Immovable Rod Monkey Bars?

[Bonedagger]

Always bring 4 Immovable Rods for your hammock.

 

[Taloras]

Always bring 4 Immovable Rods for your hammock.

Nice idea...I think im going to do that. My character has boots of levitation....i think im going to have him get some immovable rods and a hammock. Just float up to the ceiling and set em up.....and then sleep where i cant be hit!

 

[Bonedagger]

Nice idea...I think im going to do that. My character has boots of levitation....i think im going to have him get some immovable rods and a hammock. Just float up to the ceiling and set em up.....and then sleep where i cant be hit!

Hope he doesn't sleepwalk

 

[osmanb]

I do have to point out some minor problems with this whole discussion. Firstly, I have always been a very big fan of the immovable rod and its many uses. I think it's still one of my top three favorite magic items in the DMG. But...

As was pointed out to me, using them as a makeshift ladder is INCREDIBLY hard, if not impossible without extra equipment. Imagine that you have two such rods in your hands, and want to climb "up". How do you do it?

The "ladder" approach fails miserably. You start out by fixing both rods in the air, one over the other. Now, you position your feet on one, and your hands on the other. What next? Good question. I sure don't know.

Really, the only option is to put one in each hand, and alternate turning them off, moving them up, then turning them back on. But this amounts to doing many one-handed pull-ups over and over. This is significantly harder than normal climbing, as you have no support from your feet, and all of your weight is on one hand/arm.

I think it's possible, for a sufficiently strong character (probably a HARD climb check), but sadly, they're just not as easy to use as the DMG claims, nor as everyone (including myself until not too long ago) believes.

-Brian

 

[Jeremy]

/hijack

Monkey bars are different apparati than ladders. They work differently and are a different mode of locomotion than that suggested by the picture in the DMG.

 

[osmanb]

True. I was primarily referring to the normal claims about going up. I agree that using them for monkey bars to achieve lateral motion would be much easier. (Once you start moving on monkey bars, it's a basically fluid motion.) And you might be able to use some of the same techniques to gain momentum and "swing" your way up. It would still be hard, thought. And I think that doing that, or simply doing one-handed pull ups, or some combination of the two, is best abstracted as a difficult climb check.

-Brian

 

[Kilroy]

Please tell me the Orc simply activated the other ones, and climbed down? Because he had Two of them; he shouldn't have splatted.

Well, no, he was only hanging from one and swinging a weapon, after all.

 

[Corwin]

As was pointed out to me, using them as a makeshift ladder is INCREDIBLY hard, if not impossible without extra equipment. Imagine that you have two such rods in your hands, and want to climb "up". How do you do it?

That's why, half a thread ago, I suggested you would need 3 or 4 rods, not 2.

And the picture in the DMG shows the bard using 5 of them, BTW.

There is no evidence or implication that he is using them to climb up to the heavens, as much as he is just climbing in general. The idea of using them to litterally climb thousands of feet up into the air is just interesting to me.

 

[Artoomis]

It would be a very slow climb to use four or five immovable rods to climb.

It's easy at first, but gets really slow when you have to keep reaching down to your feat to grab the lowest one.

And, if your following the rules, pushing the button to activate the rod is a move-equivalent action. Presumably, de-activating it is a move-equivalent action as well ( though the description fails to mention this).

If the rods are 2 feet apart for climbing, you could advance 2 feet every other round.

Not very efficient - but you can go as far as you want, perhaps even without climbing checks at DC 0 (equivalent to a knotted rope against a wall).

 

[Mahiro Satsu]

The difficulty of the ladder action is what smart DMs us to keep it from becoming a standard feature in an adventure. The "Look at that 400 foot wall... I will just use my rod ladder..." logic tends to fail if it takes an obscene amount of time to use, especially if they are fleeing something. What the rod ladder does allow a PC to do is have a somewhat reasonable last-ditch method to beat little problems.

Anyway the ladder action isn't even the coolest thing to do with those rods. Stopping doors, stapling people to walls, and hanging things in mid air are the truly useful things they do.