NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cognomen's Cassowary" data-source="post: 7081131" data-attributes="member: 6801445">Fair answer, but two things. First, your position still requires a fairly big assumption about how the gravitational interaction passes a barrier that either cannot be modeled in physics or has exceptional physical properties with unknowable ramifications. The occupant only accelerates downward if the force of gravity is acting on it (and perhaps only if he or she uses an action to push the sphere downward). It may be that the potential energy ceases to exist at the moment that the sphere appears. (Remember that it's magic; it can violate the law of conservation of energy.)More to the point, that explanation only covers half the energy. Under normal circumstances, a fall results in this: the action of the body hitting, and the reaction of the ground resisting the hit. Or, if you prefer, the body accelerating downward due to gravity and then accelerating upward ("decelerating") due to the immense mass and rigidity of the ground.So. The sphere explicitly cannot pass energy or physical objects. This means that it cannot pass the momentum of the falling occupant to the ground (action), and cannot pass the inertia of the ground to the occupant (reaction). The interaction (the collision) therefore cannot happen. You have the downward acceleration of the fall without the upward acceleration of stopping. Thus I say that you have half the energy that you need.So what happens in this situation? We have no clue, because the laws of physics are not mutable in our universe. The sphere may allow the occupant to fall through the ground, since the sphere has no reason to stop if the occupant does not stop. The two may "fall" out of their reality entirely. The sphere stopping of its own accord and the occupant going splat against the inside are not consistent with the spell's description.First, magic can alter gravity, so Oofta's formula does not prove masslessness. Second, what Oofta has given is one convention for the use of the word "weight," which does not really correlate with a use of the word "weightless." By his standard, nothing (except some particles) could be weightless in our universe unless infinitely distant from all other bodies. Yet surely you have used and heard used the word "weightless" in your life and understood its meaning to be practical. A person floating in the Red Sea or an astronaut in orbit might be "weightless" in everyday speech, but those individuals continue to both have mass and be affected by gravity. So I keep saying that he is not correct because the convention he uses to define "weight" is not in keeping with the common-language design philosophy of 5th edition.Okay.Thanks for condescending. You're so very smart.Close enough to what the spell description says that I'm willing to go with it.This is something of a matter of interpretation, depending on how literally one takes the "nothing" in the spell description. I would also add the qualification that the occupant obeys normal physical laws except where that would violate the functioning of the spell given in the description.This is the sphere acting in a physically realistic way, as we just agreed that it doesn't need to.As is this, in a way that is pretty damaging to the point you are trying to make.This is exactly why it is impossible to make the case that the occupant would take falling damage. Neither the ground nor the occupant is interacting with a physical object, so to play it such that the outcome is essentially the same as if the two physical objects interacted with each other is, I would say, a violation of the functioning of the spell as given in its description.I don't have a problem with a reading of the sphere as a spherical wall of force, but, as I roughed out earlier, its terminal velocity would be around 25-30 miles per hour, so the occupant would never go splat in a terribly energetic way. If it falls at all. The mobility of the sphere, as I keep saying, might be entirely a magical effect, and it might freely resist gravity, just as the wall of force does.Sidetracked. It can be a spherical wall of force, but I don't think that it is consistent with the other effects of the spell to say that the occupant would take falling damage, because what the spell does, however it does it, is to separate the occupant from the outside world and protect him or her from damage. It is easy enough to say that the magic absorbs the impact.</blockquote>

Verification