D&D 5e Rules – Spells: Wrath of the Storm! (and what kind of attack triggers it)

When you can React to attack depends on what kind of an attack it is.

Know the Rules Part of an ongoing series of 5e (2014) Rules notes. See the end of the post for notes on 5.5e (2024) rules.

Our Tempest Cleric had the Wrath of the Storm class ability (strictly speaking, not a spell), and endlessly enjoyed using it. Even when she took a bigger smack than her attacker did in turn, she just enjoyed the free combat.

It is, in fact, pretty cool:

Also at 1st level, you can thunderously rebuke attackers. When a creature within 5 feet of you that you can see hits you with an Attack, you can use your Reaction to cause the creature to make a DEXterity Saving Throw. The creature takes 2d8 Lightning or Thunder damage (your choice) on a failed Saving Throw, and half as much damage on a successful one.

So in one game, a Smoke Mephit did its ash breath on the cleric from from the adjoining square. This isn’t a To-Hit roll Attack, but an AoE Affect. Should it trigger Wrath of the Storm?

So, is an AoE “attack” an actual attack?

The answer seems to be NO. Because the AoE weapon isn’t, strictly speaking, hitting with an Attack. The key here is “hits you with an Attack.” And the PHB (p. 194) is clear what that all means:

When you make an attack, your attack roll determines whether the attack hits or misses. To make an attack roll, roll a d20 and add the appropriate modifiers. If the total of the roll plus modifiers equals or exceeds the target’s Armor Class (AC), the attack hits. The AC of a character is determined at character creation, whereas the AC of a monster is in its stat block.

Attacks are made with a d20 roll against a target’s AC. But that’s not what happens with the Smoke Mephit’s breath, or a Dragon’s breath weapon, etc. Those:

are not targeted at someone
don’t require an attack roll
aren’t defended by AC

Instead, AoE attacks create a condition in a certain area of squares, and if someone is in that area, they automatically have to make a Saving Throw to determine the severity of the conditions that ensue (which may or may not include damage; the Smoke Mephit’s ashy breath caused blindness).

(This is part and parcel of why an AoE attack from an adjoining square doesn’t trigger any Disadvantage, either — because there’s no attack roll to Disadvantage.)

If there’s no attack roll (and, as part of it, a hit caused by a successful attack roll), Wrath of the Storm does not trigger. That would include attacks with Magic Missile, Hold Person, or even Wrath of the Storm itself:

A consequence of this is that if two tempest clerics are fighting one another, and Ann smacks Bob with her mace, Bob may use Wrath of the Storm on Ann as a Reaction, but Ann cannot retaliate in turn, even though she might have a Reaction available, because Wrath of the Storm does not qualify as an attack.

Does any of this change in 5.5e?

Pretty much nope.

The Tempest Domain for Clerics has not (yet) been ported over to 5.5e (2024), so theoretically it continues to exist as it did in 5e, with Wrath of the Storm acting as above.

The rules over what an “attack” is remain pretty much the same, too.

When you take the Attack action, you can make one attack roll with a weapon or an Unarmed Strike.

The more elaborate PHB definition echoes this:

When you take the Attack action, you make an attack Some other actions, Bonus Actions, and Reactions also let you make an attack. Whether you strike with a Melee weapon, fire a Ranged weapon, or make an attack roll as part of a spell, an attack has the following structure: […]

3. Resolve the Attack. Make the attack roll, as detailed earlier in this chapter. On a hit, you roll damage unless the particular attack has rules that specify otherwise.

So, as with 5e, an attack made through an Attack action (or, in this case, a Magic action) is only considered an attack if there is a to-hit D20 Test by the attacker. In the case of an AoE, there is no such role made, the Area gets an Effect automatically, and the only rolling is to see if creatures in the Area manage to dodge, block, or otherwise fend off all or part of the damage or other conditions taken.

D&D 5e/5.5e Rules – Spells: Thunderwave! (and other cubical-AoE range-Self spells)

Wherein we handwave about a fine spell, and instead talk about Range Self Cubic AoE spells.

Part of an ongoing series of 5e (2014) Rules notes. See the end of the post for notes on 5.5e (2024) rules.

So Thunderwave (PHB 282-83) is a pretty cool spell, and usually ends up in a lot of parties’ repertoire (also in the repertoire of a lot of enemy parties). It does decent damage, an AoE, a push, and the CONstitution Save it carries makes it most useful against spellcasters. It does make a godawful racket (carrying 300 feet away, which any DM should take advantage of), but it also scales damage by spell slot.

Overall, a nifty spell. But we’re not going to talk about any of that.

Thunderwave and its Area of Effect

This came up in a game, so afterwards I did some looking into the odd Area of Effect world that is Cubes and Thunderwave.

(There’s a lot about 5e that I respect, but their AoE stuff is kind of janky in general and then the fit onto a grid map — which 5e really sort of dislikes on principle but cannot ignore because a lot of tables really love it, like ours — is even more janky.)

Thunderwave has Range: Self (15-foot cube). “A wave of thunderous force sweeps out from you. Each creature in a 15-foot cube originating from you …” blah blah effects.

So, what does that mean? How does the cube relate to the caster? You would think a Cube AoE would be easy. Yet some of the writing on it approaches being Talmudic in its intricacies to figure out what RAW means here. This is my current interpretation:

Putting together the Self and the Cube AoE

Range of Self

AoE spells that have a range of Self have a point of origin starting from the caster (PHB 202).

Cube AoE

Here’s the PHB 204 on Cube AoE (emphasis mine):

You select a cube’s point of origin, which lies anywhere on a face of the cubic effect. The cube’s size is expressed as the length of each side.

A cube’s point of origin is not included in the cube’s area of effect, unless you decide otherwise.

AoE and Grid Maps

DMG 251 notes the following on “Areas of Effect” in relation to grid maps:

The area of effect of a spell, monster ability, or other feature must be translated onto squares or hexes to determine which potential targets are in the area and which aren’t. Choose an intersection of squares or hexes as the point of origin of an area of effect, then follow its rules as normal.

And Xanathar’s echoes this, speaking of “Area of Effect on a Grid”:

Choose an intersection of squares as the point of origin of an area of effect, then follow the rules for that kind of area as normal (see the “Areas of Effect” section in chapter 10 of the Player’s Handbook).

This is one that drives me bats as DM, because everyone wants their spell to be centered in in the center of a square (in origin, in target, in range calculations), and the rule are very clear that is not the case: for where spells start from, land (if not targeting a creature), and calculating the range, it’s all about intersections.

(If you look at how Cover works on a grid, too, it’s much the same thing.)

Put it all together …

So, standing in a 5×5 grid square, any of the four corners of the square / intersections of the grid are at a range of “self” and are corners that could be the face of the cube you are going to create (including a cube that you are part of, if you are touching the outside face from the inside). Here then would be the possible arrangements I can see:

Any of the above can be rotated in increments of 90 degrees.

I.e., you can be on any of the squares outside of the cube, or on the inner squares of the cube, wherever one of the corners of your square touches (red blips) part of the perimeter (side) of the cube. But not in the very center, because you can’t reach that outer face from there.

I’ve not seen anyone actually include the bottom left “corner” example, but it seems to fit the rules to my eyes.

Insider Casting

There is some debate as whether being on the inside of the cube (bottom right-hand two examples) is allowed. I don’t read anything in the above, though, that says it isn’t. That might mean including yourself in the spell effect (but hold that thought for a moment).

Note that though you can be within the cube, for the Thunderwave spell, “the thunderous force sweeps out from you,” so you yourself are not affected when you cast it, even if you are in the area. (Which is a fancier way of saying that you, as the point of origin, are not affected by spells that have a point of origin; a point is not dimensionless, in this case.)

(But Dave, you might be saying, if the point of origin is the grid intersection you are casting from, then doesn’t the thunderous force emanate from that and, if you are inside the AoE, affect you, too? To which I say (1) remember how I said some of this stuff gets Talmudic? and (2) go away, boy, you bother me.)

When would you use a case, of being inside (not the center!) of the cube? Two use cases I can think of:

To reduce the effective effective range to 10 feet rather than 15 feet (potentially important in an indoor combat).
To include a tiny opponent in your own square (an edge case, but a potentially helpful one).

To sum up

So, unless anyone has any objections, that’s how I consider the area for Thunderwave to work.

So what about with 5.5e?

I’m still trying to figure that out.

Remember that in 5e (2014), grid-based combat is an optional rule. The default is Theater of the Mind, where the DM gets to be constantly juggling where everything and everyone is in order to convey it to the players so that they have some idea of what’s going on …

Sorry. Betraying my wargaming prejudices here.

Grid-based tactical maps are referenced in the 5.5e (2024) PHB, but, in more detail, in the 5.5e DMG, p. 44. These largely parallel the 5e rules (along with the confusing “well, here’s what you can do with these things, but you don’t have to, you can just use rulers and pipe cleaners and sticky notes,” but I digress).

The key here is that under “Areas of Effect,” the DMG rules say:

If the area has a point of origin, choose an intersection of squares or hexes to be the point of origin, then follow its rules as normal.

As well as:

If an area of effect covers at least half a square or hex, the entire square or hex is affected.

This is basically the same as the 5e rules. Whether a line, a cube, a sphere, or a cone, everything anchors off a grid intersection.

Except …

Emanations are weird. In 5e, these were basically “range = Self” radiused AoEs, but it was still easy enough to say, “Well, sure, choose one of the four intersections [assuming a square grid] around your character and anchor the effect there.

But while 5.5e has “range = Self” rules, a lot of those lean on Emanations, which make corner-based AoEs a bit harder to swallow:

An Emanation is an area of effect that extends in straight lines from a creature or an object in all directions. The effect that creates an Emanation specifies the distance it extends. […]

An Emanation’s origin (creature or object) isn’t included in the area of effect unless its creator decides otherwise.

That really sounds like they want an Emanation AoE to center on the focal square, not on an intersection next to it. Given the AoE definition above, that sounds incorrect, but it’s still an uncomfortable definition.

That said, I’d still require an Emanation to hook off of one of the target’s adjoining intersections, and treat it different from a sphere AoE, etc., by being mobile with the creature or object it emanates from. That keeps things consistent, if marginally janky.

But what about Thunderwave?

Well, what about it?

Oh, as a spell? It’s written up pretty much the same as the 5e version.

Roll20 – Area of Effect templates

A home-made game aid for Roll20 that makes life (for me, at least) a lot easier.

For my Princes of the Apocalypse game (which we ran on Roll20 with a standard 5-foot grid), I built some Roll20 AoE templates for spells, to make it easier to see and use the AoE and to provide a longer lasting way to show a still-active area spell.

So why is this needed?

There are ways to show the area of a spell. At a minimum, you can draw something on the screen — but that gets messy and not always easily movable. It’s also hard to draw some shapes, like cones.

Also, even if you draw something with the circle tool, you have two problems — precisely knowing the center point to anchor it on, and, more importantly, clarity on what squares are affected by the spell or not. Yes, you can interpolate (“I think that’s less than half the square”), but that’s just argument fodder.

Roll20 and various adjuncts to it provide area tools for AoEs (Roll20’s native tools have improved dramatically of late), but they still have a couple of problems. First, again, they are actual geometric figures (e.g., circles), so interpolation is still needed. Second, they are non-persistent — you can set them to Linger, but a player can only have one up at a time (I’m not sure if two players can have theirs up simultaneously); you can maybe eke by for that initial Fireball, but if you have a Spike Growth that stays up for a long time, you’re back to drawing a circle on the map.

What I wanted was a way that players could express a proper spell area (cones, squares, circles, even rectangles) in full squares, that they could move as needed for placement, and that would let me (as the DM) resolve the effects on those within the area, whatever the shape, and that could be left on the map for non-instant duration spells.

The answer: AoE templates.

Now coming to a marketplace near you

You can buy spell templates in the Roll20 marketplace. In fact, I did.

Unfortunately, the ones I bought turned out to be one or more of:

Obtrusive (covering up too much of the underlying terrain).
Ugly (a judgment call on my part, to be sure)
Wrong (there are different ways of calculating a 15-foot or 20-foot radius circle on a grid, partly based on whether you are centering on a square middle or on a square corner. Who knew?) (And D&D 5e renders cones differently from other editions or systems.

I wanted something that would be:

Largely transparent — clear enough to be visible, but not blocking the map people were on.
Reasonably attractive
Correct, based on my reading of how (especially) cones and circles/spheres work, including anchoring on a grid vertex (corner), not (except in rare, specified occurrences) on the centers of grid squares.

So, after a couple of failed tries, I decided to roll my own.

Rolling my own

I used a drawing program I have to basically build up a sample AoE as a drawing, trimmed to the edges, with transparency on anything outside of the borders. There would be a grid within the AoE, with solid borders along the grid, and the squares inside tinted but mostly transparent, with a slightly thicker border around the edges to make its boundary clear. I sized it to fit a 70 pixel cell grid.

For a given shape (a 20-foot radius circle, for example), I usually started with something gray. I could then use the color select / color dump functions to remake it into different colors based on the type of spell — orange for a Fireball, green for a Spike Growth, etc.

Once I had a drawing how I wanted it, I uploaded it to my Art Library in Roll20. Then I created an NPC character named, for example, “Fireball (20r)”. I assigned the drawing to it as its image and as its token.

I dragged out a token, sized it to the grid properly, made it into a drawing, and then reassigned that as the token. Lastly, I assigned that character to be seen and controlled by the mage who could throw fireballs.

AoE 20ft radius orange — 20-foot radius orange circle

Now when that mage wants to throw a fireball, they can see in an “AoE” folder in their Journal “Fireball (20r)”. They can then drag that out onto the map, move it to where they want their fireball to off, and say, “Hey, DM, your orcs are on fire.” I can easily see the orcs in question, push the fireball token to the “bottom” of the token layer (something which Roll20 does not allow players to do, for some reason) so that I can click on each of those orcs, and start rolling saves …

And, once the excitement is over, I or the mage can easily delete the AoE. Or, if it were a more persistent spell, leave it there for people to see.

Embellishments and Edge Cases

Moonbeam (5' radius) AoE token — Moonbeam (5 foot radius) AoE token

For some spells, I felt the need to decorate. So, for example, my Moonbeam template has a little Crescent moon in it. And, yes, I did it as a circle, rather than filling up the squares, largely because it’s a small template, and there’s no question which four squares are encompassed by it.

Similarly, for the Dust Devil’s radius of effect, I included a little Dust Devil icon in the center.

AoE 10ft radius Dust Devil — Dust Devil (10ft radius) AoE token

The biggest hassle are cones, both because of 5e’s rules, and because the vary in shape depending on the direction they are cast. Which left me, for example, with these two templates for a 15 foot cone.

Yes, this is all about the confusion of trying to fit a cone cross-section onto a square grid.

Both of these can be rotated, by the player or DM, in increments of 90 degrees and still line up

The orthogonal one includes a bunch of question marks because of 5e’s cone rules. The basic rule there is that the cone is as wide at a given point as it is long. That means at ten feet away, it’s ten feet wide, etc. But you have to then ask “is that ten feet leaning to the left or to the right?” because, for symmetry, at ten feet away orthogonally, it’s actually a potential range across fifteen feet. So for the diagonals, the player has to say “This cone includes the questionable squares on the left, not on the right” or vice-versa. The alternative is to have two orthogonal templates, and that would be kinda crazy.

The diagonal one doesn’t suffer from that, though it does dredge up the concerns about how diagonals are counted distance-wise on a grid in D&D. In 5e, the basic rule is that a diagonal is as long as an orthogonal — vertical or horizontal — distance, which is nonsense, but quite easy to work with, and the rule we use at my table. Other folk use the older 3.x rule (given as an option in the DMG) that the first diagonal is five feet, the second is ten feet, then five, then ten; under that rule, my diagonal template would need to be changed.

Lastly, cones don’t need to be shot as a straight orthogonal or diagonal — they can be further canted. Fine, whatevs. Since I don’t want to force the players to pick from dozens of templates, they can just rotate one of these partially and we’ll interpolate. The “it’s as wide as it is long” rule makes that a bit easier.

In conclusion

Anyway, this works for my virtual table, and it’s pretty easily extensible as people level up and get new AoE spells of different shades and shapes.

I’ve made a bunch of the ones I crafted early days available here, for you to copy, recolor, and have fun with. Some of them are a bit rough, but that’s what you get for free, and, honestly, the roughness is very rarely visible one the Roll20 desktop.