Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinman
What Merrick is trying to point out is that against multiple opponents (say 3 Orcs in a line each with 1 yard between them) Spell #1 (I know he forgot to put in range) will do 9d to each. Spell #2 if it hits the center guy (best case) and even using Varyon's 10d, will do 10d to one & 1d to the other two (if they fail their dodge).
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Yes, I'm aware (or at least believe I am) of the point Merrick is trying to make. Ignoring range considerations (where in my opinion paying energy for range is better than having to deal with it via an attack penalty), an area of effect attack will be greatly superior to an explosive one. One way to deal with this would be to require area of effect blasts to pay for area via the Area Effect
Enhancement, rather than the Area of Effect Spell Modifier, but that may be overkill (it works out to about +10 energy for AoE 2, then +5 per +1 on the SSR Table). A quicker alternative would be to just assume
all large area external damaging spells must be explosive (a caster can freely downgrade this to Exp0, making it not actually spread beyond the confines of its nominal space). This will probably be much more balanced - you're looking at a 6d 10-yard-radius wave of fire (optionally surrounded by a 1-yard 2d wave surrounded by a 1-yard 1d wave surrounded by a 1 yard 1d-1 wave surrounded by a 1d-2 wave, etc) vs a 10d explosion - but conflicts with the only existing example of an area effect external damage spell (Rain of Fire).
EDIT: A minor nitpick is that the adjacent orcs actually take ~3d damage, the next set 1d+2, and so forth - you divide by distance from point of impact multiplied by 3. If we roll straight average - 35 damage - for the orcs, that means we're looking at 35 damage at point of impact, 11.67 at 1 yard away, 5.83 at 2 yards, 3.89 at 3 yards, and so forth.