Role-playing Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for gamemasters and players of tabletop, paper-and-pencil role-playing games. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Say that I know the spell pyrotechnics and am carrying a lit torch. There's a cluster of enemies a short distance from me that I want to blind, so my goal is to throw the torch onto a square within 10 feet of them and cast the spell on it.
Does throwing the torch take an action even though I'm not making an attack with it, or is it covered as an object interaction?
From the description of the Use an Object action in the PHB:
You normally interact with an object while doing something else, such as when you draw a sword as part of an attack. When an object requires your action for its use, you take the Use an Object action. This action is also useful when you want to interact with more than one object on your turn.
This isn't particularly useful for your example, and I would say that the actual implementation of that is best set by the DM. Personally, I would rule it as an object interaction - uses their action - and get the player to make a Dexterity check to see how accurate they were (I don't tend to give away stuff like that for free), but other DMs would obviously have different opinions. But I don't think there is anything RAW that specifies how to play it.
As pointed out in a comment below, the oil flask is specifically mentioned as being able to be thrown as an action and then set alight.
The Player's Handbook gives a number of examples of object interactions (p190). Looking at those examples; if you had an already lit torch in your hand, it seems reasonable that you could throw it as an interaction on your turn.
However it is also reasonable that the DM might have some limitations around the range/accuracy of the throw. For example throwing a torch 10 feet to land in a general vicinity might be a given (or possibly a very easy or easy DC Dexterity or Sleight of Hand check), still allowing the character to take an action. Throwing a torch 40 feet to land in a particular place amongst the enemy would a different proposition; that starts to look a lot more like throwing a weapon and therefore could require an action (e.g. a hand axe has a thrown range of 20/60 feet, and requires a successful attack to get it "on target").
