Using a tower-shield as an all-terrain sled

[Jowgen]

So I had this idea.

Get yourself a tower shield (wood or steel), and have it designed so it's front is smoothly concave and the straps on its back allow you to slot your feet into it just as well as you can your shield arm. Take your spiked chain and fasten it either to the shield, or to yourself, and to a flying creature/player that can't carry you but can push/drag your total weight. The flyer drags you along varying terrains in style.

My question is how feasible this is.

A character can push or drag 5 times their maximum load, give or take circumstantial modifiers. It doesn't suggest any speed reduction. Am I thus right to assume that this would allow for travel at the flyer's max speed? What would be the minimum strength score the flyer would need to have?

Secondly, I imagine using the method to move over snow or sand works great, regular earth or stone reasonably well, but water is where I hit a bit of a rut. How fast would the flying creature need to be moving to allow you to effectively water-ski over a given body of water on your tower-shield?

[Windstorm]

just like any good wakeboarder will tell you, the minimum speed required to get going is a function of the total weight of board and rider. the heavier the load, the more force required to keep it skipping along.

quick search says most instructional wakeboarding (close to min speed) is done at 18-23 mph, most active wake in tow or using paraglider is done at 33-35. assuming the "standard human" used in most ergonomics settings weighs 180lbs plus another 5-7 for board/gear/clothes. that gives a general frame of reference that works out to be about 185 ft/round (30.8ft/second x 6) for an unencumbered medium creature.

I'd suggest aiming for something in the 280 - 300ft/round range for realistic tower boarding speeds. I can't figure out the best way to do that off the top of my head though.

may I suggest using the name xander cage for the character and see who gets the joke? :smalltongue:

[Azoth]

Using Wild Cohort for ease of grabbing a critter.

Dire Bat...because it is SRD and I am away from books.

40ft fly speed base.
Quick Trait +10ft -1hp/hd
Warbeast Template +10ft (costs 75x5=350gp IIRC)
Air Heritage feat +30ft
Dash feat +5
Wild Talent
Spped of Thought+10

40+10+10+30+5+10=105ftx2(move actions)=210ft/rnd

If I could add a few templates or think to pick a faster monster that can be snagged with Wild Cohort I could get you faster no problem.

As is this eats 4 feats for your cohort just to jack the speed up to the probable minimum to surf on water using him with a single rider. He is also strong enough to just straight up carry you...

[Jowgen]

Okay, so there is quite the need for speed to do proper Wakeboarding. Seems like quite an investment just to cover aquatic terrain, although the idea of Xander doing awesome tricks via the tumble skill is priceless.

Anyone happen to know a simple way to give a tower shield sufficient floatation as to make it function as a boat/raft?

[Fouredged Sword]

I know how to turn a heavy shield into a flying island, but not a tower shield. There is a enhancement for weapons called flying. Get sizing, flying spikes on your shield. Your shield turns into a collosal flying animated object that can carry you around. It can fly around with 6400 lbs of passengers of cargo.

[Kane0]

I wonder if adding the animated or dancing enchantments would help.

[Jowgen]

Expensiveness aside, I don't see dancing or animated helping, as 'riding' the shield doesn't quite seem like something that would be covered by their abilities.

I've looked around a little for mundane means of increasing the floating power of the shield, and what I found so far is Buoyancy, from the Underdark, and Pearlsteel, from Stormwrack.

Bouyancy reads: "Many small, sealed bladders of air festoon the insides and outsides of buoyant armor. The armor check penalty of any armor so treated increases by 1 but is not doubled for Swim checks.". Adding it to a shield (while perfectly plausible) is not mentioned. It's cheap (50 gp) but oddly adds 5 lb to weight, so I'm not sure if it would be useful.

Pearlsteel costs 500 on a shield and "is very light, especially in water. Pearlsteel items weigh 25% less than their normal equivalents." and also it "slices more smoothly through the resistance that water presents". On a steel tower shield, which one could argue weighs the same as a wooden since Races of Stone raw states it to be identical to a regular to a regular except when it comes to things like warp wood, I can see this helping to make the shield a viable raft; but I'm not sure it's enough. :smallconfused:

[Jowgen]

A related question that I considered making a separate thread for (and still might), but seems to play into this enough to include:

Would an objects made of riverine (water sandwiched between two planes of force) create friction when pressed and moved against something?

If not, then in this particular case, this would translate into a frictionless sled/wakeboard. What kind of effects would that have on its 'ride-ability'?

From the top of my head, I'm thinking that it would make over-land travel a lot easier, as the flyer would only need to worry about overcoming the rider's inertia and air-resistance, which is a moot point since neither acceleration nor aerodynamics really exist in the D&D rules. On the other hand, a friction-less board might be horribly hard to balance on maybe?

Also, I do not know remotely enough about wakeboarding or hydrodynamics to know how this would affect moving over water, so any input from the wakeboarding-sages would be most appreciated :smallsmile:

[Deophaun]

Make your tower shield a custom universal item of skate (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/powers/skate.htm).

[Seerow]

Using Wild Cohort for ease of grabbing a critter.

Dire Bat...because it is SRD and I am away from books.

40ft fly speed base.
Quick Trait +10ft -1hp/hd
Warbeast Template +10ft (costs 75x5=350gp IIRC)
Air Heritage feat +30ft
Dash feat +5
Wild Talent
Spped of Thought+10

40+10+10+30+5+10=105ftx2(move actions)=210ft/rnd

If I could add a few templates or think to pick a faster monster that can be snagged with Wild Cohort I could get you faster no problem.

As is this eats 4 feats for your cohort just to jack the speed up to the probable minimum to surf on water using him with a single rider. He is also strong enough to just straight up carry you...

Okay so this got me looking and... I don't see anything that prevents a creature with a native fly speed from using the Run action. Not in the Run rules, or the Fly Speed rules. The only references I can find to not being allowed to Run while flying are in places like the Fly spell. Meanwhile, the "Dragon Wings" feat which simply give you wings to let you fly explicitly says you can run while flying, as long as you go in a straight line.

So if your wild cohort takes the Run feat, you can easily bump that up from 210ft/round to 525ft/round. Get it some adapted horseshoes of speed to add a +30ft enhancement bonus to make that up to 675ft/round.

Getting pulled around by your Dire Bat at a speed in excess of 75mph sounds like a lot of fun.

[Jowgen]

Okay so this got me looking and... I don't see anything that prevents a creature with a native fly speed from using the Run action. Not in the Run rules, or the Fly Speed rules.

Actually, in the SRD under Fly it does indeed state "A creature can use the run action while flying, provided it flies in a straight line.", so yeah, provided the creature can run for a sufficiently long amount of time (maybe undead? :smallbiggrin: ) that does work.

Here is a thought: if my earlier mentioned theory that Riverine severely reduces friction (if not negating it entirely), that is bound to count as a "Favorable Condition" that double the maximum push/drag weight from times 5 to times 10. This means that one can use a considerably weaker critter to do the pulling of the shield.

Enter the great and powerful Pseudodragon, creature of legend, king of improved familiars, and pet extraordinaire.

Their fly speed is superior to that of the dire-bat (60 compared to 40), and with their strength score of 6 they can fly and still push/drag 200 lb if "Favorable Condition" are met, which should cover a given PC's weight, and if not, can be boosted with an item.

The best part is, thanks to their MM entry and Arms and Equipment guide , then they can be purchased/kept as pets (an egg goes for a whooping 10000 though) , not requiring a feat.

Get yourself a pseudodragon, maybe a str-boosting item for it, a riverine tower shield; make it a Necropolitan with 2 flaws (to open of feat slots) and give it the Run feat for constant x5 speed, Air-heritage for + 30, adjusted horseshoes of speed for + 30, Quick trait for + 10, Speed of Thought for +10 and (if you have space) the dash feat for a +5, and maybe Quickness barding for another + 5.

(60 + 30 + 30 + 10 + 10 + 5 + 5) x 5 = 750 ft per round

That's 85 mph, which is like quadruple what you need for wakeboarding. :smallbiggrin:

Edit: forgoing all the item and feat shenanigans, just having a pseudodragon of any undead variety with the run feat and a riverine towershield would be sufficient for all-terrain wakeboarding, as that would give you 34 mph no problem.