Spike Growth, shoves, and Hexblade's Curse

[Dalinar]

Hi folks,

Was messing around with some good old-fashioned cheese grater builds and trawling for ideas, when I noticed Hexblade's Curse:


You gain a bonus to damage rolls against the cursed target. The bonus equals your proficiency bonus.

Spike Growth reads:


When a creature moves into or within the area, it takes 2d4 piercing damage for every 5 feet it travels.

I have LOTS of questions.

Let's say we're a Swarmkeeper 5 / Hexblade 5, with the Agonizing Blast, Repelling Blast, and Grasp of Hadar invocations. Repelling Blast works every time we hit; Grasp of Hadar is once per turn. (Agonizing Blast is irrelevant to the scenario, but we have it because c'mon, it's Agonizing Blast.)

We place Hexblade's Curse on someone and cast a Spike Growth under their feet. Next turn, assuming they're still there, we Eldritch Blast them twice, and they both hit. We get Repelling Blast twice and Grasp of Hadar once (nothing I can see says you can't do both on the same EB hit). We use our Swarmkeeper ability to add a 15ft shove in any horizontal direction (it activates off any kind of attack, doesn't specify weapon or melee or anything like that), which we'll say they fail the save to resist it for the sake of the scenario.

So far, so good. We've kept them in the middle of the Spike Growth, and moved them a total of 45 ft, for 18d4 damage. Tack on the 2d10+2*CHA from Eldritch Blast, also makes sense.

Then we come to Hexblade's Curse, and, well, I'm a bit stumped. So it definitely gives us the bonus at least twice, once for each Eldritch Blast hit. (There's no once-per-turn limit or anything in the text that I can see.)

But the interaction with Spike Growth is what confuses me.


Does Hexblade's Curse activate from Spike Growth at all? (I don't see why it shouldn't, but I figured it was best to check my assumptions. Doesn't specify that it's a damage roll from an attack, for instance.)

If so, it have to be *our* Spike Growth, or can it be from another caster? In other words, does the damage roll from Spike Growth belong to us, per se?

Expanding on 2, If somebody else shoves our HBC target through Spike Growth terrain that we casted, does that damage roll receive our HBC bonus?

Most importantly, how many separate damage rolls does Spike Growth do, for the purposes of HBC? Is it a separate 2d4 for each 5 foot of movement? Is it one damage roll of 4d4 or 6d4 for each of our shoves? Does it combine our shove distance into one big shove, such that we get exactly two rolls in this scenario since we shoved twice? Or does it give us zero extra rolls, with a ruling that the Spike Growth damage is combined with the EB damage as one roll? (This last one doesn't sit right with me, but I figured I'd throw it out there.)

As a related pair of questions: if someone walks through Spike Growth for 10 feet, attacks someone or otherwise acts, then walks through it for another 10 feet, how many separate damage rolls does that person take? And lastly let's say a creature with low health walked voluntarily through Spike Growth until they took knockout damage. Do they finish their movement before taking all the damage? If not, how do you calculate where they stopped?


In short, provided we make both hits and the target fails a Strength save, how many times does the bonus damage from Hexblade's Curse get applied if they're in our Spike Growth and we EB them twice with both shove invocations and Swarmkeeper shove?

[Biffoniacus_Furiou]

On item 2, it must be your own Spike Growth because the one who cast the spell is the one who rolls its damage. On item 3, someone else moving a creature who's affected by your HBC on your Spike Growth will still trigger HBC because it's your spell.

I'd say each attack that moved them is a single Spike Growth damage roll. So one EB that shoves 10 ft., pulls 10 ft., and moves it another 15 ft. is a single roll of 14d4+prof, and the second EB that shoves them 10 ft. will be another single roll of 4d4+prof. (You want to do as many as you can on the first hit, in case the second shot misses.)

[borg286]

I can see 3 interpretations on adding HBC:
1) resolve damage at each 5' of movement, in which case HBC would be added.
2) each movement group, meaning HBC would be added once on repelling blast, once for the pulling one, once for the spore thing.
3) all movement is lumped together and you add it once.

I tend to think (2).

[Dalinar]

I am currently in the middle of clarifying with my DM, will edit or repost when I get a straight answer out of him :P


On item 2, it must be your own Spike Growth because the one who cast the spell is the one who rolls its damage. On item 3, someone else moving a creature who's affected by your HBC on your Spike Growth will still trigger HBC because it's your spell.

This interpretation makes sense to me!


I'd say each attack that moved them is a single Spike Growth damage roll. So one EB that shoves 10 ft., pulls 10 ft., and moves it another 15 ft. is a single roll of 14d4+prof, and the second EB that shoves them 10 ft. will be another single roll of 4d4+prof.

This one, a little less so. To clarify, are the Spike Growth shove rolls separate from the EB rolls here? That'd be four HBC if so, or two if not. I'd think they're separate, because the EB damage is applied and then the shove happens, right?

I included the stuff in #5 because I thought it might help give us an idea of exactly how Spike Growth damage rolls are supposed to work. The "move, attack, move again" scenario is one where exactly two rolls of Xd4+PB makes sense, as there's two distinct chunks of movement; but the "lethal damage" situation is the one that makes me question things a little.

For the sake of the table's sanity, it would slow down combat to a crawl to have to roll 2d4--and therefore 2d4+HBC damage--for every individual 5ft step, but on the other hand it doesn't make sense that someone on 1 HP could potentially move 15ft through Spike Growth before dropping and take 6d4 damage all at once--and therefore 6d4+HBC damage (or twice the dice with dash--BTW, double checked, and dash action is phrased as an increase to movement speed rather than a separate movement, so that'd be one total roll). On the other other hand, looking at the total damage and dividing it so that it deals its damage evenly over the course of the movement and dropping the guy wherever he hit 0 at also would take forever unless your DM is talented at math.

Also, it occurred to me that Heavy Armor Master raises similar questions with Spike Growth as those that Hexblade's Curse does, hoo boy. Presumably the same rules apply to both modifiers.


(You want to do as many as you can on the first hit, in case the second shot misses.)

That's a good thing to keep in mind, thank you!

--

@borg, I wrote all this before I saw your post. What's your take on the guy dashing through Spike Growth with 1hp?

[borg286]

@borg, I wrote all this before I saw your post. What's your take on the guy dashing through Spike Growth with 1hp?

Obviously he'd be dead, but how exactly and where would his corpse be? If each movement group dealt damage then you do the movement, calculate how many 5' steps he took and then deal the damage. Honestly this sounds silly.
If each 5' step dealt damage then he'd end up at the entrance of the growth area.

The simulationist in me is favoring the latter.

[borg286]

To simplify the math just assume 2d4 is 5 and technically a damage roll.

[Dalinar]

To simplify the math just assume 2d4 is 5 and technically a damage roll.

I'm fine with this as long as any given DM is. Rolling a bazillion d4s will heavily favor the average roll of 2.5 bazillion damage anyway.

[Darc_Vader]

I think I’d also tend to favour the ‘each 5ft increment is its own roll’ as well. It would do a lot of damage with HBC, but from what I’ve seen Spike Growth and HBC already tend to stack damage into absurdity if you optimize for it anyway.

Also to add: Heavy Armour Master wouldn’t interact with Spike Growth at all; it only applies to damage from non-magical weapons.