Okay, old-school storm chaser dungeon masters, listen up. Today we light things up with lightning bolt.
We get a 100-foot long bolt of lightning that is five feet wide. I'm assuming the actual lighting bolt is just an inch wide, and the rest of that width is a conductive danger area that forks out along the main bolt.
The line must be 100-feet long. Because lighting is the way it is, it won't bounce off of living tissue, it will pass straight through in a line to the next thing. The silly "carried or worn items will not be ignited" anti-player-complaint gear-protection rule is back here again, and I summarily ignore it because old-school is cool. Nope, you get toasted by a lightning bolt and all bets are off for your gear, just like fireball.
"DMs can improvise," page 5, PHB, so don't complain about your broken magic items. That stuff was paid for when you found it.
They say that you get a DEX save to take half damage? If you are wearing metal armor, you get disadvantage on that roll, lighting rod. I may even up the distance from the bolt where you can be hit to 10 feet, especially if there are other objects nearby that can get hit and transfer the shock to you. That candlestick near the bolt took a strike, and it jumped all the way over to you. It may up the power of the spell, but this is the sort of freedom you get with old-school rules that is cool and gives the referee the flexibility to adapt to situations.
Lesson? Don't stand next to an iron golem if the mage casts a lightning bolt at it, I just may rule it jumps to every adjacent target in melee, especially characters hitting it with metal weapons.
When this bolt hits a solid object, things get interesting. You could rule one of two things. In old-school versions of D&D, lighting is wonderfully bouncy, and it would reflect in random directions all over the map until it expended its length. In the real world, the wall or ground behind the lightning hit would absorb the electricity, but act as a conductor and spread the electric shock out to a 20-foot radius sphere through the walls and floors.
Since I am an evil DM, I will roll a d6 on each impact, on a 1-3 it bounces, and on a 4-6 it grounds and causes area damage. I love bouncing lighting, but causing it to ground and fry everyone nearby helps you understand why you shouldn't stand near trees during a storm, so it is in. If the dungeon is made of metal or water, I would rule bounces produce grounding damage as well.
To be fair, it is all one jolt with one voltage, so you can't take damage twice from any combinations of direct strikes or grounding. You are either connected to the current or not during the millisecond flash, and you take that damage once no matter how many times you are hit.
If lighting hits water, everything within a 100-foot radius of the strike in the water takes damage. Stay out of the pool during a dungeon exploration for your own safety, please.
The lightning may bounce back and hit your friends, so be careful where you cast it. To be fair, bounce direction should be random, you can't really predict the angle of whatever it hits on the map, so just come up with a random direction based on a d6 roll, and bounce away until it grounds and stops. No, you can't predict lighting and do a cool bounce shot, you are unleashing the cruel forces of nature.
Noise? What, I can't hear you because this stuff is loud. It is probably safe to assume the entire map has heard your little experiment in voltage transfer, so monsters are likely on their way (or running). Enemy mages can use lightning bolt as well, and I toss those scrolls into magic wielders with enough frequency to make my players' eyes twitch anytime they see a caster. DM's, you are not old school unless you regularly fling the same spells back at the party at least a couple times during the adventure. What fries the geese can fry the gander.
The only way to truly balance powerful magic is give it the chance to kill the caster, break magic items, and wipe out the party. Then, the caster thinks twice before summoning unholy power, and the party's thief loses all thoughts of backstabbing the careless mage before trigger-happy Gandalf gets them all killed.
This is the old school. The DMs are evil and turn the party's own tricks back onto them with alarming frequency and maniacal glee, either through stupid mistakes, random chance, or by a monster's own hands. If you want your game to capture that OG flavor, you pull no punches. Magic spells this powerful does not come with warning stickers and safety caps.
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