Alexander123
First Post
Would a large boulder falling from 200 feet in the air be considered a coup de grace? I would think so. (unless their size happens to be extraordinarily large, definitely for large and smaller creatures.)
-
The VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
D&D 3E/3.5 [3.5] DM questions regarding the art of magic war
- Thread starter PLUTON
- Start date
My point was more general than specific to this situation, even know it worked out well that 200ft = 6.25 seconds. Just that as a DM there are ways to combat players trying to trick the system.
A coup de grace requires an attack roll does it not? Or are you just saying insta-kill? Because yeah, I'd say so in most situations. I'm thinking it wouldn't work so well on elementals though. Maybe a magic boulder....
Alexander123
First Post
Ah, ok.
It does require a roll, but as far as when I said it would be considered a coup de grace, I meant that a medium humanoid cannot possibly survive such a boulder falling on them no matter how many hitpoints you have. Probably the same with a large sized creature. I would rule it as a kill without a save (except a reflex to see if you avoid.)
It does require a roll, but as far as when I said it would be considered a coup de grace, I meant that a medium humanoid cannot possibly survive such a boulder falling on them no matter how many hitpoints you have. Probably the same with a large sized creature. I would rule it as a kill without a save (except a reflex to see if you avoid.)
Last edited:
Really? I doubt it would do much more than temporarily inconvenience a forest troll (to provide just one example). In a fantasy setting everything can be survived.
Besides: In the real world surviving a falling rock is usually accomplished by not getting hit by the rock. IOW, you either have to make an attack roll, or the humanoid gets a save.
Anything else would resemble the 'fist of god' and not a falling rock.
Alexander123
First Post
That makes sense.
Persiflage
First Post
On boulders, spells, and why this isn't nearly as good as it looks...
Some simple facts for you, which might help clear up some misconceptions:
1) Rocks are very heavy things indeed
2) An 8th-level Wizard can Levitate up to 800lbs, or 362.87kg.
3) The density of granite - your traditional boulder material - is 2.7g/cm^3
4) This means that the maximum boulder volume the Wizard can Levitate is 134396.3 cm^3, or 0.134396 m^3 (4.75 cu.ft)
5) The radius of such a boulder is 0.317m, or 31.7cm
6) Therefore, the maximum size of granite boulder an 8th-level Wizard can move with a Levitate spell is a sphere 63.4cm across... or to put it another way, about 2ft in diameter.
What was all that about large boulders again?
Now imagine trying to drop such a thing accurately from 200ft up, taking into account wind-shear, the fact that most targets won't be perfectly stationary, the fact that most natural lumps of rock aren't perfectly spherical and will thus tumble in an unpredictable fashion in the air... "Getting hit" by a rock of that size would of course be instantly fatal to pretty much anything in the real world depending on where it hit.
If it caught a human being a glancing blow, it could inflict any injury from a broken fingernail to shattered bones, but with objects the size we're talking about - with such unpredictable properties and so hard to aim from 200 ft away - the slightest movement by the target could reduce the effect from insta-kill to "nothing whatsoever".
I hear you say "Aha! But we've upgraded the scenario, and the Wizard is now using shrink item". That's true enough. An 8th-level Wizard can shrink an object of up to 16cu.ft in volume... which is a sphere of 3.13ft in diameter. That's better, but hardly Indiana-Jones-dodging-giant-balls-of-rock territory.
For the record, a 20th-level Wizard could shrink a boulder of approximately 1.29m (4.24ft) in diameter, which would weigh 3058.219kg (6742lb) before shrinking. That's even closer to the "boulder" people were originally talking about, but it's still easy to conceive of a Medium-sized creature avoiding an object of that size that landed in their square.
Alright, the rock could be (and most probably is) more flat than it is spherical, and would therefore cover a greater area... but who's to say it doesn't land edge-on over such a fall? Air resistance alone would likely cause an irregular solid to tumble over a 100ft+ drop.
To my mind, this means a to-hit roll (to get the thing on target) and a saving throw (because there's such a long gap between the rock being released and it hitting the ground, although see below).
Basically, in order to drop anything really big on someone's head, you'd have to use greater levitate, because the volume limits on shrink item just aren't enough to allow you to tote a genuinely massive rock at pre-epic levels. Greater levitate is a 5th-level spell so our 8th-level Wizard can't cast it, but when he first gets the spell he'll be hefting 9,000lb. Now we're talking: that's a granite sphere 4.67ft across, which is already larger than a 20th-level Wizard can shrink.
Greater levitate is not a core spell though (I believe it's from a WoTC web enhancement) so you can disallow it with impunity, even assuming the player knows of it.
Whether player or DM, numbers can be your friend
All that said, an 800lb rock would "only" have to be dropped from a height of 170ft for maximum oomph, as you'll see from the falling objects damage table. To get maximum damage, you add 4d6 base (1d6 per 200lbs of weight, dropped from a height of 10ft) plus an additional 1d6 per extra 10ft fallen.
Finally, exactly how difficult is it to drop this rock on someone's head? It's this difficult:
1) He's using a ranged weapon from a long way away. A thrown rock has a base range increment of... well, there's no real default because range increments for hurled boulders are normally specified by race (different giant subtypes, for instance) or other corner-case effects (such as the giant's wrath spell). As such, you could quite reasonably call it, say, a 20ft-range increment. As it's dropping straight down there's no maximum range increment, but at 170ft he's on a -16 penalty to hit. If you're feeling generous, double the range increment to 40ft so his distance penalty is only -8.
Don't let him talk you into a longer range increment: he's not a giant (they get ridiculous range increments), and isn't casting a spell that'd give him the rock throwing ability by other means.
2) He's using a ranged weapon with which he is not proficient, which means he should be suffering a -4 penalty to his attack roll on top of the distance penalty.
3) He's using an inapproriately-sized weapon: a sphere of 3 times the diameter of a regulation bowling ball. That's another -2 penalty at least.
4) Levitate does not render something weightless, and more importantly, not massless: all it does is lift it from the ground. It still has as much mass as ever, and the wizard is no stronger than usual. He is trying to push it along using a fly spell. "The subject of a fly spell [...] cannot carry aloft more weight than its maximum load, plus any armor it wears." He may not be "carrying" it as such, but the fact remains that he's still trying to push an 800lb object around. It still weighs 800lbs even if it's lifted off the floor by magic... what's his Strength score? Wouldn't he just succeed in pushing himself away from it?
Consider a large boat moored in perfectly calm weather: you *can* push it by hand, but if you were on a frictionless surface (say, an icy dock) you'd be pushed away from the boat at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than it would accelerate from you, due to your respective masses. If you want another comparison, consider a space-walking astronaut trying to push an 800lb rock... what do you suppose would happen then?
5) OK, so you don't want to ban it on that basis. Use the rules on pushing or dragging up to 5 times your maximum load, meaning he could pull it off at 14 Str. Under these rules, he can only move that rock at 5ft per round.
6) If you continue to allow him to move the thing at all, remember that he's not "throwing" the rock, he's actually trying to shove its 800lb bulk around painstakingly into an advantageous position before cancelling the levitate spell. It is not unreasonable to further impose a circumstance penalty on his attack rolls: -4 sounds about right.
The use of shrink item would paradoxically make it even harder: at what point during the throwing (or dropping) process does he cancel the spell? Minute mistakes in trajectory could be catatrophically magnified depending on conditions; and it's not like he's strong enough to give the thing any guidance once the spell has been dismissed. Think about how hard it is to get a 12lb bowling ball exactly where you want it... and that's from only 60ft away, in perfect conditions, with a perfectly regular object that doesn't suddenly change size when you've got it lined up!
Real-world comparisons aside (they're only to help you picture what's going on, not to interpret rules) you could and should impose range penalties, non-proficiency penalties and circumstance modifiers to his attack roll. Even then, he's doing a maximum of 20d6 damage to a single target with this trick... and it's a trick that could be stymied by a 1st-level caster with featherfall, if said caster won initiative (or readied an action in subsequent rounds).
Some simple facts for you, which might help clear up some misconceptions:
1) Rocks are very heavy things indeed
2) An 8th-level Wizard can Levitate up to 800lbs, or 362.87kg.
3) The density of granite - your traditional boulder material - is 2.7g/cm^3
4) This means that the maximum boulder volume the Wizard can Levitate is 134396.3 cm^3, or 0.134396 m^3 (4.75 cu.ft)
5) The radius of such a boulder is 0.317m, or 31.7cm
6) Therefore, the maximum size of granite boulder an 8th-level Wizard can move with a Levitate spell is a sphere 63.4cm across... or to put it another way, about 2ft in diameter.
What was all that about large boulders again?
Now imagine trying to drop such a thing accurately from 200ft up, taking into account wind-shear, the fact that most targets won't be perfectly stationary, the fact that most natural lumps of rock aren't perfectly spherical and will thus tumble in an unpredictable fashion in the air... "Getting hit" by a rock of that size would of course be instantly fatal to pretty much anything in the real world depending on where it hit.
If it caught a human being a glancing blow, it could inflict any injury from a broken fingernail to shattered bones, but with objects the size we're talking about - with such unpredictable properties and so hard to aim from 200 ft away - the slightest movement by the target could reduce the effect from insta-kill to "nothing whatsoever".
I hear you say "Aha! But we've upgraded the scenario, and the Wizard is now using shrink item". That's true enough. An 8th-level Wizard can shrink an object of up to 16cu.ft in volume... which is a sphere of 3.13ft in diameter. That's better, but hardly Indiana-Jones-dodging-giant-balls-of-rock territory.
For the record, a 20th-level Wizard could shrink a boulder of approximately 1.29m (4.24ft) in diameter, which would weigh 3058.219kg (6742lb) before shrinking. That's even closer to the "boulder" people were originally talking about, but it's still easy to conceive of a Medium-sized creature avoiding an object of that size that landed in their square.
Alright, the rock could be (and most probably is) more flat than it is spherical, and would therefore cover a greater area... but who's to say it doesn't land edge-on over such a fall? Air resistance alone would likely cause an irregular solid to tumble over a 100ft+ drop.
To my mind, this means a to-hit roll (to get the thing on target) and a saving throw (because there's such a long gap between the rock being released and it hitting the ground, although see below).
Basically, in order to drop anything really big on someone's head, you'd have to use greater levitate, because the volume limits on shrink item just aren't enough to allow you to tote a genuinely massive rock at pre-epic levels. Greater levitate is a 5th-level spell so our 8th-level Wizard can't cast it, but when he first gets the spell he'll be hefting 9,000lb. Now we're talking: that's a granite sphere 4.67ft across, which is already larger than a 20th-level Wizard can shrink.
Greater levitate is not a core spell though (I believe it's from a WoTC web enhancement) so you can disallow it with impunity, even assuming the player knows of it.
Whether player or DM, numbers can be your friend
All that said, an 800lb rock would "only" have to be dropped from a height of 170ft for maximum oomph, as you'll see from the falling objects damage table. To get maximum damage, you add 4d6 base (1d6 per 200lbs of weight, dropped from a height of 10ft) plus an additional 1d6 per extra 10ft fallen.
Finally, exactly how difficult is it to drop this rock on someone's head? It's this difficult:
1) He's using a ranged weapon from a long way away. A thrown rock has a base range increment of... well, there's no real default because range increments for hurled boulders are normally specified by race (different giant subtypes, for instance) or other corner-case effects (such as the giant's wrath spell). As such, you could quite reasonably call it, say, a 20ft-range increment. As it's dropping straight down there's no maximum range increment, but at 170ft he's on a -16 penalty to hit. If you're feeling generous, double the range increment to 40ft so his distance penalty is only -8.
Don't let him talk you into a longer range increment: he's not a giant (they get ridiculous range increments), and isn't casting a spell that'd give him the rock throwing ability by other means.
2) He's using a ranged weapon with which he is not proficient, which means he should be suffering a -4 penalty to his attack roll on top of the distance penalty.
3) He's using an inapproriately-sized weapon: a sphere of 3 times the diameter of a regulation bowling ball. That's another -2 penalty at least.
4) Levitate does not render something weightless, and more importantly, not massless: all it does is lift it from the ground. It still has as much mass as ever, and the wizard is no stronger than usual. He is trying to push it along using a fly spell. "The subject of a fly spell [...] cannot carry aloft more weight than its maximum load, plus any armor it wears." He may not be "carrying" it as such, but the fact remains that he's still trying to push an 800lb object around. It still weighs 800lbs even if it's lifted off the floor by magic... what's his Strength score? Wouldn't he just succeed in pushing himself away from it?
Consider a large boat moored in perfectly calm weather: you *can* push it by hand, but if you were on a frictionless surface (say, an icy dock) you'd be pushed away from the boat at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than it would accelerate from you, due to your respective masses. If you want another comparison, consider a space-walking astronaut trying to push an 800lb rock... what do you suppose would happen then?
5) OK, so you don't want to ban it on that basis. Use the rules on pushing or dragging up to 5 times your maximum load, meaning he could pull it off at 14 Str. Under these rules, he can only move that rock at 5ft per round.
6) If you continue to allow him to move the thing at all, remember that he's not "throwing" the rock, he's actually trying to shove its 800lb bulk around painstakingly into an advantageous position before cancelling the levitate spell. It is not unreasonable to further impose a circumstance penalty on his attack rolls: -4 sounds about right.
The use of shrink item would paradoxically make it even harder: at what point during the throwing (or dropping) process does he cancel the spell? Minute mistakes in trajectory could be catatrophically magnified depending on conditions; and it's not like he's strong enough to give the thing any guidance once the spell has been dismissed. Think about how hard it is to get a 12lb bowling ball exactly where you want it... and that's from only 60ft away, in perfect conditions, with a perfectly regular object that doesn't suddenly change size when you've got it lined up!
Real-world comparisons aside (they're only to help you picture what's going on, not to interpret rules) you could and should impose range penalties, non-proficiency penalties and circumstance modifiers to his attack roll. Even then, he's doing a maximum of 20d6 damage to a single target with this trick... and it's a trick that could be stymied by a 1st-level caster with featherfall, if said caster won initiative (or readied an action in subsequent rounds).
Last edited:
anest1s
First Post
The fact that he is not proficient with it, and the range incr. include the penalty for it not being a appropriate sized weapon, and the fact that you calculate the bonus negates the 6th, that it isn't an attack. Also, he doesn't need to throw the rock, just let it fall, range incr. doesn't make sense to me. Then again, even with all these bonuses, he can target the square. Which has a pretty low AC (5 I think?).Some simple facts for you, which might help clear up some misconceptions:
1) Rocks are very heavy things indeed
2) An 8th-level Wizard can Levitate up to 800lbs, or 362.87kg.
3) The density of granite - your traditional boulder material - is 2.7g/cm^3
4) This means that the maximum boulder volume the Wizard can Levitate is 134396.3 cm^3, or 0.134396 m^3 (4.75 cu.ft)
5) The radius of such a boulder is 0.317m, or 31.7cm
6) Therefore, the maximum size of granite boulder an 8th-level Wizard can move with a Levitate spell is a sphere 63.4cm across... or to put it another way, about 2ft in diameter.
What was all that about large boulders again?
Now imagine trying to drop such a thing accurately from 200ft up, taking into account wind-shear, the fact that most targets won't be perfectly stationary, the fact that most natural lumps of rock aren't perfectly spherical and will thus tumble in an unpredictable fashion in the air... "Getting hit" by a rock of that size would of course be instantly fatal to pretty much anything in the real world depending on where it hit.
If it caught a human being a glancing blow, it could inflict any injury from a broken fingernail to shattered bones, but with objects the size we're talking about - with such unpredictable properties and so hard to aim from 200 ft away - the slightest movement by the target could reduce the effect from insta-kill to "nothing whatsoever".
I hear you say "Aha! But we've upgraded the scenario, and the Wizard is now using shrink item". That's true enough. An 8th-level Wizard can shrink an object of up to 16cu.ft in volume... which is a sphere of 3.13ft in diameter. That's better, but hardly Indiana-Jones-dodging-giant-balls-of-rock territory.
For the record, a 20th-level Wizard could shrink a boulder of approximately 1.29m (4.24ft) in diameter, which would weigh 3058.219kg (6742lb) before shrinking. That's even closer to the "boulder" people were originally talking about, but it's still easy to conceive of a Medium-sized creature avoiding an object of that size that landed in their square.
Alright, the rock could be (and most probably is) more flat than it is spherical, and would therefore cover a greater area... but who's to say it doesn't land edge-on over such a fall? Air resistance alone would likely cause an irregular solid to tumble over a 100ft+ drop.
To my mind, this means a to-hit roll (to get the thing on target) and a saving throw (because there's such a long gap between the rock being released and it hitting the ground, although see below).
Basically, in order to drop anything really big on someone's head, you'd have to use greater levitate, because the volume limits on shrink item just aren't enough to allow you to tote a genuinely massive rock at pre-epic levels. Greater levitate is a 5th-level spell so our 8th-level Wizard can't cast it, but when he first gets the spell he'll be hefting 9,000lb. Now we're talking: that's a granite sphere 4.67ft across, which is already larger than a 20th-level Wizard can shrink.
Greater levitate is not a core spell though (I believe it's from a WoTC web enhancement) so you can disallow it with impunity, even assuming the player knows of it.
Whether player or DM, numbers can be your friend
All that said, an 800lb rock would "only" have to be dropped from a height of 170ft for maximum oomph, as you'll see from the falling objects damage table. To get maximum damage, you add 4d6 base (1d6 per 200lbs of weight, dropped from a height of 10ft) plus an additional 1d6 per extra 10ft fallen.
Finally, exactly how difficult is it to drop this rock on someone's head? It's this difficult:
1) He's using a ranged weapon from a long way away. A thrown rock has a base range increment of... well, there's no real default because range increments for hurled boulders are normally specified by race (different giant subtypes, for instance) or other corner-case effects (such as the giant's wrath spell). As such, you could quite reasonably call it, say, a 20ft-range increment. As it's dropping straight down there's no maximum range increment, but at 170ft he's on a -16 penalty to hit. If you're feeling generous, double the range increment to 40ft so his distance penalty is only -8.
Don't let him talk you into a longer range increment: he's not a giant (they get ridiculous range increments), and isn't casting a spell that'd give him the rock throwing ability by other means.
2) He's using a ranged weapon with which he is not proficient, which means he should be suffering a -4 penalty to his attack roll on top of the distance penalty.
3) He's using an inapproriately-sized weapon: a sphere of 3 times the diameter of a regulation bowling ball. That's another -2 penalty at least.
4) Levitate does not render something weightless, and more importantly, not massless: all it does is lift it from the ground. It still has as much mass as ever, and the wizard is no stronger than usual. He is trying to push it along using a fly spell. "The subject of a fly spell [...] cannot carry aloft more weight than its maximum load, plus any armor it wears." He may not be "carrying" it as such, but the fact remains that he's still trying to push an 800lb object around. It still weighs 800lbs even if it's lifted off the floor by magic... what's his Strength score? Wouldn't he just succeed in pushing himself away from it?
Consider a large boat moored in perfectly calm weather: you *can* push it by hand, but if you were on a frictionless surface (say, an icy dock) you'd be pushed away from the boat at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than it would accelerate from you, due to your respective masses. If you want another comparison, consider a space-walking astronaut trying to push an 800lb rock... what do you suppose would happen then?
5) OK, so you don't want to ban it on that basis. Use the rules on pushing or dragging up to 5 times your maximum load, meaning he could pull it off at 14 Str. Under these rules, he can only move that rock at 5ft per round.
6) If you continue to allow him to move the thing at all, remember that he's not "throwing" the rock, he's actually trying to shove its 800lb bulk around painstakingly into an advantageous position before cancelling the levitate spell. It is not unreasonable to further impose a circumstance penalty on his attack rolls: -4 sounds about right.
The use of shrink item would paradoxically make it even harder: at what point during the throwing (or dropping) process does he cancel the spell? Minute mistakes in trajectory could be catatrophically magnified depending on conditions; and it's not like he's strong enough to give the thing any guidance once the spell has been dismissed. Think about how hard it is to get a 12lb bowling ball exactly where you want it... and that's from only 60ft away, in perfect conditions, with a perfectly regular object that doesn't suddenly change size when you've got it lined up!
Real-world comparisons aside (they're only to help you picture what's going on, not to interpret rules) you could and should impose range penalties, non-proficiency penalties and circumstance modifiers to his attack roll. Even then, he's doing a maximum of 20d6 damage to a single target with this trick... and it's a trick that could be stymied by a 1st-level caster with featherfall, if said caster won initiative (or readied an action in subsequent rounds).
I would say, either target a square, with easy AC and easy save but high damage,
or target the creature, with high AC and no save.
Persiflage
First Post
No, no he can't. If you re-read my post, you'll see that the rock is only 2ft in diameter. At its widest point, that amounts to an area of pi square feet (3.142); or in other words, just over an eighth of the area of a 5ft square. How does he not have to make a to-hit roll?
If you want him to target the square rather than the person, well OK... but assuming he hits the right square, he has only a 1 in 8 chance of intersecting with his target at all, let alone hitting them full-on enough to do the necessary damage.
Range increments aren't just about the ability of an attack to cover a particular distance, they're about the ever-increasing difficulty of compensating for the movement of a target, allowing for windage, overcoming atmospheric effects such as heat haze, etc. For someone dropping something from above, the primary confounding factors are going to be air resistance causing an irregularly-shaped object to tumble unpredictably, and parallax errors caused by trying to line the rock up with something 170ft directly beneath you.
As such, range increments are entirely appropriate. Imagine standing at the top of a 10ft wall with a beach-ball sized water balloon, and trying to hit someone beneath you. Easy, right? Now imagine standing at the top of a 170ft cliff and trying the same trick... are you honestly saying that the distance makes no difference?
Also note that anything the PCs can do, why not an NPC at some stage?
Survivor of 1st encounter: They did this and that and another thing.
Leader: We have casters, lets hit them with the same trick. Even if they counter us, it will give us methods to counter them next time!
My group has an understanding, anything the players can do, the npc's can do. So if a player comes up with a clever trick, they can expect to see it in the future. Use the exact same tactics against the group and
a) hear them complain and/or
b) watch how they counter them, and take notes.
anest1s
First Post
Yes, but still throwing a rock down 170ft has to be easier than throwing it up 170ft...I would say that the range increment should be depending on the wind and how big the rock is...and since its small and heavy, I would say it has to be big. At least bigger than 20 or 40ft.
Yes, it is small, and thats why it can't be a hit all the times. If you dropped a castle on his head, it would/should in my opinion be, a never miss trap. A low reflex shows that it is pretty easy to avoid it, while a high AC shows its pretty hard to hit. Rolling a d8 to see if it hits...is like saying that when you attack a halfling you get 50% to miss, since it has the half size of a human.
Also, a rock hitting your hand from up there, can cause decapitation...
Similar Threads
