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Just spent *way* too much time going down the rabbit hole of what D&D considers an Object or Creature, and it's a surprisingly deep hole.
Ok, my son has claimed the playstation, so y'all get to walk through this.
It began with the question of whether you could cast mage armor on an Unseen Servant.
By the book, you cannot, because it requires you target a willing creature which the US is not.
It began with the question of whether you could cast mage armor on an Unseen Servant.
By the book, you cannot, because it requires you target a willing creature which the US is not.
But that lead to the question of what the US *is*, and the official answer is that it's a "force", because that's the word used to describe it. That seemed silly on the surface of it, because it meant that a mage hand is a "hand" - and it seems odd to just invent keywords.
So we went poking about, looking at the language that got used to describe a variety of spell effects, especially things like walls and other conjured effects. By and large, what they reveal is that the key is the *absence* of the object/creature keywords.
Through that lens, a lot of oddballs in the language of spells make more sense. But once you're looking for this, you start digging into the specific language of how spells target, what hits objects, what hits creatures and so on.
(The other category of things is "magical effects", which are a little nebulous, but provided they're actually the same as magical features, it's actually decently well defined.)
So, if you are of a malicious mind, the thing you start looking for is things which are neither objects nor creatures, because they're going to be immune to a lot of effects by virtue of being untargettable.
The WOTC folks are pretty careful about this though, but the editing is not quite so careful on non-primary books, so there are absolutely plenty of loopholes. But those are kind of low hanging fruit.
You do find a few oddballs, like the fact that Fog Cloud is a cloud of "fog", not "gas" or "vapor", and as such it ignores Gust of Wind. (Yes, this depends on intentionally differentiation between "Fog" and "Vapor", which fails common sense check, but is defensible)
It's also the basis of the idea that magic missile *can't* attack the darkness, because it can only target creatures. :)
Most fun-but-preposterous interpretation I've encountered is that they don't explicitly say that conjured food & water are objects, so in theory you could do some fun things with piles of untargetable food.
Anyway, yes, this is kind of preposterous. I don't mention it as a criticism of D&D so much as just calling out that this kind of stuff is super fun to noodle around with. It *can* be abused, but I like playing in such a way that this is not a worry.
Anyway, this does raise one explicit question that you might want to discuss with your table - what happens when strict interpretation in in conflict with cool logic?
Boring logic isn't really a question, but what if I decide to try to counter a flaming sphere with a sleet storm? Or cut a Wall of Thorns (not an object!) with a Vorpal sword?
Is your table's expectation that the GM has leeway to deviate from the rules for coolness, or not?
Is your table's expectation that the GM has leeway to deviate from the rules for coolness, or not?
I'm not going to say either answer (or other answers) are right or wrong, but I'll suggest you probably want to check that everyone at the table has the same expectation.
All that said, this also as a little bit of a window into a pretty interesting question about 5e, one which is fairly well illustrated by the question of whether or not to expect a grid as essential to play. That is, is this a strictly or loosely interpreted game?
The easy answer is, "it depends", but that's a pretty iffy answer. "Sometimes strict" is kind of worse than either actual option, because it introduces a world of uncertainty.
I genuinely think that most real world tables prefer a certain amount of looseness, and that the mode is encouraged. I think that's cool. But it gets weird when the language is very strict and restrictive - sends a different message.
BUT!
I don’t think D&D will ever actually resolve that contradiction, and that is probably a great source of its power.
I don’t think D&D will ever actually resolve that contradiction, and that is probably a great source of its power.
If D&D were a smaller game, the contradiction might be a problem, but at it’s scale, the result is that it is more flexible in definition and casts a wider net. In many ways, D&D is many different games in one trenchcoat, because it can be.
