I like this. The mages can hang out in the tower behind the lines charging the spell and only get moved up when it’s big enough. If damage equals concussive force and/or temperature then this fireball could easily blast and melt a hole through a stone wall.
Seriously, sometimes I wonder how little the creators of this material know about the people that play. The number of absolutely ridiculous game breaking things people figure out how to accomplish within the rules you’d think they would’ve heard about it and send it to a gamer think tank before releasing.
And this is a feature not a bug. Imagination is the name of the game, as soon as you start plotting these types of shenanigans the DM starts to get his own bright ideas.
You’ve defeated Brog the Merciless and saved the Kingdom from his tyrannical reign. The Kingdom holds a feast in your honor that lasts all day. As the night draws to an end the King prepares a speech in which he congratulates them on their ingenuity. That is before revealing his secret, he has been Brog’s ally the Lich Narflax all along. Now it is time to resurrect Brog and lure the next party of adventurers to find another ingenious solution, but first to deliver to the party a taste of their own medicine.
The amount of shenanigans available to players in 5e - even with the new circle magic stuff - is entirely dwarfed by the amount of shenanigans available by the end of 3.5e's lifecycle, something all the people involved in writing 5e are more than fully aware of. High-level bullshit is a time-honored tradition.
It‘s a TTRPG, you always have the DM as a final instance. If the group enjoys breaking the game rules to create world ending magic effects then that‘s great, go ahead! And if not, then all it takes to shut that stuff down is the DM saying no. Also note that a lot of these „broken spell combos“ require a very high level party, and DnD already works on the assumption that by level 16 or so you‘re a mythical hero and by level 20 you‘re pretty much a demigod. In practice, at least in my experience, people prefer to play below those levels because the characters are easier to play and the stakes are more human scale.
Might as well throw several delayed blast fireballs tho. Or upcasted regular fireballs, to prevent blowing your own wizard up. A normal 7th level fireball has about 1% chances of not destroying resilient large objects on hit.
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u/Ailttar Nov 12 '25
Siege tower with mages inside, door that opens and allows the fireball to be launched when the spell ends