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2018-10-03, 12:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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#1
Barbarian in the Playground
Is Leomund's Tiny hut *truly* Immobile?
I've recently been having an interesting argument somewhere about the RAW of Leomund's Tiny Hut, specifically pertaining to the following stipulations in the description:
>" A 10-foot-radius immobile dome of force springs into existence around and above you and remains stationary for the duration."
The argument begun based on what would happen ( And some of you might know where this is coming from ) if someone were to cast the Tiny Hut on a moving ship. I said that based on the first, primary definition of immobile in particular ( incapable of moving or being moved. ), even if were to make leeway toward 'stationary', what would happen at best is that the caster and the moving ship would simply sail past the boundaries of the dome of force that sprang up around him in a few seconds, at which point the spell would dissipate, or at worst ( And this is even more accurate in my opinion ) - The hut would completely break the ship apart as it's rear section, which wasn't inside the 10 foot radius at the time of casting, would get completely raked against the hut's hemisphere in a tug-of-war game between the section of the ship that was inside the AOE that is still trying to sail forward and the area which wasn't, now being barred by the hut. Imagine a titan just driving down a wedge into the middle, basically.
The opposition retorted that I'm wrong and that it is 'implicitly understood' that the hut is "anchored" to some point of reference like a ground or surface. I of course told them that not only is it written nowhere in the spell itself, but there are spells which do refer to a ground or surface ( I.E Tenser's Disk ), but this one explicitly does not. You can cast it in the air or in space or anywhere you want to and it springs into existence around you. ( And yes, it does have a floor )
So then they asked if that means whenever anyone casts the hut on the ground in a planet which is rotating or orbiting a sun, whether the hut gets instantly jettisoned away from him as a completely immobile ( relative to the 3D space it occupies ) magical force dome that is not affected by gravity and is incapable of moving or being moved. I responded that if your fantasy D&D planet employs real earth physics ( which ****s up A LOT of spells, Teleportation for instance ), then yes, by RAW that is exactly what would happen, no matter how outlandish it sounds. The hut will only remain around you on a crystal sphere/planet that does not abide by those laws. ( I.E does not rotate, and either the sun orbits it or else some kind of magic/god is responsible for day night cycles )
So a major argument ensued, and I proceeded to ask - If we're going to rule that the hut can simply be carried by a moving ship, despite being immobile, which goes against everything that the spell is trying to prevent, namely that you won't be able to just bring it with you wherever you need it, then does that mean if I cast it while riding a horse, it's now moving with me on the horse? If I cast it while holding a stick, does the stick work as a frame reference? What happens to the hut on the moving ship if the ship gets destroyed? If a chunk of wood from the deck it was cast upon survives and floats on the water, does the hut keep moving along with it? If the hut now uses the sea as references, does it it move with the waves or does it, arbitrarily, not move at all? If a giant asteroid destroys the planet you're on, what happens with the hut and the caster inside it? Since it apparently responds to gravitational pull, does it begin to orbit the sun or spin around with the debris?
Basically, in order to justify ascribing "implicit understandings" to immobility and straying from the explicit RAW, you end up in a spiral of infinite, arbitrary, and probably contradictory adjudications in a bid for consistency, and none of it based on the actual spell. So as far as I'm concerned, the hut is exactly as I read it - an immobile dome of force with no anchors or surfaces or grounds whatsoever, except the space on which it was imposed. Even if that means that yes, if your D&D world is a perfect replica of earth, then you do get spirited away from it every single time you try to cast it, with the only fix being to make your physics fit RAW instead of making RAW fit our own universe's physics.
But maybe someone could offer a better insight.