Monday, September 19, 2011

Aiming that Fireball












  1. I like the grenade idea. It's a ball of fire, you have to throw it, so Strength could be a range factor; when it hits BOOM!
    Of course you should allow archers to try a called shot to attempt hit it in flight, to detonate it early.

  2. I've successfully used grenade-like rules for quite sometime. My players live and die (sometimes literally) by the molotov cocktail. Therefore they are very used to the idea of fireballs not going where you want them. If anyone complains, I explain that a fireball is nothing more than a magical version of the molotov cocktail, so they use the same rules.

    A suggestion for converting your players...throw a couple of precise fireballs at them. When they complain, simply state what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If they want imprecision when being fired at, they'll have to accept imprecision when firing...

  3. We used the "had to have a target" rule way back when, so no airbursts. I recall the biggest problem we had was calculating the blast area whenever some nitwit set one off in a dungeon. (They never learn)

    I'm more and more liking the idea of making wizards roll "to hit" and using some sort of grenade rules for the inevitable misses.

  4. Mentioned this a few times, here and there: Arneson actually delt with these questions in his unpublished revision of the D&D rules waay back in '74. "Fireball is thrown by the Magic-User, and the accuracy will vary with the distance of the intended target. Targets
    within 50 feet can be hit with 99% accuracy, at 55 feet 95%, accuracy, and the accuracy decreases at 5% per every 10 feet."

    No doubt this, amoung a myraid of other reasons, was why he was so ticked at Gygax for publishing without waiting for his revisions.

  5. That's pretty interesting, are those Arneson revisions available anyplace or discussed on a blog - I wonder how many other D&D problems for which he had an interesting alternate rule.

  6. I know of only one physical copy, and it was an old photocopy, once in the possesion of MAR Barker. The present owner asked me to have a go at identifying and analyzing the text early last winter. At present, I think there is no legal way to release a .pdf in its entirety. I've been preparing a study of it and am hopeful the present owner will not object to makeing that public at least. Needless to say it is a key source for Champions of ZED.

  7. Hackmaster uses a to hit roll for fireball, as well as declaring your target without measuring. in addition there is a skill called 'complex geometric estimation' a successful roll of which allows you to measure and find out the effect of the fireball before declaring your target.

  8. I support the targeting method, especially since I play without a grid (sketching maps freehand on unlined scratch paper when necessary).

    One rule I do have that might be topical for you, though, is that characters who want to judge a distance make a Sight check (in systems without that exact skill, something like Spot or Perception, etc. could substitute). Different check results give different degrees of accuracy, so in essence I have a mechanic that says "the front line *seemed* to be 15' away from you, but appearances are deceiving..." for me. ;)