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2021-12-02, 10:21 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2007
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- RVA
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
I'm not going to pretend to know what realm your games may take place in, and every setting is different.
But, it's generally accepted that there are elemental planes and circles of hell and all that stuff in the D&D cosmos, right? D&D cosmos aren't orbs spinning around in space, they're "planes of existence." Given that there are "planes" of existence, it's fair to assume that magic functions on what I call "planar physics," or flat physics.
If we used an immovable rod on Earth, you'd lock the button and ZOOM! You'd never see the rod again, because we're whizzing through space. Earth is rotating on it's axis, orbiting the Sun, which is itself orbiting at the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, which is spinning around some other massive event, maybe the center of the universe, which could be orbiting around the center of a megaverse.
If we think of D&D world as the science-proved-it-wrong Flat Planet of our ancient world, an immovable rod locked into specific coordinates X,Y,Z (in relation to, let's say, sea level) would maintain those coordinates, because planar physics require planes to stay put. So... If you accept my fantastic planar physics, the rod's magic works pretty okay.
In your specific circumstance, with an airship, I'll posit this thought exercise. If I jump up in the air, holding the rod and push the button, I'd be hanging in the air, not moving, because I'm holding an immovable rod. The ship, which isn't holding the rod, would continue moving under me, eventually leaving me hanging by one arm in the clouds. If the rod locks in relation to the ship, I'd jump up and, though there's no connection, I'd be towed by the ship somehow.
Now, if the campaign is centered around airship travel, I think having it function in relation to the ship would be awesome! I'm imagining that metal-boomerang-surfing thing from the TailSpin cartoon. You could tie somebody to the rod, lock it 10ft off the port bough and you've got sky keelhauling (kinda).
There's a lot more interesting stuff you can do, if you decide that immovable rods don't work how they do.Last edited by Burley; 2021-12-02 at 10:32 AM.
Check out a bunch of stuff I wrote for my campaign world of Oz.
SpoilerI am the Burley, formerly known as Burley Warlock. I got my name changed. Please remember me...
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2021-12-02, 10:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
To be fair, strength 30 is only a +10 bonus to Strength Checks. Notably, Immovable Rod calls for Strength, not Strength(Athletics), so by the RAW you cannot use anything but raw Strength to move it.
So, a Strength 30 creature still has to roll a natural 20 to move it! This is beyond any PC's capabilities, because nothing in the game gives access to a strength of 30. Maybe if they have the right wild shape or polymorph form?
Though Tanarii does point some things out:
The Barbarian could have up to a 24 strength at level 20. Anybody could have a 29 if they have the Legendary Storm Giant Strength belt.
Bardic Inspiration, Jack of All Trades, guidance, and other things that add to raw ability checks would work here.
I also like it, assuming I am interpreting the assumptions you put into the anydice program correctly.
We can potentially use this to interpolate backwards what kind of force other DCs equate to. (We can probably adjudicate that Athletics applies to some of these, but not others, with the idea behind the immovable rod being that you can't generally get into a position to use your training and have to rely on pure muscle rather than on any stacking or other techniques.)
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2021-12-02, 10:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2018
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
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2021-12-02, 12:36 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Sep 2015
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
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2021-12-02, 12:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2019
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
How about: the wizard that created the rod anchored it to an object in their posession, like a gem or something. When you press the button, all motion relative to that item ceases.
Would be a nice plot hook if the rod suddenly starts moving because an adventurer somewhere half a continent away found the gem
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2021-12-02, 02:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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2021-12-02, 02:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
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- Burbank CA
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude... seeming to be true within the context of the game world.
"D&D does not have SECRET rules that can only be revealed by meticulous deconstruction of words and grammar. There is only the unclear rules prose that makes people think there are secret rules to be revealed."
Consistency between games and tables is but the dream of a madman - Mastikator
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2021-12-02, 02:38 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
To be fair, unless this was an exploit the wizard intended to use, himself, it seems more likely such rods would be fixed relative to very big, heavy things, so that the rod would be likely to remain immobile in the context the creator intended.
Either fixed to a particular boat on which it's intended to be used, or fixed to a particular building or tree or massive natural formation that is unlikely to move.
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2021-12-02, 02:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
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- Burbank CA
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Last edited by dafrca; 2021-12-02 at 02:47 PM.
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude... seeming to be true within the context of the game world.
"D&D does not have SECRET rules that can only be revealed by meticulous deconstruction of words and grammar. There is only the unclear rules prose that makes people think there are secret rules to be revealed."
Consistency between games and tables is but the dream of a madman - Mastikator
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2021-12-02, 02:50 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Indeed.
Could do this with, say, a dragon turtle that was sleeping and everyone thought was an island. Suddenly, it wakes up, and this ancient immovable rod that was tied to the "island" back then (or was tied to the dragon turtle when the dragon turtle was known to be a creature and the owner wanted it to move with his fortress on its back), is moving around seemingly at random.
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2021-12-02, 04:20 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2007
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- The Land of Cleves
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
I can't use that one, because the immovable rod my party has, they made themselves (I gave them a magic item formula as a reward). However... One of the ingredients in the formula I gave them was a stone from the highest pinnacle of a mountain (it had to have been there for at least 50 years prior, so they can't mass-produce immovable rods). So the logical choice for me is that the rod is motionless relative to Mt. Waterdeep. If they ever come to another mountain and make another, then that rod will be anchored to that mountain, which could have tectonic implications.
Come to think of it, a recent adventure did bring them to another mountain, but none of us, including me, remembered that detail at the time...Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2021-12-02, 04:56 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Oct 2019
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
As an aside - sea level is a really crappy reference point IRL as it is nearly undefinable / not fixed.
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2021-12-02, 05:55 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2009
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- Washington D.C.
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Cuthalion's art is the prettiest art of all the art. Like my avatar.
Number of times Roland St. Jude has sworn revenge upon me: 2
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2021-12-02, 06:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2017
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Unless it is. See my previous post about how appeals to realism generally fall into either "like real life" or "internally consistent". No reason to think sea level would need to change in a fantasy world. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. It all depends on the world building.
The same applies here, but in the other way. This is fantasy, not science fiction. You need to define things in mythological terms, not scientific ones. Something like "pressure" might not even exist in the same sense. After all, imagine how much you need to bend the rules of science to break the square-cube law and get giant creatures that don't collapse under their own weight, to name but one aspect of a fantasy world that breaks the laws of physics.
The idea mentioned early about using the highest stone from a mountain attuning the rod to that mountain is more in line with how fantasy typically works. It does still beg questions like what happens if the mountain gets split in two, or gets leveled, or whatever, but you can probably work those out. It is at least approaching the concept from a mythological perspective, rather than a scientific one.
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2021-12-02, 07:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2017
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
The kind of things leveling mountains in fantasy settings generally have people worrying less about how their immovable rod stopped working and instead how to stop the gigantic magical disaster/world ending beast can be stopped before it does more than erase a mountain.
Nitpicking aside, I agree, if you must have it stationary relative to a specific thing, a mountain is a good place to start.
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2021-12-03, 08:43 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2006
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2021-12-03, 11:22 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2007
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2021-12-03, 02:09 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2018
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Whatever the character needs it to without conscious thought. Maybe I worded that poorly, but the general concept is that it defaults to the planet (whether or not your game's planet is in motion in space. Or plane, if on a different plane.) I tend to think of the worlds in my games as moving through space, but the characters think of the ground as solid and stable, like most of us think of our planet in day to day life. If the character is on an air-ship or a sea going ship for an extended period of time and it becomes second nature for them to think of it as the most stable identifying marker around, and they need it to do some minor task, like a hand hold or a foot up I wouldn't have an issue with that. It's not breaking anything. If the character starts overthinking it, either looking for an exploit (where they acknowledge to themselves that the object it's in relation to isn't the most stable thing around) or like wile-e-coyote looking down after standing in open air for a while, I might declare that their perception of stability has shifted and as such the interpretation of immobility has. It doesn't seem more or less arbitrary to me then any other base line assumptions of immobility, and it lets them use the item a bit more. It has holes, of course, like any interpretation.
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2021-12-04, 08:26 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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- The Land of Cleves
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
To give a serious answer to a silly comment, the CMB doesn't actually define a reference frame. It defines a whole bunch of them, a different one for every point in the Universe. A locally-comoving reference frame is a convenient thing to be able to define, but it's still only local, not "universal".
Of course, an Immovable Rod does indisputably have a location, so this would still be a perfectly viable and consistent way of ruling for it. But it would surely have unintended effects, that nobody in the game world would describe with the word "immovable".
Oh, and when I came up with the recipe for the magic item formula, I wasn't even thinking about the whole "immovable relative to what" question. My thought process was purely limited to including costly materials that add up to about the right price, making it feel thematic, and making sure they couldn't churn out unlimited numbers of them (but could, under the right circumstances, make more than 1, so it would still be different from just giving them the item directly). IIRC, the ingredients I told them were the mountaintop-stone, a lodestone, a diamond, and some quantity of adamantium.Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2021-12-04, 02:07 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- May 2018
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
The main good reasons I've seen are:
(1) For the most part, the rule in RPG is "things that are considered intuitive for the players (GM included), are true unless it is very important for the game that they are false". E.g humans have two eyes. And depending on your table, the amount of things that are considered "intuitive" varies. At a table full of medieval historians, there will be more expectation about having a social structure that actually make sense for your world, because they will use their personal knowledge about how societies work to guide their choices. Similarly, at a table full of theoretical physicists, a good share of them will probably expect astronomy to works mostly as IRL unless it is an absolute necessity of the worldbuilding that it doesn't.
(2) Because it's very fun/interesting to do for a certain part of the population, and when you're table is constituted at 80% of peoples that find if fun to extrapolate on how the general relativity would interact with the law of magic, this kind of reasoning will end up in your D&D games with those peoples. Just because you can explain everything with "don't think about it, it's MAGIC", it doesn't prevent you from finding the minimal amount of "Magic Nonsense" necessary to make the world works.
(3) Because the GM has a (edit: IME homebrewed) consistent worldbuilding including the fact that the D&D universe is literally a post-sci-fy universe (so mankind had an usual sci-fy development, and after breaking the laws of reality in an apocalyptic war you ended up with the D&D universe) and is making sure as many part of the rules are consistent with this worldbuilding (including the fact that the material plane is still made of planets).Last edited by MoiMagnus; 2021-12-05 at 02:08 PM.
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2021-12-04, 02:57 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2019
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
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2021-12-04, 04:36 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2015
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- Burbank CA
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
This is why I have started to use the word "verisimilitude" rather than "realism". For me, most of the time I accept what happens in game if it feels consistent with the setting and other things in the game. So for example: if a 10,000 lb lizard can fly and so can a medieval cog style ship, then I expect it should not be an issue for my character to fly using a spell. It has nothing to do with reality, it has to do with setting consistency for me almost all of the time.
*It isn't realism, it's verisimilitude... seeming to be true within the context of the game world.
"D&D does not have SECRET rules that can only be revealed by meticulous deconstruction of words and grammar. There is only the unclear rules prose that makes people think there are secret rules to be revealed."
Consistency between games and tables is but the dream of a madman - Mastikator
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2021-12-04, 04:51 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Apr 2016
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- krynn
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
personally in relation to what makes sense in context. you on a planet it's the planet. you're in a spaceship is the sun. you're in limbo. it's whatever rock you're on. in your example I would ask intent. if you want to make a ladder it's the ship. if you want to **** the ship it's the earth.
Have you accepted the Flying Spaghetti Monster as your Lord and Savior? If so, add this to your signature!
Beholders are just a meatball that fell out of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
78% of DM's started their first campaign in a tavern. If you're one of the 22% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.
my first game started on a pirate ship
Sorry for any spelling mistake
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2021-12-05, 08:09 AM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2007
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- The Land of Cleves
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Quoth MoiMagnus:
(3) Because the GM has a consistent worldbuilding including the fact that the D&D universe is literally a post-sci-fy universe (so mankind had an usual sci-fy development, and after breaking the laws of reality in an apocalyptic war you ended up with the D&D universe)Time travels in divers paces with divers persons.
—As You Like It, III:ii:328
Chronos's Unalliterative Skillmonkey Guide
Current Homebrew: 5th edition psionics
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2021-12-05, 08:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2006
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
I'm not sure whether it's been part of any actual published D&D settings, but the game itself was heavily influenced by the works of Jack Vance - and his Dying Earth stories in particular, which were full of post-scientific technology-regarded-as-magic by his characters, so it seems reasonable for a game to be established along those lines.
Last edited by Gurgeh; 2021-12-05 at 08:34 AM.
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2021-12-05, 01:40 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Sep 2015
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Last edited by Tanarii; 2021-12-05 at 01:41 PM.
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2021-12-05, 02:17 PM (ISO 8601)
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- May 2018
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Sorry, I should have made it cleared that I was talking about an homebrewed world (more precisely for the case I had in mind, it was an homebrewed world made by the father of my current GM). I've never actually played a campaign in a non "significantly hombrewed" D&D universes (and never had a D&D GM interested in doing so, and neither am I as a D&D GM), and the fragments of knowledge I have from one-shots are not enough to give you a specific publicly available example.
[And when I say "significantly homebrewed", I mean that you can probably count on your fingers the numbers of names, including gods and cities, that already exists in any of the published books]Last edited by MoiMagnus; 2021-12-05 at 02:22 PM.
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2021-12-05, 09:26 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Dec 2006
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Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
Yeah, I'm in the same boat. I don't think I've seen a published setting that I've cared for, and I've been irritated by 5e's shift towards Forgotten Realms as a "default" setting (horrible cosmology, headdesk-worthy cultural stereotypes, world packed full of risible DMPCs). I want my worlds to belong to the GM and the players, not the sourcebook writers.
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2021-12-06, 10:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2021
Re: The Rod is immovable in relation to what?
It is amazing how intuitive Spelljammer's rules for an Immovable Rod are once you're familiar with how its rules for gravity planes and spheres and air bubbles work, considering that's exactly how I ruled it in my Spelljammer campaign without ever looking up what the Spelljammer rules for Immovable Rods specifically are.