Arkrim, you've made your call regarding the ongoing fight, and I want things to move along there, but can we talk about some of this here?
Arkrim:
1) All area effects are bound by the lines of the grid.
You cannot be 3 inches in or out or over the lines. You're on the lines and inside the squares. This ruling has been made many times and you shouldn't even be asking about it at this point.
2) You cannot customize shapes of your area effects.
Unless explicitly noted otherwise by the effect or some other feat or ability that says you can, you cannot alter the shape described in the effect. So no creating "gaps" or "holes" in walls or anything like that. It is assumed you can make areas smaller than normal, but you cannot customize the shapes. So if you normally have a 30-foot cone, you can make it a 15-foot cone instead but you cannot alter it from a cone to a blast or burst or attempt to alter it's ratio size off what the grid allows in 5-foot increments (you could not do a 7.5-foot cone or 3 inch cone but it would always be split into management whole number increments based on the grid and the base spell BOTH needed to have whole numbers on any ratio reduction). Same thing applies to walls and all area effects. You can make the wall SMALLER than the spell states, but not bigger nor can you customize its shape. It's always in 10-foot increments for walls of force AS DESCRIBED IN THE SPELL.
3) Any wall with a thickness less than this lays ON THE LINE OF THE GRID.
Any wall with a thickness equal to or greater than 2.5 feet fills the square that it's in (pick one). Also no exceptions here. Assume a wall is 1 inch thick unless exclusively noted otherwise.
I've highlighted the sections that puzzle me, could you elaborate on the following:
- are you suggesting we can reduce the area of spells willy-nilly? Like, make a 5ft fireball for example? That's a huge change from core rules, so if it is what you mean, I suppose it should be explicitly said.
- Wall of Force doesn't say that it needs to be in 10ft increment. You can decide that it is the rule here for balance purposes or shenanigan prevention or any other reason, but that's not how wall of force works anywhere else.
- on the line of the grid: does that mean that we can't create a wall on a diagonal?