Shp Shenanigans

[AlanBruce]

Greetings! So my party decides to charter a ship. Thirty day voyage, more or less. A caravel, according to Stormwrack, with a crew of 20 + 3 mayor officers and an adept to heal and fix the ship.

Firts night on the ship and the crew places a table on deck with bulls eye lanterns attached to the ship looking outside, in case something were to show up while they ate.

The party eats, drinks, shares jokes with the crew.

But the party's warforged... he doesn't drink. He doesn't eat.

He can, however, cast spells, by virtue of being a spirit shaman.

So he decides to mount a puppet show, using summoned medium earth, fire, water, and air elementals, all looking for a cookie on deck.

The crew loves it, at first, they were afraid, but one of the officers, a bard with high spellcraft calmed them down and told them what it was and to just relax and enjoy the show.

As a finale, the warfiorged dismisses the medium elemntals and calls a Greater Earth, which weighs 54K lbs on deck, asking for his cookie in an Arnold Schawrznegger voice.

I loved his impromptu, but then it hit me- can a deck hold a single 54Klb earth elemntal, especially if it crouches so as to not hit the masts?

I ruled it broke through the deck and went down towards the bilge below, before being dismissed, as the ship began to fill up with water.

How would you have ran it?

[Fouredged Sword]

The ship should have a cargo weight listed in Stormwrack somewhere, unless I am mistaken. In the very least, I would require a rather high profession sailor check from the person at the helm to keep the ship steady, and prevent it from floundering. The elemental would damage the deck and likely cause major damage to the structure of the ship.

ALSO, the summoning should have failed. You can only summon a creature onto a surface that can support it. IF the elemental would break the deck, the deck is not a surface that can support it.

[VoxRationis]

I would probably also have ruled that such a concentration of weight would have overwhelmed the deck. 54000 pounds is as much as a whole ship's (3rd rate, to be specific) worth of cannon, all on a small part of the deck of a ship never designed to carry that sort of concentrated mass.