How many people can you shove in a portable hole?

[GiantOctopodes]

So, Portable Holes are awesome, we all know that. In particular, they are useful in combat because you can grapple a creature, put them in the hole, then close it up, which for anything that breathes means they'll be dead in 15 minutes or so, no muss no fuss, and you even have easy corpse disposal. It's 6' wide and 10' deep. My question is, how many people can you put in there before you close it up? Obviously minimum 2, for medium creatures, but based on the squeezing rules it seems like potentially 4? Maybe more?

[Daishain]

You can get a lot more than that in there, bear in mind, that's roughly 280 cubic feet, more than your typical full sized van.

Ten people standing chest to back would take up around 10', shove them together a bit, and you can likely get twelve or more in that row. Then there's the space on the sides left open.

You can probably get fifteen people in there without causing undue stress or harm (although they won't be comfortable), thirty if they're already dead or you don't care about them dying, and perhaps forty if one does not care about the bodies being intact.

EDIT: just ran the numbers, purely in terms of average body volume for humans, it should be physically possible to pack about 100 corpses into a collapsible hole. Might need to get a stone golem to jump up and down on the pile to pack it in though.

This post got morbid fast...

[GiantOctopodes]

You can get a lot more than that in there, bear in mind, that's roughly 280 cubic feet, more than your typical full sized van.

Ten people standing chest to back would take up around 10', shove them together a bit, and you can likely get twelve or more in that row. Then there's the space on the sides left open.

You can probably get fifteen people in there without causing undue stress or harm (although they won't be comfortable), thirty if they're already dead or you don't care about them dying, and perhaps forty if one does not care about the bodies being intact.

EDIT: just ran the numbers, purely in terms of average body volume for humans, it should be physically possible to pack about 100 corpses into a collapsible hole. Might need to get a stone golem to jump up and down on the pile to pack it in though.

This post got morbid fast...

Indeed, when dead and not squirming (not to make this any more morbid) you'd just do it based on volume, and the more the merrier. I was more wondering about the "before" state though, when still alive and kicking, since everyone in D&D has their 5' bubble of personal space (antisocial to the extreme), so I wasn't sure if either you or gravity, depending on how you interpret it, could "force" more people to occupy that space. It gets a little trickier because the person / people on the bottom mean that you only stop when they can't fall down, but it's not clear to me if a creature would indeed fall if above a space filled to "capacity" of two squeezed creatures, especially since you can't willingly end your turn in another creature's space, though of course gravity makes it somewhat unwilling

It seems wierd though too to have two people down on the bottom and the next two essentially standing on their shoulders or something since they're not falling and there's clearly still space left, so I'm just not sure about it. However, letting an arbitrarily large number of creatures be pushed in is problematic in its own right, so just from a balance standpoint it seems like some kind of limit should be established.

[Kyutaru]

That hole is going to grow rancid if you keep killing things in there.

The next time you open, it may release a stinking cloud.

[GiantOctopodes]

That hole is going to grow rancid if you keep killing things in there.

The next time you open, it may release a stinking cloud.

Nah, just gotta rinse it out from time to time. As a point of interest, when doing so, a decanter of endless water in geyser mode puts out 30 gallons of water. A Portable Hole Filled with water then dumped out (likely by attaching it to something upside down) releases over 2000 gallons of water.

[goto124]

Can you have a confortable duel in a Portable Hole?

[jkat718]

Can you have a confortable duel in a Portable Hole?

I mean, you'd suffocate...but some people are into that.

[Rilak]

Can you have a confortable duel in a Portable Hole?

The hole is a cylinder of 6' diameter 10' depth. It would be easier to duel if the gravity was such that you stand in the tube (like in a sewage pipe). If you assume this direction, the 6' height is a problem for large character (the have to hunch down to even fit). It would be a comfortable duel for two halflings wielding one-handed weapons. No room to circle around the opponent though.

If the gravity is in the other direction, you can stand comfortably as a half-orc. But you can't swing your sword very well if you stand in the centre of the hole. A longsword is 100-130 cm in length. 6' is 183 cm. So if you stand against the "wall" on one side you could swing it towards the other side; but this makes some swings harder (there is no room to your sides). There is no room to move forward and you would need both opponents to stand with their back almost next to the wall. I would suggest a knife fight or perhaps short swords.

[jkat718]

TI would suggest a knife fight or perhaps short swords.

Or fisticuffs! :smallbiggrin: Not exactly a duel, per se, but...

HALFLING MMA DEATHMATCH!

[goto124]

HALFLING MMA DEATHMATCH!

Find space for a camera (shouldn't be much trouble, apart from the existance of modern technology), and invite Belkar. Other small races (kobolds, gnomes, pixies) also work.

Shall we extend both the OP's and my question to other containers, such as Bags of Holding?

[Fwiffo86]

If you reduce the people down to their base components, hundreds of thousands.