I guess doing some light-hearted fantasy world-building has taken a major slice of my life outside sleep or screen time, because I always find myself reiterating one of my campaign worlds when I go to the toilet, sauna or shower.
"Gee, I wonder what Mairzidon the Elf Lord is up to today," said kviiri as he entered the bathroom.
I wonder if I'll ruin it making the bathroom into a writing room. Probably yes.
@kviiri I've resigned to calling one of the bathrooms in the apartment "my office" so that when I get a house my wife will be more likely to be okay with putting a work desk around one of the toilets.
In all seriousness, not fiddling with a smartphone on the toilet seems to be a really good idea and not just because of hygiene concerns. I feel like I really benefit from having a place where I can be alone, not talk to anyone, and not have to look at screens
just me, my thoughts, and natural processes of waste elimination
Using your smartphone on the toilet increases the chance of it falling into the water, which is not good for the phone. Thus not using your smartphone on the toilet, as Kviiri mentioned, is a good idea for that reason as well as the others Kviiri mentioned
@ThomasMarkov Treating the effects of that spell as a series of normal attacks is IMO an error in the first place. Whether you (or the OP, or David, or any of the other answers) want to split hairs over 'unseen' versus 'invisible' versus 'vanish' is I think based on that error in the first place. If you simply treat it as a spell that hits each enemy (like a melee spell attack, inflict wounds done to that many enemies) and then the Ranger ends up "some place that they may not have started" ...
... one will have followed RAW and also not overcomplicated things. The ranger isn't actually moving in and out of the attack range of the targets of the spell, the magical effect is doing all of that. The vanish is a lot more like a 'misty step' function.
@ThomasMarkov Put another way, the OP tossed out a red herring and some folks netted one.
Hence my observation regarding cherry picking. It has hazards, just as it does on reading various passages in Scripture and picking a small bit "what does this mean" ... I've made that point ad nauseum on Christianity SE. Well, I stopped a couple of years ago since I was just getting frustrated.
@ThomasMarkov PS nice job mentoring Warcupine on this question, I may be able to do an analysis tonight.
@ThomasMarkov If, and t his is a big if, I have about 30-45 minutes of peace when I get home, I'll be comparing it to my favorite Sorcerer (shadow) and seeing how they stack up.
yes, I am a dog person, and Shadow sorcerer gets a doggie. 😀
@KorvinStarmast My point re: cherry picking is that I could have chosen any definition of vanish and it still bears the implication of being unseen. In my understanding, that's the opposite of cherry picking.
@ThomasMarkov Here's my opinion: The spell is not intended to give the caster advantage on any of the attacks made, otherwise, it would likely say so, or it would use some sort of game-defined term that also grants advantage by extension, such as "Invisible" or "Heavily Obscured". Also, since vanish also means to disappear physically, and the spell involves teleportation, I think it is intended to theme after a short series of rapid teleportations and attacks, ending after the last attack
@ThomasMarkov I’ve followed it in hopes of answering it, but most of my sorcerer experience has been one-shot games at third-5th level, excepting a shadow sorcerer I’ve been playing for 22 sessions (about 43 hours) from 3rd-7th level so far, so I’m not sure how it compares to anything but that
Personally, I think the spell is another one of the "we really didn't write this well" spells. And it seems kinda clear that the intent is likely not to have advantage, but a written strict reading opens up the possibility.
The pro-advantage folks have to do some grammatical gymnastics to show their interpretation, and the anti-advantage folks also have to do some grammatical gymnastics.
@ThomasMarkov oooh! I was wondering what that announcement was going to be.
@ThomasMarkov Probably a bit, yeah. But since the context kind of points towards the "not existing" definition, and also the fact that they didn't use terminology that explicitly states gaining advantage, I don't think that's how it functions.
Hello other humans! I am most certainly a human today and not a being of flame, fire and justified retribution cyborg made of homework and painful suffering
I've reached the weird level of transcendence in my scientific writing where "oh shoot, I chose a really stupid convention for this thing" registers in my mind as a positive experience
I mean, that I'm able to recognize the stupidity of the convention I spent long to choose well, and at a glance too, is a sign of substantially increased skills
@ThomasMarkov I've rewritten a particular piece of my research code like, four or five times?
Each re-iteration is simpler than the last. AND more performant
Going from "ohhh I need to hyper-optimize this" to "ok so it's pretty performant but there's still these pathological cases" to "ok now it handles like, nine out of ten pathological cases well but..." to "hm, why don't I just give it to a SAT solver"
I should say, the SAT solver solution satisfies me.
because of a mutual friend of my d&d group’s love of corgis we decided my shadow sorcerer’s Hound of Ill Omen was a corgi. Just a normal corgi, except that (because rule of cool) it was almost a black hole in composition, a beast of pure shadow
