Rocket Jump
As we’ve previously established, Sorcerer loves his fireballs. There are a million and one uses for a big ball of burny-hurty, and it’s all manner of fun coming up with them. The principle applies to every spell in the book: from prestidigitation to grease to wish, figuring out new and exciting uses for your abilities is just good gaming. There comes a time, however, when “creativity” gives way to abuse.
Here’s what I see happening in today’s comic. A player is faced with some sort of physical obstacle. Maybe it’s a mountain. Maybe it’s a big pit. Whatever. The point is that they’ve got to find a way across. The don’t have fly. They don’t have spider climb. All they’ve got to work with is a crappy Climb bonus and a backpack full of rope. Staring down the barrel of 20d6 falling damage, there’s plenty of incentive for coming up with creative solutions.
“I’ve got it, guys! You know how I play Soldier in TF2? Well I’ve got a plan….”
What follows is a poorly-conceived idea involving flame-retardant underpants and rocket propulsion. And whether this plan results in epic failure (see the Ming Dynasty astronaut) or epic success (see Midoriya’s landmines) has everything to do with your GM’s discretion. I’ll be up front with my opinion on this one. At my table, saying “I cast fireball at my feat and jump” is a recipe for 8d6 damage to the dome. The way I see it, some plans fall into the you-should-have-known-better category.
What do you guys think though? Encouraging player creativity is a good thing, but does that remain true even when the plan is ill-advised? Should GMs go out of their way to “let it work?” Or is it incumbent on creative players to accept negative rulings with good grace? Let’s hear how you prefer to run “rocket jump plans” down in the comments!
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So what I’m hearing is Rocket Jump bad, Rocket Sled A Okay? In all seriousness I would probably allow the Rocket Jump. But then you have to deal with the fall damage… and the enemy archers with readied actions… not to mention the spear users looking up and placing bets on how far down you’ll get before your body stops moving, long story short a big boom followed by airtime is as good as pressing start in Duck Hunt except this time you’re the one the dog is gonna pick up
So we’re looking at “yes, but…” sort of situation? Always good for a middle of the road kind of approach.
I would go for both, I would have them roll for damage and if it meets a certain threshold I would say they take the damage. And they are successfully propelled to where they want to be. Maybe getting a bonus if they are wearing gliding equipment or what have you and it survives the blast.
That way the player can consider if it is worth the cost. In this case their health and probably upon failure falling into the pit. Than the success in this case propelling themselves across the pit and looking cool at it. (Plus a few bruised bones but hey looking cool is always worth the price)
Comic below kinda says what im saying but in a more player orientated fashion.
https://thepunchlineismachismo.com/archives/comic/cherry-cherry-sweet-caroliiiiine
I’ve always loved manly guys doing manly things. Mr.fish and Jared are amazing:).
I hear the phrase “you can certainly try” hovering in the background on this one.
I’ve always believed the dm should give a reasonable amount of leeway with creativity, so that the players can do really cool things. If they are able to explain exactly how this would allow them to do something, that gives alot of points as well for creativity, like fireballing a body of water while hangliding to have the rising steam give you a boost of height. At the same time however, i dont think too much leeway should be given, as if you allow a player to start doing everything with their abilities, then it may make the abilities another player chose to allow them to do those same things seem less valuable since that first player is doing those without having to put any of their character creation resources towards it. Like most things in dnd, i think its something that also depends alot on your players and their composition to see how things should ultimately fall out on the spectrum of allowing crazed creativity to work.
I’m thinking about stapling an Exalted style stunting system on my Starfinder game. It’s kind o a cartoony game so I want people to go for the weird shenanigans.
Ah yeah, in cases like that you definitely want to be alot looser with what crazy stuff you allow.
In many situations, there is also a degree of rules in the creativity one must be aware of. For example, trying to use fireball the way Sorceror is here is actually viable in D&D 3.5 if one has the Explosive Spell Metamagic. It forces people to the edge of the spell’s area and knocked prone if they failed the reflex save. Meaning that with proper positioning and possibly a potion of Fire Resistance, the party could all be pushed over as big as a 15 ft gap with relative ease. For like a 5th level spell slot, but now you’re arguing efficiency.
I generally use a system by system approach myself. The recent group funfest of Scion 2E has a very flexible system that highly encourages creative play within its own rules, so the GM doesn’t actually have to “mediate” that much. 5E, pathfinder, and other more rules grounded systems i tend to lean toward a RaI approach.
Always interesting to me that “creative play” stems directly from system. We don’t usually think of systems as the root of imagination, but getting a scaffold to hang your ideas on is huge.
Generally speaking, creativity goes hand-and-hand with logic, which gets fuzzy when you involve magic. Fireball for example. For your typical player, it’s an explosion. simple enough you may think, but in this instance where someone wants to rocket jump with it, you must ask yourself: is it REALLY an explosion? Fireball does not create any concussive force beyond the flames, which is a sort of kinetic force commonly found in explosions, but real life explosions are a combination of many things (heat, concussive force, shrapnel) which technically fireball itself doesn’t all have.
And thus it may begin to expand to other spells too. Sure, some may argue that a spell can only do what it specifically says. But that alone isn’t enough sometimes. Take for example my favorite 5e spell, Mold Earth. Now to preface this still one must ask yourself this logical question: how much damage can a five foot cube of dirt/9000 lbs of dirt do if it fell at you all at once? It’s a literal rocks fall which kills most murder hobo parties, and now it can be used as a cantrips for many spellcasters.
If your knee-jerk reaction is “you can’t do that much damage, it’s just a cantrips” then realize that excuse has no logic. It only makes sense from the meta standpoint that because Mold Earth is a cantrip, and cantrips are generally weak, that their ultimate effectiveness should be weak. But that still doesn’t change the fact that a cantrip is capable of dropping a five for cube of dirt from a cave ceiling into an enemy below. This is not a light dusting or dirt spread over a very wide area hundreds of feet in radius. This is a five foot cube, roughly the size of a refrigerator and packed with dirt, falling with its full combined weapon on top of you. It doesn’t matter if this happened because of a cantrip or a wish spell; you must now figure out the logic behind this creative use of magic.
Suddenly many spells have unspoken conditional modifiers if you realize that what it can and can’t do isn’t specified. Sure the effects are spelled out, and some things are exploratory mentioned as impossible, but a creative player does not plan to do anything with their magic that is mentioned. Rather, they will see what is mentioned, both possible and impossible, and try and figure out how it happens. Broken down to their individual components so they can reconstruct the spell to satisfy their results.
If fireball cannot create a concussive force then it is safe to use in an unstable cave, as the flames would not shake the stone or foundations now matter how powerful the damage. If magic missile will always hit its target, it can be used for (sometimes literal) surgical precision where one cannot afford to miss or catch someone in the splash. A low level cantrip can become a veritable skeleton key of solutions, to either befuddle enemies who wouldn’t expect a lowly spell being used so uniquely against them, or even as a literal key to open a barrier that originally needed some skullduggery to bypass.
All in all, the only issue with creativity is when you truly run across a situation where a creative option is one you e never considered or understood before. That doesn’t discount it being possible, simply that you weren’t ready for when it finally happens.
Mold Earth quite specifically says that it cannot be used to drop something on someone for large amounts of damage, or indeed any damage at all.
The only earth it can move is loose earth (which would already have fallen) and even then only along the ground which prevents dropping it onto someone, and this movement furthermore is specified to not having enough force to do damage.
Really that OP use there is more in the domain of the last comic than the current one.
This is where logical implications come into play, as well as looking more into the nature of the spell. I know that moving the earth via the cantrip doesn’t cause damage, that is to say, if I move the dirt right next to you into your space, that itself can’t hurt you. The spell specified that much that’s true. It does not, however, mention what happens to that dirt when you’re magic isn’t affecting it. If you move a five-foot cube of dirt from the ceiling to a five foot space beneath it, does it suddenly just get absorbed back upwards or does it just naturally fall to the ground?
There’s also a matter of loose dirt too. If you take it as ONLY loose dirt, Mold Earth would Int be useful in a place that’s already been heavily dug up; the dirt breath your feet isn’t “loose” in any sense, especially if there’s grass growing precisely to keep dirt together. And if you’re going to play hardball with semantics, Mold Earth wouldn’t even be useful in places with abundant “loose earth” like sandy beaches or a desert because by strict definition, sand is not “dirt”.
But it’s these logical breakdowns is what can either ascend a cantrip above and beyond its spell class, or forces them to stay in their lane as parlor tricks. And that itself is more in line to the theme of this comic; being able to do more with a spell than its given descriptor with the correct or at least agreed upon understanding and a creative opportunity to utilize it.
1) Moving dirt from the celling to the space beneath it would require moving it in a different way than along the ground, which is the only way the spell allows.
2) it only being able to move loose earth (note earth not dirt), is not a semantics, it’s a real limit of the spell clearly meant to prevent it from being used to say dig your way through walls.
Your uses aren’t logical extensions of the spell, they are just ignoring it’s effects and inventing some extremely much more powerful ones in your head with no relation to the actual effect other than the name.
“A player is faced with a big pit. The don’t have fly. They don’t have spider climb.”
As the one who wrote the plot, I know that the good stuff is on the other side of the pit. I want the player to be there, because otherwise we all miss out. If a player doesn’t have fly, but is willing to spend an equal slot, I will allow it. They are going to take the 8d6 damage from the blast of course, and if the fireball doesn’t hit them hard enough, they might not even make it across. They can improve the chances by trying to soak up more of that blast with their body of course (choosing to fail the dex save). If they do make it, the speed of the launch has them hitting the other side with a force of about 4d6 bludgeoning damage. The important part though is that they are going to be on the correct side of the pit for plot to happen.
I am cruel to the characters, but I will always show mercy for the players if it is convenient for me.
And over in Spheres of Might, anyone can pick up rocket jump as an ability. Say what you will about 3rd party stuff, but sometimes they get stuff right.
Really makes me sad im never actually going to get to play a SoM using character.
You’d think the anti-party members would have gotten fire immunity/resistance for themselves by now.
Is Sorc’s schematic of Konosuba-style flying having the party be catapulted by the fireball’s explosive force, or are they riding the speedy ball of flame like Disgaea’s bug-antennae’d overlord hitching a ride on a meteor?
Only 8d6? Let me know when he’s 10th level. Or higher if he picks up intensify spell.
If Fireball included bludgeoning/thunder damage to represent a blastwave I could justify rocket-jumps. It doesn’t, it’s all heat.
I think player creativity is great if it makes sense in-universe. Throwing the Lich into lava, and then using Cone of Cold to solidify the top layer is applying real science. Then having them retrieved via Stone Shape so it doesn’t re-melt and laughing aboot how the Lich thought they were soooo smart hiding their phylactery away and now they’re entombed in stone unable to move/speak/cast/sleep/dream/do anything other than think aboot how much they hate us until they wither away from not feeding souls to their phylactery.
That said, I don’t think the 8 Int character would come up with that. That’s where meta-gaming comes in. I doubt any player at most tables has 18-20 Intelligence. The party is as smart as the smartest member of the party who is as smart as all the players at the table putting their heads together.
Except bone has a density of between 1.2 and 1.9, while lava has a density of about 3.0 and is highly viscous. Your bare-bones lich won’t be doing any sinking…
I like the creative use of player powers and abilities, but I also have a certain standard of reasonableness. A cool idea has to at least make sense, and a rocket jump really just doesn’t. You’re a lot more likely to just end up like Octane from Apex Legends than you are to actually get anywhere.
I don’t have a blanket rule for them, usually judging them on a case by case basis.
…Except for the fun little ‘system’ I made for running one-shot crazy adventures in a world where probability retired and gave his job to someone who had seen too many John Woo movies. It was a quite simple system really. You play an ordinary person in a world rapidly going from ordinary modern society to Borderlands/Mad Max levels of craziness. Every time you come to a challenge, you decide how you’re going to respond to it. You and the DM each roll a d10, high roll wins. Every sane and reasonable thing you do to improve your odds adds a +1 to your roll. However, if instead, you come up with a crazy action movie plan, such as ramping your motorcycle off a nearby truck and jumping off at the last second so you can reach a second-floor window, you roll a d100, while the DM still rolls a d10.
Fireball Fast Travel would probably at least get some good-natured laughing. I hate when someone tries to bring real-world physics into a game as a means of engineering a creative solution, though.
It just leads to long arguments between players and goes completely off-topic. Plus I’m not very science-minded, so it’s hard for me as a DM to judge what’s a reasonable solution there, and what’s nonsense. I usually just fall back on song that this world doesn’t operate on science, it operates on The Rules.
…But something like Fireball Fast Travel? I could happily adjudicate for that. It’s a case-by-case basis sort of thing. Fireball Fast Travel itself would probably be a “No”.
In my game, rocket jumping with Fireball is pushing the bounds of plausibility. Sure, you might be able to make it work, but you’re still taking at least 8d6 fire damage, and if you flub your skill checks, you might not even end up where you wanted to be.
One thing I did allow in my game was a combo of Wall of Water and Lightning Bolt. I figured the best way to handle it was to pass on about half the damage to anything else stuck in the water within about 15ft of the bolt. Our sorcerer was very happy she got to do that at least once before leaving for Virginia.
I get that you mean your Sorcerer player moves, but I’m amused by the idea of a D&D&USA setting.
I’d say a big factor is the feel and tone of the game that you’re running. Rocket jumping works and adds to the feel of TF2, but would feel quite out of place in, say, Spec Ops: the Line. Similarly I’m a lot more inclined to allow for that sort of craziness in, say, Mutants and Masterminds or a high fantasy D&D campaign than I am to allow it in a low fantasy D&D campaign or Call of Cthulu. In fact, I’d say it should be encouraged in the former type. The Midoriya landmine is a great example; it showcases how smart the character is while also contributing to the crazy-awesome world of quirks and heroes, but it would completely break immersion if something similar were done in Dunkirk. If it’s the right kind of campaign though, creative ideas like those can cause awesome and memorable moments that contribute to the campaigns feel, make the players feels cunning, and are hopefully matched by crazy things the DM is bringing. As such, I think the DM’s flexibility and allowance for such should depend on the tone and feel of the campaign.
As a rule of thumb i would say that all the plans we make on our group are ill-advised. The “Manigoya land-mines” is a good way to cook for my group, and cleaning, and building, and… well almost everything, we are more like the other guy… Bakugan? Why DMs ask us, the players, to be creative and fight evil for later cry when we collapse the king castle to defeat a group of bandits? I for one denounce the hypocrisy of the same DMs who ask their players creativity when creating their characters don’t want for their players to be creative while playing their characters, eh?
Down with the tyranny of DMs!!! Power for the players!!!! Lets unleash our creativity!!!!!
D&D is a weird case where I’m maybe slightly less lenient than I would be in a system where spell effects are less specifically and narrowly described as to what they do.
So if people want to do creative things I will tend to answer honestly about their chances before they have to commit to the attempt. Whether that be a no, a “yeah sure”, or villainous laughter.
When it comes to the “rule of cool” I am a self confessed miserable old man – my players have learned to equate the phrase “you can certainly try” as “of course you effing can’t, give me a moment to decide exactly how catastrophically badly this will go”
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy my players making risky plays and pulling off unlikely heroic high jinks, but the key words there are risky and unlikely, and I absolutely refuse to equate those words with “utterly impossible by any understanding of reality”. I will allow my players to go far with a well played bluff and a clever illusion, but when they try to bend things like the rules of gravity with me, they can be sure to come crashing down (literally)
Where do you come down on “the RPG lie?” Same deal?
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/charm-anything
Much the same. I love a good bluff, but require at least the basest attempt to make it believable rather than trusting to a good dice roll (my personal, most despised phrase in a rpg story is the words “and I rolled a nat 20” since it usually is preceded by a truly horrible, low effort, or meme idea), and consider the natural and normal response to the idea “I’ll seduce the Dragon” to be “heres a new character sheet, you just got eaten”.
That said, most PC’s are smarter, wiser, and more charismatic than your average gamer, so I allow a bit of leeway for a character with 18 charisma to talk their way out of a situation when the 6 charisma player is spouting complete offensive gibberish, and I will make an effort to give them a chance to turn what they said into something more like what their smarter and smoother character would have said instead.
Even though I love the crazy stunts, I probably wouldn’t allow rocket-jumping with fireballs. If they don’t normally fling things like that, they shouldn’t do so now. And if an explosion has that kind of force, the acceleration will probably be lethal anyway. Shockwaves kill.
On the other hand, Sorceror already has the answer to flight. Build a large hot-air balloon, and have him periodically discharge flame into it. His lowest level abilities will probably do fine, because it’s all about keeping the temperatures consistent and controlled. Just use the original Montgolfier design as inspiration. I would love for my players to come up with something like this.
You ever see Cave Dwellers?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQC4ZfHKYh0
Can’t believe I’ve never seen that. Thanks.
I feel like some sort of INT/WIS check to see whether your character is sufficiently stupid/foolish to attempt the action might be required.
The old “common sense” feat strikes again!
One time in a moderately high level pathfinder game (~9th level) we knew we were going to be attacked the next day but didn’t have anything to barricade the main entry with. My sorcerer had a Robe of Infinite Twine (a simple 1,000gp item); I told the group I had it covered, summoned unseen servant, set it to work, and went to sleep.
Every round you can draw 10ft of hemp rope from the robe without hurting it. By the time I woke up there was a pile of 48,000ft of rope (9,600lbs of rope) blocking the doorway.
So… I’m THIS guy, but usually my plans are better thought out than they appear because I am doing something crazy to play the psychology of the enemies in the encounter and provide the biggest opening for the other PC’s to come in and be Big Damn Heroes (see TvTropes if necessary).
I won’t go into detail unless Story Time(tm) is requested, but… for our example here, 10-15 Fire Resist, a ring of evasion and a scroll of levitate (or similar) can take this from a BAD idea to a Plausible one.
Self cast Reduce*walks on to metal plate *casts catapult on plate Transportation achieved for 90 feet hops provided you have a bunch of metal plates, etc about. Can sub with mage hand but won’t go as fast.
Gotta use those 1st levels slots for something, lol.
A fireball of normal fire is a Conjuration spell, not Evocation spell. Flask of oil plus torch is better.