Planeshaper Epuic Destiny question

[Starfox]

Planeshaper Epic Destiny
Shape Reality (30th level): Your transcendent understanding of the universe empowers you with the ability to bend and warp your environment. You gain an aura 10 that allows you to reshape reality as you see fit. During your turn, you can alter the environment in any of the following ways by spending a minor action:
• Change the temperature. Creatures that start their turns within your aura automatically take 15 cold damage or 15 fire damage (your choice). You can spend another minor action to return the temperature to normal, eliminating this damaging effect.
• Permanently transform any squares of difficult terrain within your aura into normal terrain.
• Permanently transform any squares of normal terrain within your aura into difficult terrain.
• Create breathable air in any or all squares.
• Fill 9 unoccupied squares with a solid surface, such as stone or wood. If you fill a square with a solid surface that is not attached to another surface (in other words, you create a stone slab 5 squares up in the air), the surface hovers in place.

Bolded the most interesting part.

Can I use this power to completely fill a cube of volume?

"Fill 9 unoccupied squares with a solid surface" is nonsence to anyopne with a bit of mathematical familiarity; no amount of surface can fill a volume. What does it mean? The easiest interpretation is that it can only be used to create ridges, sloping raps, and free-floating platforms, but is this the intention?

 

[Oompa]

Well it says 9 unoccupied squares.. within the reach of the aura.. so as long the square is unoccupied.. you can fill it.. it does not say anything about that the squares have to be next to eachother horizontal..

 

[Moon_Goddess]

Unfortuinatly to anyone who has an understanding of mathematics. The rules assume that world is a 2 dimensional grid thus 9 squares makes sense.

When dealing in 3 dimensions the rules assume that each "square" is 5' tall.

 

[Tuft]

"Fill 9 unoccupied squares with a solid surface" is nonsence to anyopne with a bit of mathematical familiarity; no amount of surface can fill a volume.

Not if you look upon it gamistically instead of simulationistically. The world is the map. A square on a map is a surface. It may represent a three-dimensional volume, but on the game board it is a two-dimensional surface.

What the power enables you to do, is simply to create squares of floor where there weren't any before.

"Fill" can simply mean that you have to do complete map squares, no partials, and "solid surface" can mean that it all has to be floor, so no traps, trapdoors, illusory floors, quicksand, etc.

"Unoccupied" means that you cannot put floor where there are walls etc on the map, so no tunneling.

 

[Cormacolinde]

Actually, I've been having fun drumming up the fact that the D&D world is a non-euclidean 3D space, as the pythagorean theorem doesn't hold up in it. i.e. the length of the hypothenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the two other sides, instead of the squared values like in the Euclidean 3D space in which we live. The real Universe is as far as we know a non-euclidean 4D space-time manifold, of course, but in 3D euclidean geometry holds up rather well as long as you're not near a singularity (black hole) or going too fast (like near the speed of light).

In fact, it's like the 3D world of tactical D&D was actually the 3D "surface" of a 4D sphere, which is called "elliptic geometry". It's not unlike the actual surface of the earth modeled in maps which is actually the surface of a 3D sphere. Euclidean geometry holds for small areas but for greater ones, it doesn't.

 

[Starfox]

Actually, I've been having fun drumming up the fact that the D&D world is a non-euclidean 3D space, as the pythagorean theorem doesn't hold up in it. i.e. the length of the hypothenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the two other sides...

Isn't the hypotenuse equal to the longer of the two sides in 4E? There is no sum involved.

 

[DracoSuave]

Sigh.


The terms 'surface' and 'volume' aren't restricted to mathematical terminology.

It's normal english, and it makes sense. Move along.