Burning Hands damage

Koto

Hello. Sorry, I couldn't find more proper section for this question.

I'm playing Baldur's Gate 1 Original (no mods) and got spell Burning Hands. I tried it and have 2 questions.
In description it says damage: 1d3 + 2 per caster level (max 1d3 + 20).
At pihwiki wiki it says: 2d2 + 2 per caster level (max 2d2 +20).
https://pihwiki.bgforge.net/Baldur's_Gate:_Arcane_Spells_List#Burning_Hands

My level 1 Conjurer did 8 damage O_o
If we take 1d3 + 2 and max roll, it will be 5 damage.
If we take 2d2 + 2 and max roll, it will be 6 damage.
But I got 8! How? What is the real damage of this spell?

Second is its AoE. It says 5 ft. length and 120 degrees. pihwiki says that area is so small, that it's actually single target spell.
I lined up 2 characters next to each other, cast it, and only 1 character was affected. So is it possible to affect at least 2 characters or it's indeed a single target spell?

Here are screenshots:



EDIT:
Now I even got 14 O_o

jmerry

The AoE depends on the game version; BGEE/BG2EE actually changed it relatively recently with the latest patch 2.6. In 2.5 and earlier, it was a single-target spell that you had to target an enemy directly with. In 2.6, it's a true area spell and you target a point on the ground. Hitting multiple small enemies such as xvarts or gibberlings with it is fairly easy.

As for the damage, a true "save for half" option wasn't there in the original - I'm pretty sure that was introduced in the EE. Spells with "save for half" had to hack it by splitting the damage into a portion you could save against and a portion you couldn't. For the "+2 per caster level", that's easy; there's 1 per caster level you can save against and 1 per caster level you can't. 1d3 doesn't split so cleanly, though. The old game apparently went with 1d2+1d2, which is rather obviously inaccurate.

As for the numbers you're seeing, with up to 8 damage at level 1? Looks like there's a mistake in there. Maybe it's improperly splitting 1d3+2 as (1d2+2) + (1d2+2) instead of (1d2+1) + (1d2+1)? I don't have original BG1 to test myself; I doubt I could even get it running on my system anyway.

Koto

I was able to find out why such a big damage dealt, while cast by level 1 Conjurer on other forum. I'll write solution in case someone else is interested.

Reason was due to casting it from the scroll. When spell is cast from the scroll it's treated as level 6. Thus 1d2 + 6 2 times. Thus damage either 8+8, 7+7, 7+8, 8+7.

jmerry

Ah. No mistake then, just a case of a different caster level.