@Jason_c_o but it is capable of targeting more than one during the spell. I actually don't think reading it that way helps but I'd have to think about it.
> Twinned Spell. When you cast a spell, you may spend sorcery points equal to the spell's level (or 1 point for a Cantrip) to duplicate its effects. You may choose a new target for the duplicated effect. No creature may be affected more than once by this spell at the same time.
Would anyone object to that revision? It makes the metamagic more powerful, but for being a metamagic that, theoretically, costs more than any other, it seems reasonable.
@Rubiksmoose Hence the "no creature may be affected more than once". Makes it worse than Heightened Spell if you could already fit all the creatures inside the AOE range.
@Jason_c_o you can also have magic missle hit only one target. It is specifically disallowed by the errata. It's whether it is capable of targeting more than one which hex is
Which makes me think about how Protection would work...in that those attacking you with disadvantage aren't targets. You are the target and you being you is generating disadvantage for certain creature types.
@Xirema but some AOEs have smaller effects for balance reasons. If you twin it for double the AOE it becomes very strong (drag someone through two squares of cloud of daggers every turn for example)
@Rubiksmoose They can already do that as-is with a single wall, I think? Since the effect still reads "starts their turn there, or enters the area for the first time in a turn"
@Jason_c_o how can you add a temporal clause to the text implicitly. Would you also rule that you could cast wish again after losing the 33% because it's not "in the same day"?
IMO, I don't think increasing the AOE of a spell is that powerful. It's powerful enough to justify the expenditure of some Sorcery Points, but it's pretty rare to have an AOE nuke spell that doesn't also have the AOE of a... well, nuke. And if you invoke "well, what about Meteor Swarm"/whatever, I generally consider "balance" a non-factor when 9th level spellcasting is involved.
@Xirema I guess my issue is that it deviates too far from the obvious and intended use of the ability for my comfort. I think we are throwing the baby out with the bath water here. Sure it makes it easier (maybe I still think the AOE thing would lead to weirdness I can't think of exampels right now though) but we end up with essentially a new ability.
@Jason_c_o okay. Bad example, but there have to be cases where reading clauses into the text is just absurd. I don't see the logic of adding the clause to Twinned Spell as a RAW or RAI interpretation
I really think it's more about how many targets can the spell affect. Hex/HM is more than one. Dragon's Breath is a single target (but they can use it on more than on person), Haste is a single target (but they can use it on more than one creature), Protection is a single target (but it can have an impact on more than one creature's interaction with that target.)
I think perhaps a modification that fits my idea better would be to change it to saying "incapable of affecting more than one creature on the turn it is cast". What do people think of that?
Remove the target argument completely and make it say affect since it is pretty clear what that means. Then the turn limit is to prevent confusion about hex and other spells who can expand later.
@Rubiksmoose That would certainly clear up a lot of ambiguities, though it does shut down Dragon's Breath, as cast on yourself would enable you to Quicken it out and then use the action to deal damage.
@Rubiksmoose I think it takes a more pro-player logic to the ruling and also makes it easy for the DM to adjudicate as there is nothing I can think of that would be unclear with the new parameters.
@Jason_c_o Here's what I was trying to get at. Targets in this game are differentiated by creature. Regardless of when you choose the target or how a different creature is a different target. Saying that chosing creature A on turn 1 and then moving it to creature B on round 2 and counting them as one target would be the same as allowing both creatures to be considered the same target if chosen at the same time as well. It doesn't make sense.
@DavidCoffron Does it? It makes it more permissable sure, but the underlying concepts are the same about it I think. And it is much easier to use potentially.
@Rubiksmoose yeah. I would certainly not protest to it as a house rule. Can't think of any examples that it changes other than removing some ambiguity on DB. I'd say it's a good revision
@Jason_c_o The only way this statement can be true is if you accept your thesis that "at a time" is implied. If you disagree with that then that statement is false.
But there is almost no way to prove that it isn't implied so it is not really fruitful to keep arguing about that point with you.
@Jason_c_o If we're talking vanilla, i really don't think it works. The difference is in your reading of it as "one creature at a time" and i'm reading it as "more than one creature targeted for the duration of the spell"
@Jason_c_o take Channel Divinity. "Beginning at 6th level, you can use your Channel Divinity twice between rests." Is there an implicit "[at the same time]" after "twice"
@Jason_c_o You did, but I think if we are going to continue this discussion we are going ot have to buy into one or another's reading. Arguing abou the same base point will get us nowhere. You read it one way, the rest of us read it the other.
I think the other way causes the confusion haha. I'll accept I'm the odd one out, but we're both adding something. Either "at a time" or "for the duration"
"At a time" is a pretty large assertion to add to something as implicit. If you came across a spell that read "make an attack against one creature. If it hits, deal 1d8 psychic damage, and then you may make another attack against another creature in range, dealing the same damage. You may repeat these attacks until you miss or run out of targets".
It's pretty evident that this spell has multiple targets, but if you go by your reading of adding an implicit "at a time", then the spell only has one target
Ok can we not keep doing this please. I think there are other interesting aspects to talk about. @Jason_c_o is reading it their own way and there's no way to convince them otherwise. We are reading it another. If we continue to talk about this we have to agree to one or the other.
> When you cast a spell that targets only one creature and doesn't have a range of self [...] To be eligible, a spell must be incapable of incapable of affecting more than one creature on the same turn on which it is cast, at the spell's current level.
@Xirema yeah, so when I make a call for a random number between 17 and 48, the underlying implementation gets a random unsigned int back and makes the value fit with modulo division.
@Jason_c_o Didn't want to put up a thread in the comments, but did you read the meta? I understand it being helpful, but there can be good reasons NOT to explain the downvote as well.
Very true. I've read it before but not recently. There may be good reasons, but the poster was a "new contributor" asking for reasons. It's good to point them there, though, I'll admit
@DavidCoffron What are you talking about? The function's 100% random, it demonstrates the results of my random physical method. I rolled a die, the function returns those random results (xkcd: xkcd.com/221)
@NautArch I personally would not consider downvoting for that, and it seems a bit unlikley. I wonder actually if it is the title and people aren't really reading the question.
"How broken is..." is not usually the beginning to a good question in my experience.
@Rubiksmoose I didn't up or down - I don't think it was worth either. I think there's a lot of knee-jerk reactions to asking questions about upending existing rules.
@NautArch Yeah I'm not sure that it would really helpful for them to do so though. They are basically saying "I play with this rule that seems to widely be seen as overpowered. What issues are there, if any, that I am not seeing?" essentially.
Are there people here who are better at combinatorics than I am right now? If more than half of the 22 players in my organized play group picked 3 of the 12 available classes, is that surprising? I think it's $\binom{12}{3} \sum_{i=11}^22 \binom{22}{i} (1-3/12)^(22-i) (2/12)^i$, so about 2% chance to happen randomly, so surprising; Am I correct?
@Rubiksmoose And we may have found the downvote reason :) If they've been playing with no problems, but they're asking where the problems are, that's some cognitive dissonance.
@Rubiksmoose I didn't downvote it and didn't call it homebrew. I said there have been an influx of balancing questions, including homebrew. It's just getting lost in chat.
@Rubiksmoose I was actually at one point working on a comment linking to the homebrew meta...but then i realized this was a houserule and not relephant.
I wanted to know whether I should be surprised by the most frequent 3/12 classes making up 11/22 players or more. I'm surprised that the chance for that might just be 2%, I feel like my calculation is missing some factor of looking for the most frequent three.
@Anaphory I think looking at it like it's truly random is where you're getting tripped. The choices are all weighted, and differrently so for each player.
@Jason_c_o Sorry, Bayesian thinker. I have a prior for how those frequencies are distributed, and I want to know the likelihood of the outcome I see under my model of equal weight, so I know how much I need to adjust my priors.
@DavidCoffron Why do I not need to take into account that there are \binom{12}{3} ways to pick my best 3 classes?
@DavidCoffron Ah, also that is 0.0002=0.2%, right? I expected the probability that this happens to be somewhere between 5% and 20% – unlikely, but not very surprising.
@Anaphory Because which 3 are the best is irrelevant, I'd guess. E.g., it doesn't matter to the distribution if it's Rogue > Wizard > Fighter vs Warlock > Cleric > Monk
@Anaphory Classes- 1. Fighter 2. Cleric 3. Rogue 4. Wizard 5. Paladin The paladin just squeaked by the warlock to capture fifth place. However, unlike with the races, the classes were much more clustered together. To draw a comparison, the least popular class (the druid) was just a point or two behind the dragonborn in usage.
Races 1. Human 2. Elf 3. Half-elf 4. Dwarf 5. Dragonborn The aarakocra turned out to be the least popular race, while of the non-core races, the goliath led the pack. As well, there’s a big gap between the dwarf and the races that followed, with the tiefling and a few other races following right on the dragonborn’s heels.
@Anaphory if I can find the GiTP thread, I'll post a link. There was some interesting commentary on methodology, and "where did they get their data" that you may find interesting.
@DavidCoffron For any combination of 3 classes, of which there are \binom{12}{3}, the chance is that about-a-percent, coming from that binomial distribution with p=0.25. That's the $\sum_{i=11}^22 \binom{22}{i} (1-3/12)^(22-i) (3/12)^i$ I had in my formula above.
@Delioth Yes. Our organized play is not AL-conform, but we also banned Aarakocra for the same reason.
Are there people here who are better at combinatorics than I am right now? If more than half of the 22 players in my organized play group picked 3 of the 12 available classes, is that surprising? I think it's $\binom{12}{3} \sum_{i=11}^22 \binom{22}{i} (1-3/12)^(22-i) (2/12)^i$, so about 2% chance to happen randomly, so surprising; Am I correct?
@KorvinStarmast cool cool, I was just trying to help OP past knee jerk reactions to the title so I just wanted to make sure I hadn't unintentionally made it worse (or not helped at all).
@Anaphory yeah. I was thinking about it while mopping the restroom (you don't want to know why) and realized that what I had done is the chance of a specific 3 being chosen 11/22 times, not any 3
