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In hindsight I think the best thing to do is just leave a trail of rods in the air permanently with chains linking them and then use it like a chain ferry. That way I'm not spending years explaining how this works. Rowing the ship was actually my first thought but it seemed in my mind that, with none of the slip you get from water, it'd just get people injured when they are out of step with their rod de activation. Azza Bamboo fucked around with this message at 04:16 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 04:06
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I'm going to go with it's dumb and I should stick to vaguely historically accurate boats.
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Oct 27, 2020 04:28
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Azza Bamboo posted:I'm going to go with it's dumb and I should stick to vaguely historically accurate boats. The fire elemental air balloons are a great idea and should definitely stay. Skyways based on Immovable Rods are a cool concept and you should also stick with that. Either have the Rods hold the chains for a cable ferry (with magechanics on brooms flying around connecting and disconnecting the cabling), or the Rods support skyhouses that allow the balloons to maintain course in the force of magical weather (with guides on brooms delivering messages and supplies between the zeppelins and the skyhouse operators). I wouldn't get too fixated on the exact mechanics of how the balloons operate: perhaps the ships simply use sails, or they have lots of workers on brooms like a paddlewheeler, or the fire elementals can fire a rear-facing jet, or there's a group of sorcerer-sailers controlling the winds, or there's some goblin technicians with a pair of demon-powered propellers that keep popping out minor fiends in the exhaust. Kaal fucked around with this message at 04:56 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 04:51
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Yeah, fire and/or air elementals are how Eberron airships work already, elemental hot air balloons sound like a cool extension of that. Maybe for the propulsion you have not-quite-immovable rods based on the same enchantment but altered slightly to serve the purpose for oars. If you want a more Eberron feel, you could have a wheel with these rods strapped on, which activate for only part of the rotation and kind of have it “paddleboat” along.
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Oct 27, 2020 05:17
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lightrook posted:Edit: I just noticed that an Immovable Rod has a load limit of only 8,000 lb., which is not very much compared to the tonnage of a sailing ship, so you'd probably need a bunch if you want to use them for anything. Since as already pointed out, air has less resistance than water, and we're talking about a fancy dirigible, perhaps with some sort of pulley system involved maybe the only risk of exerting more than 8,000 lbs pounds on a single rod is during a hard braking maneuver. And if the rods are attached but it's a lighter-than-air aircraft then worst-case scenario (barring, say, mountains) is ride out the winds then re-engage the rods once they won't be overcome by external forces. That said: when you're on water, you can see the waves coming and adapt. That's not as much of an option if you're entirely airborne unless you've got mages with cantrips setting up plumes of smoke at range to see incoming gusts. i do enjoy the idea of reinventing chain boat navigation for air travel, though. stringless fucked around with this message at 05:43 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 05:41
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cowboy
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Semi-immovable rod: This flat iron rod has a button on one end. You can use an action to press the button, which causes the rod to become magically fixed in place but freely able to move along its longest axis. Until you or another creature uses an action to push the button again, the rod will only move along its longest axis, even if it is defying gravity. The rod can hold up to 8,000 pounds of weight. More weight causes the rod to deactivate. A creature can use an action to make a DC 30 Strength check, moving the fixed rod up to 10 feet against its longest axis on a success.
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Oct 27, 2020 05:47
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Instead of doing the work myself, I’ll farm it out to you gentlegoons. i’m running a Death House oneshot this Friday for Halloween, and I need a few random spooky but harmless effects to throw at my players whenever they get too complacent. Things like gusts of wind to blow out their torches, ghostly sounds from an apparently empty room, mirrors that show one PC something horrific, etc. anyone have a good list or can point me to one?
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Oct 27, 2020 06:02
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well, here's a d100 i'll be using when appropriate
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Oct 27, 2020 11:29
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I've recently started running a campaign in my personal setting again. As of Sunday it's been established as canon that the halfling weed (obvious) and druid leaf (coca) exist. A centaur Grave Cleric who split the party by miles yelled for help in Sylvan with Thaumaturgy and the percentage die said "Sprite" and they did a good job of convincing Flittora to flit off to get the rest of the party to meet in the middle. So now I've got a mostly decent homebrew race-statted Sprite that's one level behind the player characters. Except dex mod +3 and leather armor works out to AC 28. I've decided that Flittora is a nuisance. Hell, what else are Rangers good for anyway?
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Oct 27, 2020 11:46
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Pixies are great. In my version of Faerun the Neverwinter forest is kept by four pixies: Magnolio, emperor of the bees. A bombastic man who wears the petals of lilies as a tall collar. He directs the forest insects and represents the interests of flowering plants. He thinks picking a flower from the forest without its permission is murder, and destroying a beehive for its honey is genocide. Connie, weaver of winds. A forgetful and mood swinging pixie who wears a dress made of the scales of pine cones. She directs the winds and represents the interests of air pollenating plants as well as plants who disperse seeds into the wind. She's grateful when people blow dandelions or pull bullrushes open. She thinks spreading the forest is the number one priority and cannot forgive peoples who cut back the forest. Mycel, Seigneur of the soil. He's a stubborn and standoffish pixie wearing only a thick layer of dirt and a hat made of a flat mushroom. He takes care of decomposers and maintains a fungus colony that links the entire forest floor. He likes it when people leave dead animals lying around in the forest, and dislikes anyone who digs up the soil. Flo, the raindancer. An easygoing and lazy pixie who always lays face down on a tiny cloud she floats on. She makes springs spring up, when she feels like it... ... Maybe. She has a cruel sense of humour and enjoys watching others complain about drought while she toys with the idea of bringing rain. She'll try to make it rain or dry, whichever is least opportune.
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Oct 27, 2020 12:41
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Blooming Brilliant posted:If WotC are still doing MtG tie-ins, Tarkir? That'd be cool but out of the blue since Tarkir isn't lined up for a MtG release this year. That's a good point - Ravnica and Theros had set releases the years their books came out. Poor Tarkir doesn't even have a Planeshift pdf. There's leaks suggesting Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty is a thing, and if so, well, dayglo Asian cyperbunk wizard ninjas would be a change of pace.
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Oct 27, 2020 13:13
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You know when you're kept awake by a really dumb thought? 1. A treadmill setup, although in modern times "treadmill" means something else, so you could refer to it as a hamster wheel. People climb in here and make the drum turn, driving a belt that connects to item 2. 2. A stone flywheel and some cam/cranks. This stores energy from the treadmill and begins to convert the rotary motion into a reciprocating linear motion in the various pivoted beams that extend out from it. 3. The rodbox, a wooden construction with a hollow inside of it built to fit an immovable rod sideways. a. The battens: wooden stakes that are pushed through holes in the rodbox to push the button of the immovable rod as it passes through either end of the rod box. b. The immovable rod, shown with the button facing toward the battens. c. The pushrod: a wooden beam with a notch cut inside of it to hold the immovable rod. This pushes the immovable rod when it is active, then pulls it back to the starting position when it is inactive. As you can see, there are two rodboxes and two pushrods that are 180 degrees out of phase. This means that ordinarily there is always one immovable rod held still on its power stroke and one immovable rod being drawn back in its resetting stroke. However, by carefully timing the withdrawal of the battens from one rodbox (and not the other) you can cause the ship to steer in an arc by having one box active and another one idling. When the ship is stationary you might even be able to invert one of the rodboxes so that the ship would pivot about the crank during their shared power stroke. Azza Bamboo fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 14:46
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FFT posted:"The rod can hold up to 8,000 pounds of weight. More weight causes the rod to deactivate and fall." As long as you've got more rods currently attached than your vessel's current weight in pounds/8,000 you should be okay? It's not the weight of the airship that matters, it's how much load you put on the rod; the item description just didn't anticipate the load being applied in any direction other than down. The more load you put on, the faster you can accelerate your ship; you hit 1G of acceleration when you apply an equal amount of force to the rods as (your ship's mass) * gravity. But that's an awful lot of acceleration; .25G would be plenty for a passenger/cargo vessel, and quadruples the amount of force you can put on the rod before it breaks. Or just say you have special high-quality rods with a higher load limit.  Having said all that, an alternative to the elemental-based airship would be an airship that's suspended from a bunch of immovable rods, which are inchwormed across the sky to allow the ship to move.
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Oct 27, 2020 14:55
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Azza Bamboo posted:I have an idea for a different ship but I don't know if it's dumb. An airship that's a wooden gondola lifted by several fire elemental powered hot air balloons. The ship is moved by having a crew ride ahead on brooms and plant immovable rods in the sky which link to ropes that the deck hands tug to gain momentum.
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Oct 27, 2020 15:07
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It'd work but I've whittled it down to two immovable rods and some fire elementals rather than the large number of immovable rods you'll need to run something like that.
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Oct 27, 2020 15:19
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You'd need to make the whole thing out of adamant or the warping strain of leverage weight would leave you with a bunch of wreckage hanging off of two immovable rods hanging at a random point in the sky.
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Oct 27, 2020 15:25
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I think the key is to tune the flywheel mass so that it couldn't reasonably exert a force that would exceed the limits of the arms and the all important mounting point where the crank actually affixes to the ship (which is where the ship will ultimately be pushed from). The treadmill and rodboxes can be made out of wood, but everything from the flywheel out to the rod itself would probably be cast iron. I don't see this thing being loaded up to anywhere near the max load of a rod. This isn't to hold the ship aloft or provide ludicrous force. It's just to push the ship forwards from a fixed point in the air in the same way you can push a barge full of cargo with a barge pole from the canal floor. That said, these kinds of machines aren't exciting unless they have a failure mode, and I think a stray rod is probably going to be the fun way to kill this thing. If the immovable rod fails to deactivate at the end of its stroke it'll fall out of the end of the rodbox, snap the end of the pushrod off, then appear to blow through the walls of the ship (when actually the ship is drifting over it). Azza Bamboo fucked around with this message at 15:49 on Oct 27, 2020 |
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Oct 27, 2020 15:36
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Ok, I could see an airship using this as a steering mechanism, sure. Then high winds come and suddenly you have more than 8k pressure on the things and they bust out through the wall
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Oct 27, 2020 15:58
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Seems way more efficient than my airship that works by placing Portable Holes into Bags of Holding exactly 11 feet ahead of the ship so it gets caught in the explosion suction but doesn't go to the Astral Plane.
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Oct 27, 2020 16:11
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You know, some people itt are calling for the rods to be stronger, but actually the smart thing to do here is make the rods weaker than the breaking point of the components so in the scenario above the rods just stop working and the engine stops or fights its off timing until someone tinkers with the battens and gets them set right again.
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Oct 27, 2020 16:12
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Ok, I could see an airship using this as a steering mechanism, sure. Then high winds come and suddenly you have more than 8k pressure on the things and they bust out through the wall
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Oct 27, 2020 16:14
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Azza Bamboo posted:You know, some people itt are calling for the rods to be stronger, but actually the smart thing to do here is make the rods weaker than the breaking point of the components so in the scenario above the rods just stop working and the engine stops or fights its off timing until someone tinkers with the battens and gets them set right again.
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Oct 27, 2020 16:19
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The pushrod doesn't hold the immovable rod at all on the side to side axis, so it just needs to be weaker than the tensile breaking point of the pushrod or the force needed to break the wall of the rodbox or tear the rodbox out of the ground. I don't think that's particularly weak, just not quite 8 short tons.
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Oct 27, 2020 16:23
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theironjef posted:Seems way more efficient than my airship that works by placing Portable Holes into Bags of Holding exactly 11 feet ahead of the ship so it gets caught in the explosion suction but doesn't go to the Astral Plane. Project Orion but more wizards.
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Oct 27, 2020 16:27
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FFT posted:I've recently started running a campaign in my personal setting again. As of Sunday it's been established as canon that the halfling weed (obvious) and druid leaf (coca) exist. AC 28? I am not sure how this homebrewed race with leather armor has 28 AC. That is pretty much out of bounds except for the most crazy optimization.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:43
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Yeah, while it sounds like you're running it as an NPC that is a crazy high AC even if it's some kind of burst AC via spells or similar.
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Oct 27, 2020 20:49
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Is it worth getting Curse of Strahd Revamped if I already own the original? I heard they toned down some of the weird racism in it
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Oct 27, 2020 22:34
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AnEdgelord posted:Is it worth getting Curse of Strahd Revamped if I already own the original? I heard they toned down some of the weird racism in it I've heard that too, but exactly zero details about it. Also, is the version on D&D Beyond getting updated with the new/changed content?
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Oct 27, 2020 22:58
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Ryuujin posted:AC 28? I am not sure how this homebrewed race with leather armor has 28 AC. That is pretty much out of bounds except for the most crazy optimization.
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Oct 27, 2020 23:05
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FFT posted:mostly decent homebrew race-statted Sprite ... works out to AC 28 lol
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Oct 27, 2020 23:27
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Splicer posted:You don't need to fly ahead, just make a conveyor belt on each side of the ship with several immovable rods attached to each that get unlocked automatically when not on the forward bit. E: lol new page Okay the basic unit of this plan is what I call the "skyroller" it's an assembly that's going to make this work.  It's basically an ordinary roller built around an immovable rod. The inner axel is an immovable rod, but the outside is a tube sleeve around it and it should roll around the immovable rod. There doesn't need to be anything preventing these roller sleeves from sliding off the immovable rods because they're going to be trapped inside of channels anyway.  Next thing is to have an enclosure like in figure 1. figure 2 shows a cross section. The circles such as a. are all skyroller assemblies. b. shows the outer wall of the enclosur. c. shows slotted wheels that scoop skyrollers from the bottom of the enclosure and then drag them to the top of the enclosure. d. shows that the two wheels here are connected by a chain or belt to keep their timing. figure 3 shows a top down cross section of the device with the direction of vehicular travel marked a and the direction of the tops of the wheels shown as b. as the wheels reach the top of the foremost wheel the notch in the enclosure pushes the button on the immovable rod in the skyroller. As the vehicle skates forward on the skyroller it eventually falls back relative to the ship and the button is pushed again by the aft notch, deactivating the immovable rod. This system could work unpowered to create a vehicle that only moves forwards and backwards when pushed. It could be attached to something that would drive the wheels to keep this thing moving. The enclosure could be made longer and the notches in the wheels could be more frequent if a higher rod density is needed. Either way you could probably trap an ordinary boat in two of these enclosures like so.  It wouldn't be able to steer and questions about how this handles the curvature of certain planets could open a whole can of worms about immovable rods and the cosmos, but this idea is neat even if it is rod intensive.
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Oct 28, 2020 01:00
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Ryuujin posted:AC 28? I am not sure how this homebrewed race with leather armor has 28 AC. That is pretty much out of bounds except for the most crazy optimization. It's somehow getting +15 from an ability that's just supposed to set their base AC to 12 + DEX if they're unarmored. Simple enough to work around. / going by the comments on the Beyond page for it this has been known since July of last year lmao stringless fucked around with this message at 04:01 on Oct 28, 2020 |
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Oct 28, 2020 03:58
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Apparently there was a big leak of info for Tasha's https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/jjhlq3/complied_info_from_the_tashas_leak
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Oct 28, 2020 15:53
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loving hell that Ranger UA was perfect why would you do this Crawford.
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Oct 28, 2020 15:59
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Dexo posted:loving hell that Ranger UA was perfect why would you do this Crawford. I'm assuming so people didn't just take a 1 level ranger dip every time for free hunters marks
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Oct 28, 2020 16:14
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wotc has zero interest in making rangers a functional class or giving them anything cool they’re worried about pissing off grogs i assume
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Oct 28, 2020 16:18
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Declan MacManus posted:wotc has zero interest in making rangers a functional class or giving them anything cool Well with race being irrelevant in AL. As far as what book the race comes from. You can be a Goblin Gloomstalker. And be completely legal. And as race / class combo it's pretty silly.
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Oct 28, 2020 16:28
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Ranger changes seem fine tbh, UA Rangers were crazy front-loaded and not compatible with most subclasses
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Oct 28, 2020 16:50
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Any good house rules for a newbie DM new campaign? We finished Lost Mines of Phandelver and now the party is starting a new campaign twenty years in the future with new characters that start at level 3. They’re going to start on a ship that is going to an island, but here are two new rules we are adapting: -Silver Standard (gold is rare, but valuable and only really used by royalty and serious jobs) -turn a hit into a critical hit by using up two exhaustion points It’s my first home brewed campaign with unique names, locations, etc but will be pulling inspiration and ideas from as many sources as possible. Depending on how the start goes, the party might be blamed for killing the king or involved in a conspiracy to kidnap the queen.
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Oct 28, 2020 17:15
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Ringo Star Get posted:Any good house rules for a newbie DM new campaign? We finished Lost Mines of Phandelver and now the party is starting a new campaign twenty years in the future with new characters that start at level 3. They’re going to start on a ship that is going to an island, but here are two new rules we are adapting: yeah. whoever has the most fun wins. potions as bonus action to drink yourself is a great rule, critical hits doing max damage dice plus roll(instead of 2d8, 1d8+8 so no crits for 3 damage) is good and makes battle more lethal, and call for nonstandard ability score skill checks. charisma(history) for street stuff, strength(intimidate), etc etc one thing you want to do as a newbie doing homebrew for the first time is only create the area you need to explore in depth, and make the surrounding areas as vague as possible so you have room to improvise based off the plot. it saves you from building up stuff that never happens, and allows you to make things more cohesive..
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Oct 28, 2020 17:57
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