@Cooper Do you know what he finds unfun about it?

But maybe I'll lend him a couple of my sourcebooks to see if there's any spells in there that strike him as more fun...

@NautArch He really likes the problem solving aspect of the game, and being able to come up with creative solutions to things. (Last time we played, he used enlarge/reduce to shrink a dessicated corpse, pick it up with mage hand, and use it to disarm a trap, for example.) He seems to feel that combat doesn't actually involve any room for that type of problem solving, or for roleplay

Are you the DM in this game? The complaints I've heard most often about D&D combat are that it can be slow and repetitive, both of which have solutions.

If every combat is set up more or less the same (i.e., bunch of enemies try to kill all the PCs and fight to the death), then yes, it will seem like there is always an optimal solution (kill everything with lots of damage) and little room for experimentation, roleplay, etc.

@MikeQ Nope, unfortunately! He plays with a group of his friends (and his girlfriend). Occasionally, for family game night, I'll run a oneshot for the family, but most of this knowledge comes from discussions when we get together for dinner or whatnot

@MikeQ I've found that when I use the environment, the players see they can do the same.

I'm not sure how many of his complaints are due to a DM that is relatively inflexible with creative problem solving, and how many are due to the way the module is set up, tbh

@Cooper Do you know the module? And narrating the damage dealing can be just as fun as RPing.

Helping guide him to getting into his own narration could be a crossover.

I guess I'm hoping that there's either a way that I can nudge him to think about his main character differently to make things more fun, or things I can do as an occasional DM to help showcase that fun

@NautArch Hoard of the Dragon Queen, but they're pretty close to the end. I think they're going to take a break after they finish for a couple of weeks of board games, and then my brother is going to take a turn at DMing for a bit before they dive back into the Tiamat stuff

I do encourage players having some fun with their own "flavor text", and use the "how do you want to do this" system from Critical Role, but maybe I can push that a bit next time...

I also will freely admit that I'm sometimes a little clunky when DMing for them, since the type of game I usually run falls less into the "epic fantasy heroes" genre and more into the "woefully unprepared group of morons attempt to grapple with cosmic horrors" realm, which isn't exactly the vibe I want to go for when, say, playing on vacation in Cancun, or on Thanksgiving. So I'm not on my A-Game, either.

[ SmokeDetector | MS ] Few unique characters in body, mostly punctuation marks in body (123): In D&D when you summon in animal with conjure animal Would it have the weight of said animal as feys take the shape? by user72145 on rpg.SE (@Rubiksmoose @ThomasMarkov)

Edited that question for readability and to not look like spam, still pretty sure it's not stackable. But at least it's slightly more coherent.

I don't see any reason they wouldn't, since they have the stat blocks of the animals conjured, but there's no obvious statement in the rules that says so

(as far as I know)

I think that maybe they're asking at what point in the casting the fey have that weight?

It's a weird question overall... Usually in D&D things happen, period, they don't happen in phases

I guess they are trying to thing too much outside the box xD

But since this spell takes a single action, it seems like it's not something that would come up a lot. I'm trying to think of a situation where it'd matter. Maybe a see-saw with the character on one end, slowly sinking into a pit of lava. The character casts Conjure Animals on the opposite end of the see-saw, to counter their own weight, but gadzooks! A counterspell prevents the spell from finishing! Did the fey do anything to counterbalance the weight of the character, or not?

That's...the only edge case I can come up with.

@Cooper if you counterspell the spell, the spell didn't happen... As I said in D&D things don't happen in phases... they happen or not xD

@Helwar Yeah, yeah, but I figure the rest of that setup is so bizarre and Looney Tunes that fudging counterspell was the least of the concerns there :P

Fair enough haha

once me and my friends spent like almost an hour discussing how fireball and web interact

my point was that, given how web is written, only the most exterior squares of the web would burn, and the others would be catching fire after. Some of my friends agreed, some thought the fireball should obliterate the web altogether... I don't even remembered what we chose

Depends on where the fireball hits, doesn't it?

well, the fireball can't hit inside, because it colides with the first square full of web that it finds

(here we go again, wohooo! xD)

@Helwar Not necessarily. It's difficult terrain, but not a solid wall

@Upper_Case yeah, it might go through. I dunno why we decided it would crash at the edge. Maybe we mixed up with something in 3.5

we played a ton of that, and me and my friends are prone to discuss the minutia of every rule

so sometimes we infer things that really aren't there

And, in my experience, combat usually doesn't last long enough for flames to travel along objects any meaningful distance. Although I always reserve the right to mess with my players

It does say that they "fill a 20-foot cube", but I assume that it's not like... a solid Minecraft block filling in the space

I duno, I just remember discussing that at length, and having a ton of fun while doing so. We only decided to make a decision and go forward because some other friends were tired of the conversation

(this just happened a couple of weeks ago in my game. The PCs wanted to not deal with webs in a spider-infested forest, and carelessly fireballed them. Then the forest fire started...)

@Cooper well, you can picture a minecraft web, that fills a cube. Those are pretty thick... I don't remember if they catch your arrows though

@Upper_Case Ooh yeah, I feel like that's a well deserved consequence xD

we are too used to discussing the minutia of well detailed rules like MTG or D&D, when we play simpler games we get stuck discussing simple things that if we were less "picky" would be easy to do

we were playing Human Punishment, and we got stuck discussing how a couple of cards interacted with the order of play

the game say that there is no pile, so everything solves as it's played, but then there are cards that stop or redirect effects

so some of our friends were stuck with the idea that there is indeed a pile even if the manual says no

I prefer to think about it as "rollback effects", like, yeah you did that, now I change it and it's this other thing

or when you cancel someone shooting you, the game explicitly says that they keep their action, they only can't shoot and have to pick another one. Some of us were stuck in the MTG thinking that, you put an action in the pile, I had to play a card to stop it, henceforth you used your action, and the rules must be wrong.

but there is no pile!

as you can see, this problems don't happen to normal people, we're weird xD

Sounds like at least someone in your group has a career in law!

oh we are all like this xD It's fun until it isn't, that's why we don't play D&D together anymore

and the animal question disappeared

I need some spells whose descriptions and effects explicitly use the material component for the spell like magic jar, booming blade, and green flame blade.

I’m sure there are more.

Instant summons?

Rope trick is a weird one because it requires a rope, but a rope isn't listed among the components.

Conjure barrage and volley, cordon of arrows, create homunculus, creation?, secret chest, simulacrum?

And probably more. What did you need this for exactly?

soul cage too, gotta keep makers of tiny silver cages in business

Actually, how does one buy a tiny silver cage? What possible other use or excuse do you give to not tell the merchant (or silversmith) so you don't have to admit you plan to trap cages in it?

Hmm... now I like the idea of a socially awkward necromancer dragging around a silver birdcage because it's easier

@Someone_Evil I guess charm bracelets aren't really a thing anymore, but they definitely were when that spell was originally written.

Huh, I had always imagined it as palm sized, but that could work I suppose

I figure a charm bracelet is a super convenient way for casters to keep focuses and components at the ready.

A locket with a pinch of bat guano, a silver charm in the shape of a cage, various gems in practical settings, a tiny golden tuning fork, etc.

@Someone_Evil adding to the list at the end of my answer here

Y'all's pronoun editor is also doing it on Puzzling