Distance for a circle target...

[jules]

@Sir_Swindle

@jules

Edit: I couldn't find those debates on the forum, could you point some out to me, please?

Pretty much every time rings and circles get brought up as it happens...
[...]
The "infinitely tall" view seems generally in a minority.

Thanks. I had searched for Circle+Depth, but Circle+Height is more fruitful.
These two threads actually address the issue:
"How high is a circle...?"
A Few Questions

Apparently previous edition explicitly made it a sphere, but for 5th edition I can't see a clear majority, minority, or definitive arguments, so I'll go with the Rule of Fun:

the magic works the way you need it to work, so if the spell's designed to be a cylinder, it's a cylinder. If it's meant to be a dome, it's a dome.... both are circles.

Ergo, if you want your spell to affect earth to a given depth or in an ellipsoïd, that's what it does

@eldarin

@jules

ArM5 p112: "the spells affects everything within a ring drawn" (emphasis mine)
The cylinder of earth in question goes all the way to wherever the bedrock is, so unless you draw a rather small circle, it is most likely larger than 10 cubic paces (or even the 100 cubic paces that you get with Size+1).
You can still try it with an open-ended Spontaneous spell, though.

To affect Part of the ground, you need Target:Part.
Unless the circle defines a manageable amount of matter like Window of a Singular Direction, that is.

Do you have a reference for Circle targets being limited to base individual? I would suppose a ward can protect a group within a circle without being T:Group.

I was talking about the "base individual" maximum amount that a spell can affect without extra +Size magnitudes, there, not the number of discrete elements

You might be thinking about my previous post, where I talked about well-defined individuals.
That was wrong. The wording is not applicable to Circles in general beyond targeting the ground.
A better term would be "bounded amount of matter", and several of the shapes mentioned in this post can provide such a boundary.