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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9613261" data-attributes="member: 7737">Indeed! The AD&D 1e roc has a 60-foot wingspan and “prey upon large creatures such as cattle, horses, and elephants.” The Monster Manual has a picture of a roc with an elephant in its talons — the largest elephant IRL (the African bush elephant) stands 11 feet tall at the shoulder and weighs up to 7 tons. We’re not told how much a roc weighs but given the Dragon Turtle’s 30-foot diameter shell was enough to sink the boat, what must the roc’s twice-as-long wingspan do?!At 10th level, thieves gain the ability to use magic scrolls: you otherwise must be a spellcasting class to use a scroll. However, Dalris stopped learning thief stuff at thief level 5, in order to become a bard.Now, in this case, Carr is actually reading from his father’s spellbook as if it were a scroll, and those words open up all sorts of rules-lawyering opportunities. (Though I do think Gygax would slap us down if we suggested a non-magic-user, non-10th+-level-thief could possibly make any sense out of a borrowed spellbook being improvised as a scroll.)Rules definitely open to interpretation.“… the creature then acquires all of the form and abilities of the creature it has been polymorphed into.”[…]“An 8th level fighter successfully polymorphed into a blue dragon would know combat with weapons and be able to employ them with prehensile dragon forepaws if the fighter did not take on dragon personality and mentality.”First of all, I must immediately rush off to stat up a blue dragon which is actually a high-level fighter who’s been polymorphed, and he fights you with his Rod of Lordly Might gripped in one prehensile dragon forepaw, or shoots at you with his Crossbow of Speed (it looks so cute and tiny in his paws) firing Arrows of Human Slaying.Second of all, while Polymorph Other doesn’t explicitly say that a non-character-classed creature turned into something else would retain its innate abilities… it doesn’t say that such a creature would NOT retain such abilities! Thus an argument can definitely be made that a Rufyl who survives his System Shock roll and also maintains his own personality should retain the pseudodragon’s “chameleon-like power” to blend into its surroundings (which by the book makes it “80% undetectable to creatures not able to see invisible objects” and thus is not literally invisibility, anyway).That would be AWESOME. It would be like the giant invisible hand in the novel <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/15177.Bridge_of_Birds_A_Novel_of_an_Ancient_China_That_Never_Was" target="_blank">Bridge of Birds</a>, but it also flies. Yikes!That it does, that it does. Morris Simon brings the “sense of wonder” to these books, which should please anyone who complains it’s been lost in “modern” D&D. (A complaint that has existed since the 1990s, at least, LOL!)</blockquote>

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