If your #dnd characters are underwater (fully immersed), how would you treat fog- and cloud-based spells?
Strict rules parsing: the spells work the same as they would in air.
Our experience of the world: that doesn’t make sense. I adjust the spell to make sense in the medium. Fire spells become flash boiling or steam (with the commensurate resistance to fire damage that comes from being immersed), fog spells become cloudy (HA!) water or other particulates.
— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) July 6, 2020
It's important for me as a DM that my players feel confident that they know at least in general how their tools work. I'm not going to examine every spell and create alternate versions depending on casting environment, and expect them to read a new spell chapter.
— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) July 6, 2020
I’m currently going through the SRD and looking for weird problems and corner cases when spells are used underwater. A number of them are weird technical things that no *reasonable* DM would care about. I don’t blame the original PH writing team for not taking this approach. =) But I have a different set of goals than they had, then or now – I'm working on a Under the Seas of Vodari, which goes deep (sorry) on underwater gameplay. Emphasizing difference from surface-world play is *potentially* acceptable, since we're writing new spells anyway.
— Harbinger of Doom (@BrandesStoddard) July 6, 2020
I think creating some expressly underwater-designed spells for those sorts of cultures makes a lot of sense.
@Umbralwalker modified all spellcasting in his aquatic one-shot I played it, everything was essentially psionics instead. No components, shifted descriptions. The idea being that when waving your hand-adjacent-appendages around means moving, magic wouldn't develop that way. Ditto using spun sugar and honey and smoke for same.
— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) July 6, 2020
I’m not trying to ignore this argument, but mush as @Dan_Dillon_1 suggests, I don’t change magical effect too much based on the environment. The assertion that its magic supersedes other considerations, because all spells do only what they say they do. That’s largely intentional. PS–I mean I'm not trying to argue in favor of a non-physics approach. I'm not sure if that was clear. But spells do weird things that are not what might be expected in a real analog. Like a fireball vs. a real explosion.
— Chris S. Sims (@ChrisSSims) July 6, 2020
Yeah, Hollywood cinematic gasoline explosions are a great image, but definitely not what fireball is putting on the table.
— Dan Dillon (@Dan_Dillon_1) July 6, 2020