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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9098747" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I thought the issue people had with knocking a cube prone was due to it's shape, lol.  Weights in D&D bring up entirely new issues.  Canonically (at least according to the internet), a gelatinous cube weights 50,000 pounds.  Obviously, if we assume the thing is actually 10 x 10 x 10 (which it probably isn't, as creatures don't typically take up their entire space) and it did weigh as much as water, it would have a staggering weight.But then you have to ask questions about how dungeon floors support it, does it's weight go up to include things it's consumed, is there mass displacement as a result, how does it avoid falling into traps that are triggered by heavy things moving onto them, are the typically mid-Strength cubes affected by encumbrance of things they eat, if a cube did fall into a pit could it actually escape one if it lacks a climb speed, and other silly science facts that D&D never really takes into account (see discussions of flying dragons and gross violations of not just the square cube law, but generally most of physics as we know it).And that's usually a rabbit hole best left unexplored.  Obviously, if weight is a factor, many abilities that reference size not weight run into some issues as to whether they can be shoved/pulled/grappled/knocked prone...again, best not to think about it too much.  "Realism" has little place when discussing the fantastic, and a gelatinous cube is definitely that.Since a few people took issue with my statement about 4e not being designed to be modded, I'll retract it.  I don't have any real facts to back it up.  4e isn't any more or less solid state than any other version of D&D, in my opinion, but there are a lot of working parts under the hood that made it difficult to start making changes without finding yourself rather surprised at how those changes affected other parts of the system.Some parts of 4e could get intricate, and the people who wrote content for it often did things in ways that were counterintuitive.  For example, the biggest rules debate I ever had with the game-The game has Immediate Reactions and Immediate Interrupts.  A reaction occurs after it's trigger resolves.  An interrupt occurs before it's trigger resolves (thus allowing you to, aha, interrupt it's trigger).But a lot of times, people would use reactions when they should have used interrupts.  For example, a tale of two abilities:Ability one is a reaction that has, as it's trigger, "when you take damage from an attack".  Ok, I'm attacked, I take damage, the ability triggers.Ability two is a reaction that has, as it's trigger, "when you are targeted by an attack".  Ok, I'm targeted and then...well, the ability triggers, before the attack roll is made or I even take damage.But what if Ability two does something that would negate the attack from being made in the first place? Quickly, two camps emerged.  "Reactions are reactions, and interrupts are interrupts", said one.  "If it's not an interrupt, it can't interrupt an attack, period."The second camp said "reactions are to their trigger, and if the reaction makes the attack impossible, oh well".  Honestly, at this point, I can't even recall what the official statement was on this (I think it supported the second camp, but either way, members of the first camp were not convinced).  And this could have been completely avoided if the people making content had decided to label anything that could interrupt an attack as just that.I saw this actually unfold over several sessions with my Living Forgotten Realms group.  One player had a Drow Warlock.  He took a series of Feats that improved his Darkness ability.   One session, he unfurled his new ability to, as a reaction before an attack was rolled, use his Darkness, thus imposing a -5 penalty on the attack roll.  The DM at that time was annoyed, as they felt it shouldn't work that way, but relented.Then a few sessions later, he took another Feat, which said "as a reaction to using Darkness, he can move his speed".  So instead of just imposing a -5 penalty to hit, he could now simply move out of the range of the attack.  This was the point when the DM said "hell no!", and the great Immediate Reaction War began, lol.I don't even remember how it was eventually resolved (again, I think it was ruled that reactions to triggers happen before anything else does, and so it worked as the player thought it did), but there really wasn't any reason it should have happened in the first place.</blockquote>

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