Dungeons & Dragons

3rd Edition

                                                                                                           
Critical Failure
Use Magic Device by J. Foster
Edited From D&D 3.5 Edition Players Handbook p. 85


Magic is Inconsistent


     Burning hands was selected for observation because of how much it changes across editions of D&D. It's damage and area of effect change drastically between editions, but they are always cast by wizards with roughly the same level of experience. This is why we are examining this spell to judge the energy of the magic between the editions of the game.

     Other spells of the same level could be examined and come out requiring vastly different amounts of energy. For example, the energy required for the spell feather fall would be different that that for burning hands.

     It should be noted that the energy needed for many spells seem to just come from nowhere. In this case we will assume that this energy comes from the Weave, being channeled by and/or through the wizard. For lack of a better term, this will be referred to as Arcane Energy.

     The Forgotten Realms setting did not have a large event to define the change from the second edition of Dungeons and Dragons to the third edition. Thanks to published adventures and books, we can estimate that the edition change happened around 1371 DR by Faerun's calendar.


Flaming Cone... ish?

     The 3.5 Edition Players Handbook describes Burning hands as being a 15-foot cone-shaped burst that fires from the caster's fingertips, the Dungeon Master's Guide detailing the cones on a 5 ft by 5 ft square grid as seen to the right. These illustrations show that the spell shape is a cone with a spherical cap at the end. The volume for this shape can be found using:

Vcone + Vdome = π r12 (h1 / 3) + (π h22 / 3) (3 r2 - h2)

     For this equation r1 and h1 are the radius and length of the cone, while r2 and h2 are the radius and length of the dome. The volume comes out to 1043.33 ft3 or 29.5438 m3.

     Plugging this area into the same energy equation as before tells us that this version of burning hands requires 49,155 kJ of arcane energy, 477 times the energy requirements of the previous version of the  spell.


Area
                            of a Cone
Spell Areas (Cones, D&D 3e)
Edited From https://forum.aidedd.org/viewtopic.php?t=4176