Disclaimer: this is purposefully obtuse.
Other effects in the game which explicitly state they kill you:
Shadows, succubi, massive damage, death saving throws, beholder death ray (notably not even their disintegration ray kills you), power word kill, vampires, mind flayers, night hags, drow inquisitors.
Clearly, if they intended for disintegration to kill you, they’d have said so. Since specific overrides general, and there is no general rule that disintegrated creatures are dead, I rest my case. QED.
I’m not misreading anything. “The creature can only…” applies a new state to the creature. After that state has been applied, or somehow reversed (unaware of any way to do this by RAW), then the creature can only be brought back to life by the means mentioned in the spell.
Yes you are. You’re intentionally abusing a weakness in English language (present and future tense are often written the same way so must be inferred by context) to assume something clearly not intended by the 2 sentences considered holistically.
It’s a funny joke. +1, but, ain’t no DM takin dis Hail Mary from a player seriously. 😂
Just playing the game RAW.
It’s like this for all TTRPGs. Someone always be tryin to game the system. 😎
It’s like this for all TTRPGs. Someone always be trying to rules lawyer away someone’s fun. 😎
I actually love rules lawyering, but it has to be done away from the table, and done with a certain amount of good faith. And don’t get mad when others rules lawyer you back.
In 7th Ed 40k, I found a way to make the Tau Stormsurge to be even more ridiculous than it already was. It clearly conflicted with RAI. I had to talk it out with another Tau player, who was a real lawyer, to find a way to invalidate it. He had to pull out actual lawyer tricks of carefully reading the rule to disentangle it, and he agreed it wasn’t at all obvious.
But I never played with that interpretation, and never intended to. Tau players already have a reputation for playing like dicks.
Hey, that rules-lawyering is someone’s fun!
Rules-lawyering rules lawyers is my fun!
It’s like this for large parts of human life; you just hope that no lawyer ever gets wind of whatever thing is being done.
Reminds me of that one barbarian subclass skill that doesn’t state when does you bonus to AC end, so you could argue (and lose) that it stay with you forever
I absolutely would, my players would need to be creative to allow this dust pile to communicate and do anything, but I’m quite sure they could manage
New villain is a cleaner with a feather duster +1.
I was legit imaging a pile of dust that learns telepathy to communicate with their party members and screams in an angry scotch accent to be thrown at their enemies so that their particles might sting the bastards eyes and blind them
They’d be deathly afraid of any and all cleaning staff, but also the party would have a broom and catch pan of some sort for when their buddy get a lil spilt
Same, I’m now going to try to kill a PC with disintegrate just for the occasion!
Wanna bet?
I’d make it an absolute realistic pile of dust, unable to move, unable to cast magic, fight, or anything but be carried along by whatever picked it up, and when enough of the dust gets separated, death is automatic.
But I’d still allow it as an interesting edge case once.