somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 damage or so from our paladin before he retreated. Our psion got lucky and criticalled on an AoO provoked by the giant casting somethiing and dealt something like 10 points of damage. I think our ranger also dealt him some damage before he was beaten mercelessly into a pulp (reduced to something like -30 hit points).

Maybe it all works out.

Waiting for my RBDM to respond .

 

[Darklone]

122 points of damage at level 11 is a smackdown (yawn)?

 

[Gaiden]

122 points of damage at level 11 is a smackdown (yawn)?

All right . Enough of that. We are not designed to be super uber munchkins, we are not level 16 and this is in mechanics dominated by pre-BoED's and pre-CW.

I suppose you are right though - but still, with one spell, 122 damage is nothing to snuff at. Actually, the real concern is that we have opened pandora's box. I think the most damage dealt by one character in one round has approached 100 or so damage (several criticals ina row). This is entirely different though. Where as those were very lucky rolls combined with smites and what not, this was a simple casting of 1 spell with average rolls. There is no reason the enemy would not use such tactics against us as well. Maybe one of us at 12th level (we all gained a level from the fight with the seeds) has 120 HP's, i.e. probably none of us could survive such an attack (and my DM told me over IM with glee that the use of fire seeds prompted an epiphany of a new way to use some other spell liberally and whenever he hints at future pain, it happens - worse than I can imagine).

BTW - My DM assured me that given the conditions of the battle, everything was still legit - giant would still be a dead stone giant, so no worries on having to come up with some estranged rulling to accomdate what happened in the story.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Sounds like you need the DM to make a public ruling. I'm on the side of one save per berry similar to the multiple-attack Element Orb spells but that's pretty irrelevant. Just make sure the DM commits and the entire group is aware of the good (yay, we blow up giants!) and the bad (boo, they blow us up!).