Can I make a really 'frilly' Wall of Force?

[Pielorinho]

Whoah, Tilla, I completely missed how the area is phrased!

"Up to one 10-foot square/level" is COMPLETELY different from "up to 10 square feet/level." The phrasing means that the area consists of 10-foot squares, of which you get up to one/level. You don't get to reshape those 100 square feet into any shape you want; you get several 10' squares, which you can arrange into a continuous, unbroken wall.

Looks pretty unambiguous to me, now that you point that out.

Daniel

 

[Norfleet]

As for hitting it from the edge: the simplest answer would be to declare that the wall of force is broken if it's hit from the edge, since the rules give no means for the wall to do damage and no parameters for the wall's stopping a sideways approach. Once there's a body in the middle of the wall, the wall is no longer unbroken, and so it's dispelled.

That would be an interesting conclusion that would appear to make walls of force rather useless, if all that was necessary to dispel one was to poke in the edge. Of course, it states in the description walls of force aren't susceptible to damage, which would imply a similar immunity to damage incurred by being poked in an edge.

As for being cut, suppose I swing a rope through the edge of a wall of force. I then pull on this rope. Since the wall of force is impenetrable, the tension force of the end of the rope I'm pulling on simply doesn't transmit to the other side, nor the other way around, as if the other end were held immobile, and in the absence of this, doesn't this seem to suggest that the rope has become two seperate ropes, and has therefore been cut? Otherwise, if somebody were leaning against a wall of force, and from the other side, I struck at him with a hammer, he would feel that and potentially suffer damage, or if somebody was on one side of the wall, and I pressed a lit torch against the other side, it would burn him.

Hmm. And walls of force are invisible. Does this mean they are only invisible in the visible spectrum, or does this mean that energy passes freely through the wall of force? If I fire a laser at somebody on the other side of a wall of force, what happens?

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I wonder... are we allowed to use non-Euclidian geometry to define our plane?

Only if you game on a non-Euclidean table.

 

[FrankTrollman]

One thing which I think is being missed here is that while a Wall of Force cannot be destroyed - it also has no hardness and no sharpness. If you hang onto a wall of force your fingers don't get severed unless the difference in gravity torques on your finger tips and hands would normally be enough to severe them (unless you are made of pressed oatmeal this is almost certainly not the case).

A wall of force is not an infinitely sharp, infinitely strong, infinitely hard razor - it's just an imovable, impenetrable plane. You couldn't make something like that out of matter - which is why it is made out of magical force instead.

Remember, when you run into a Wall of Force, you don't consider it as an elastic collision (let alone an inelastic collision) - you just stop moving. If you fall onto the Earth, your kinetic energy is rapidly converted and you are in a lot of pain and the entire Earth moves a little bit. A Wall of Force doesn't do that - it doesn't move at all, your kinetic energy is absorbed and removed and nothing happens to you or the wall.

It's not a reflecting plane, it's an immovable plane. Those don't really exist, and that's why it's a "magic spell" and not a new product from Dupont.

-Frank

 

[Norfleet]

One thing which I think is being missed here is that while a Wall of Force cannot be destroyed - it also has no hardness and no sharpness.

Hardness is a property of how much is required to scratch, bend, warp, or otherwise mar it. A wall of force therefore has infinite hardness, since it's indestructible and nothing can scratch, chip, or otherwise damage it.

Sharpness isn't really a property of the wall of force itself, but is simply how thin the edge of an object is: A wall of force is a 2-dimensional object, and as such, having no width, possesses infinite sharpness.

If you hang onto a wall of force your fingers don't get severed unless the difference in gravity torques on your finger tips and hands would normally be enough to severe them (unless you are made of pressed oatmeal this is almost certainly not the case).

I would think it would be hard to hang on a wall of force, since Walls of Force are vertical. Let's say for the sake of argument that some force, perhaps decompression, provides you with a force that causes you to fall in a nonvertical direction. If you simply hang from the edge of that wall of force, nothing inherently happens to your fingers, until they happen to slide inwards on the plane. The wall of force is, of course, impenetrable, and 2-dimensional, so your fingers slide downwards without penetrating, since the wall has no third dimension of thickness to stop your fingers from doing this. Unfortunately, the effect is that the grasping part of your fingers now happens to be on the opposite side of the wall of force from the rest of you. Walls of Force are impenetrable to other forces and objects, such as your fingers' attempt to stop you from being pulled off by the other force which necessitated the clinging. Therefore, you fall under the influence of that other force....but walls of force are impenetrable. Your fingers, on the opposite side of the wall, cannot be pulled along with you, because that would necessitate it passing through the wall of force. So they stay there, and your fingers are thus cut off.

A wall of force is not an infinitely sharp, infinitely strong, infinitely hard razor - it's just an imovable, impenetrable plane. You couldn't make something like that out of matter - which is why it is made out of magical force instead.

It's immovable. It's impenetrable, which means it's infinitely strong, because if it were not infinitely strong, then a finite force would be able to penetrate it, thereby meaning it's not impenetrable. It's infinitely hard, because it's completely immovable in all parts, and therefore perfectly rigid and cannot be bent, scratched, or chipped by anything. It's an immovable, impenetrable plane. Impenetrable planes, of course, happen to be the exact description of a perfect razor.

Remember, when you run into a Wall of Force, you don't consider it as an elastic collision (let alone an inelastic collision) - you just stop moving. If you fall onto the Earth, your kinetic energy is rapidly converted and you are in a lot of pain and the entire Earth moves a little bit. A Wall of Force doesn't do that - it doesn't move at all, your kinetic energy is absorbed and removed and nothing happens to you or the wall.

Actually, in a collision where you just stop moving, what you have is the ideal inelastic collision with an immobile object of effectively infinite mass. Your kinetic energy can't be transferred to the object at all, and as a result, this kinetic energy becomes painfully converted into damage to you. It's very much like splatting into the Earth, only without the Earth moving a little bit. Still, the splatting has to be conserved somehow, and therefore becomes that much more damage to you. Unless you're suggesting that somebody falling onto a wall of force as a result of gravity alteration or being hurled incurs absolutely no damage.

Alternative interpretations offered include that the wall of force dispels when this happens, because it is no longer unbroken....except that walls of force are impenetrable, and such a thing would violate the impenetrability. Yet, as planes, they're also two-dimensional, so offer no resistance to vertical motion into the edge.

Of course, walls of force aren't rated as doing any damage, so this process of being bisected would be relatively harmless, causing no damage whatsoever, much as falling is harmless, and characters can fall forever while suffering no damage whatsoever. It's the sudden stop at the end which hurts. So the victim who was cut in half wouldn't suffer any kind of damage from the actual process of being cut in half: It doesn't cause any amount of slashing, piercing, bludgeoning, or force damage.

However, being in two pieces is bad, and causes the creature to rapidly bleed to death as a result. Presumably, if the cut-in-half creature was a troll, he would be undamaged by this process of being cut in half, but he would still be cut in half and have to regenerate his missing half. Still, he'd have all of his hitpoints and the use of the greater half of his body and could seek the other half of his body to reattach with, during which the party could be attacked by either of the two half-trolls. So it's not a perfect end-all-be-all tactic either, particularly when faced with monsters undaunted or even strengthened by bisection, as any DM will surely start to make use of when faced with this. That, or possibly spell-resistant monsters who could crash through the wall of force with no effect whatsoever if they made their spell resistance, if SR applies to attempts to crash through walls of force.

Next question:
Walls of Force are invisible. Does this mean they would be visible under true seeing or see invisibility, or are they invisible by virtue of being devoid of any visible form, and therefore remain invisible?

 

[hong]

Hardness is a property of how much is required to scratch, bend, warp, or otherwise mar it. A wall of force therefore has infinite hardness, since it's indestructible and nothing can scratch, chip, or otherwise damage it.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Fusce iaculis tempor neque. Duis ac justo vel risus lobortis elementum. Ut vulputate neque sed eros. Nulla sit amet elit. Praesent et elit. Sed eu orci. In vehicula lacus eget tellus. Maecenas at felis quis neque vestibulum bibendum. Nunc vitae nisl at lorem adipiscing luctus. Aliquam erat volutpat. Donec pellentesque. In nulla tortor, pellentesque a, cursus eget, ultricies a, tortor.

Sharpness isn't really a property of the wall of force itself, but is simply how thin the edge of an object is: A wall of force is a 2-dimensional object, and as such, having no width, possesses infinite sharpness.

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I would think it would be hard to hang on a wall of force, since Walls of Force are vertical. Let's say for the sake of argument that some force, perhaps decompression, provides you with a force that causes you to fall in a nonvertical direction. If you simply hang from the edge of that wall of force, nothing inherently happens to your fingers, until they happen to slide inwards on the plane.

Aenean at lorem lacinia metus vestibulum pharetra. Nulla bibendum odio sed ipsum. Ut neque ligula, vestibulum non, accumsan sit amet, vulputate quis, urna. Aenean nec lorem. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Cras nibh. Curabitur sollicitudin. Cras laoreet, lorem et bibendum mollis, mi dolor varius nisl, sit amet scelerisque nisl dui at mauris. Curabitur pellentesque.

The wall of force is, of course, impenetrable, and 2-dimensional, so your fingers slide downwards without penetrating, since the wall has no third dimension of thickness to stop your fingers from doing this. Unfortunately, the effect is that the grasping part of your fingers now happens to be on the opposite side of the wall of force from the rest of you.

Ut feugiat arcu eu ligula. Donec nibh magna, volutpat nec, imperdiet nec, viverra congue, lorem. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Fusce vestibulum vulputate sem. Maecenas id augue eget est pharetra viverra. Nam dapibus mollis enim. Integer viverra sapien ac mi. Cras at urna quis ligula nonummy fringilla. Nullam odio est, dictum et, aliquam sed, imperdiet eget, nibh. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae;

Walls of Force are impenetrable to other forces and objects, such as your fingers' attempt to stop you from being pulled off by the other force which necessitated the clinging. Therefore, you fall under the influence of that other force....but walls of force are impenetrable. Your fingers, on the opposite side of the wall, cannot be pulled along with you, because that would necessitate it passing through the wall of force. So they stay there, and your fingers are thus cut off.

Sed sit amet dolor. In ultricies. Nullam quis mi quis diam varius ultricies. Mauris ac ante id lacus posuere iaculis. Aliquam et turpis in ipsum rutrum ornare. Vestibulum in magna. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. In vel dolor. Maecenas pede wisi, auctor aliquet, aliquam in, fermentum quis, dui. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; In at sem sed leo tincidunt egestas.

It's immovable. It's impenetrable, which means it's infinitely strong, because if it were not infinitely strong, then a finite force would be able to penetrate it, thereby meaning it's not impenetrable.

Nam fringilla nibh eget wisi. Nulla facilisi. Aenean mattis, elit ac bibendum dictum, dolor arcu laoreet risus, in consequat eros wisi ac ligula. Donec sit amet libero. Sed sit amet dolor. Cras suscipit, sapien a scelerisque cursus, nibh wisi varius magna, in aliquet eros nibh sed lorem. Quisque aliquet tempus est.

It's infinitely hard, because it's completely immovable in all parts, and therefore perfectly rigid and cannot be bent, scratched, or chipped by anything. It's an immovable, impenetrable plane. Impenetrable planes, of course, happen to be the exact description of a perfect razor.

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Actually, in a collision where you just stop moving, what you have is the ideal inelastic collision with an immobile object of effectively infinite mass. Your kinetic energy can't be transferred to the object at all, and as a result, this kinetic energy becomes painfully converted into damage to you. It's very much like splatting into the Earth, only without the Earth moving a little bit.

Aliquam blandit porttitor risus. Nullam vel eros at libero volutpat egestas. In at enim. Aliquam diam. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos. Vivamus a nulla sed velit vestibulum egestas.

Still, the splatting has to be conserved somehow, and therefore becomes that much more damage to you. Unless you're suggesting that somebody falling onto a wall of force as a result of gravity alteration or being hurled incurs absolutely no damage.

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Alternative interpretations offered include that the wall of force dispels when this happens, because it is no longer unbroken....except that walls of force are impenetrable, and such a thing would violate the impenetrability. Yet, as planes, they're also two-dimensional, so offer no resistance to vertical motion into the edge.

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Or whatever.

 

[hong]

Next question:
WANGERS of Force are WANGER. Does this mean they would be WANGER under true WANGER or see WANGER, or are they WANGER by virtue of being devoid of any WANGER form, and therefore remain WANGER ?

Whatever redux.

 

[Hypersmurf]

I would think it would be hard to hang on a wall of force, since Walls of Force are vertical.

He doesn't mean "clinging to" a Wall of Force.

Think about a ten-foot wall from an obstacle course. You jump, you reach, you catch the top of the wall, and you haul yourself up, right?

In the moment after you catch but before you haul, you are hanging from the wall. Your fingers are over the top.

If you try that with a corrugated iron fence, you'll probably slice your fingers fairly badly, with all your weight hanging on them over a relatively sharp edge.

So the question posed is "What happens if you dangle from the top of a Wall of Force by your fingertips?"

Frank says "Eventually your arms get tired" - not "Your fingers get sliced off by the 'edge' of the two-dimensional plane".

-Hyp.

 

[Darklone]

Can you climb a Wall of Force with Spiderclimb ?

*just to add another willynilly question*

 

[kreynolds]

Except for that vertical part.

I don't think he meant turning it on it's "edge". Could be wrong though.