Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

What spell level is the drow levitation discs? And how much weight can they take?

Empoweredfan wrote:What spell level is the drow levitation discs? And how much weight can they take?

The spell is Tenser's Floating Disc:

"You create a slightly concave, circular plane of force that follows you about and carries loads for you. The disk is 3 feet in diameter and 1 inch deep at its center. It can hold 100 pounds of weight per caster level. (If used to transport a liquid, its capacity is 2 gallons.) The disk floats approximately 3 feet above the ground at all times and remains level. It floats along horizontally within spell range and will accompany you at a rate of no more than your normal speed each round. If not otherwise directed, it maintains a constant interval of 5 feet between itself and you. The disk winks out of existence when the spell duration expires. The disk also winks out if you move beyond range or try to take the disk more than 3 feet away from the surface beneath it. When the disk winks out, whatever it was supporting falls to the surface beneath it. "

Evocation [Force]
Level: Sor/Wiz 1
Components: V, S, M
Casting time: 1 standard action
Range: Close (25 ft. + 5 ft./2 levels)
Effect: 3-ft.-diameter disk of force
Duration: 1 hour/level
Saving Throw: None
Spell Resistance: No

How does fire damage correspond to heat/temperature of the flame?

For example, if a creature has fire dr of 10, how much heat can it tolerate? (temperature)

NegInfinity wrote:How does fire damage correspond to heat/temperature of the flame?

For example, if a creature has fire dr of 10, how much heat can it tolerate? (temperature)

Assuming that it is "normal" fire and we apply what we know IRL about fire we know it needs three things - oxygen, fuel, and heat. An increase in any or all of these elements means the fire burns hotter i.e. why you fan the campfire flames to get them going. Let's say you have a campfire going and it is about 400 degrees. If you put a bar of lead in it, it will melt - lead melts at about 327 degrees. If you put a bar of titanium in it, it will get hot, but it won't melt - it's melting point is about 1668 degrees. To put it in game terms, if a creature has a natural and/or magical resistance to fire, the fire will have to burn hotter in order to harm them.
I can't give you a more specific answer because I have no idea how to do the math when it comes to factoring magic or natural resistance into the equation but IG mechanics would have the creature suffer less or no damage from a "normal" fire (from a torch, or campfire, or even being set on fire) and damage reduction from magical fires - the "hotter" the fire the more damage it would do.

Ark

Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone! Monday is the holiday and I'll be travelling to friends' places for good food and drink, and outstanding company. We have a massive PnP DnD game planned for Saturday that should last into the wee small hours of Sunday that yours truly will be DMing. I hope to get IG here at some point - watch out for Death Turkey's, Killer Rabbits, and Spam Pigs!


ps Yes, I know a lot of you will be thinking that it is NOT Thanksgiving weekend where you are, but here in Canada, it is. Have a good one everybody.

Old Ark

Its a safe assumption that Faerun has such things as oxygen and fire that burns oxygen. Several novel authors portray fires burning out because they consume all the air, or run out of fuel. And that they can be doused with water.

It is when they throw in magical elements that common-sense ceases to apply (That's why it's magic). Elemental fire does not appear to need oxygen or fuel for example. But magically created regular fire does. This creates an interesting distinction between [Fire] descriptor conjuration and evocation spells.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone! Monday is the holiday and I'll be travelling to friends' places for good food and drink, and outstanding company. We have a massive PnP DnD game planned for Saturday that should last into the wee small hours of Sunday that yours truly will be DMing. I hope to get IG here at some point - watch out for Death Turkey's, Killer Rabbits, and Spam Pigs!

Enjoy the magic

DM Ioulaum wrote:Its a safe assumption that Faerun has such things as oxygen and fire that burns oxygen. Several novel authors portray fires burning out because they consume all the air, or run out of fuel. And that they can be doused with water.

It is when they throw in magical elements that common-sense ceases to apply (That's why it's magic). Elemental fire does not appear to need oxygen or fuel for example. But magically created regular fire does. This creates an interesting distinction between [Fire] descriptor conjuration and evocation spells.

Happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone! Monday is the holiday and I'll be travelling to friends' places for good food and drink, and outstanding company. We have a massive PnP DnD game planned for Saturday that should last into the wee small hours of Sunday that yours truly will be DMing. I hope to get IG here at some point - watch out for Death Turkey's, Killer Rabbits, and Spam Pigs!

Enjoy the magic

*is being pedantic*

Novels are not exactly official source of lore, and example you gave simply means that some sorts of fire require air. It doesn't mean there's any oxygen in that air, or that standard chemical element "oxygen" exists in faerun.

Regarding example you gave, if conjurer whisked away (from elemental plane of fire, for example) magical fire, then it will have same properties as evocation-based one.

I understand the sentiment. The normal order to determine authority of Forgotten Realms material is Source book > Novel > Game. But in practice this is not accurate because Ed Greenwood (the creator) writes both source books and novels, and his novels sometimes elucidate on things contained in source books that you wouldn't otherwise have understood. Or they introduce new things all together, or replace old events or mechanics.

While a great many things might be different in the Forgotten Realms, we can rely on the creator (Ed) to tell us what isn't. And part of what he has told us is that fire consumes air and is doused by water. So Ed is building the Forgotten realms based on the laws of nature in our world mixed with magical fantasy. Its safe to assume that our real world natural laws apply unless Ed contradicts that. But ofcourse no character in our world knows higher level physics or quantum physics etc..

Its a challenge for him and his fellow writers to remain consistent. By staying away from the details they make sure they don't write themselves into a quandary. And the vagueness also befits the settings, because secrecy and hidden knowledge are a core theme of the Forgotten Realms. Its pretty clever. Most of us don't catch on to that, even though its in the title.

Going on a tangent, Warhammer is also a pretty clever setting because of the model of awareness that it uses to explain beings (demons) in the Warp. That model is based on a attention to awareness cognition, a theory of cognition for human beings, except reversed for their setting. So that beings in the warp are sentient like human beings because they manage to manifest attention in the physical universe there, which ripples into the warp where their awareness manifests. While humans there are sentient because they are somehow tied with the warp in their physical bodies.

Attention - awareness cognition is a difficult model to explain in a single paragraph. What it means is that awareness is tied to attention, the ability to direct attention and broaden or narrow it. Its also used in conjunction with AI programming. The idea in literature often that there is a deus ex machina sort of link between the human brain and some universal process or energy which causes awareness. Warhammer reverse applies that concept.

Arkanis, who is your favourite deity within the Forgotten Realms setting and why?

Arkanis,

How do you feel about the balance 5E has brought to the ridiculousness that was 3.5E spellcasting?

DM Ioulaum wrote: And part of what he has told us is that fire consumes air and is doused by water. So Ed is building the Forgotten realms based on the laws of nature in our world mixed with magical fantasy. Its safe to assume that our real world natural laws apply unless Ed contradicts that.

Not really.

If you have similar-looking effect in two different worlds, it does not mean that mechanics behind those effects are similar. Assuming that they are is jumping to conclusion. So just because faerun water can douse faerun fire, it doesn't mean that this water is h2o, and fire is chemical reaction that uses oxygen. Perhaps, there is actual element "water". Or perhaps water douses fire because in this particular instance amount of power of istishia was greater that amount of power of kossuth present on this location. (Kossuth has ability to feel any fire 17 days prior to the moment it happens).

In real world, for example, gravity and magnetism act in somewhat similar fashion. However, forces behind those events are different.

Hidennka wrote:Arkanis, who is your favourite deity within the Forgotten Realms setting and why?

This is an easy one for me, although I think I have two to be honest.

1. Tempus. Ya gotta love the god of war and I like to think of him as that barbarian guy on the battlefield swinging his axe killing friend and foe alike indiscriminately. *sigh*
2. Talos. In a PnP campaign twenty years ago we decided to make a party of exclusively CE toons. I played a priest of Bane, and a buddy of mine a priest of Talos. Oh my word. Maybe one of the most memorable campaigns ever as he would walk through towns casting death magic on random people (not out in the open of course) and we laid waist to a fair sized town before we were finally taken out. Good times.

Ruffstuff wrote:Arkanis,

How do you feel about the balance 5E has brought to the ridiculousness that was 3.5E spellcasting?

I'll be honest I haven't had the time to thoroughly go through 5E yet as I am running a large Ruin of the Undermountain PnP campaign that is eating up my weekends. I never played 4E and I never bothered to buy 3.5E source materials figuring they were close enough to 3E. The rules in my PnP world are more like suggestions so my players don't spend all of their time "lawyering" me with them, and it allows for more creative role play rather than cut and dry gaming.
I always play at a fairly high fantasy level too so extra-ordinary magical events are not unheard of in my game - like the weapons shop in Hill's Edge that exploded when the Drow in the party put a bag of holding over a wizard eye... priceless. Not necessarily 100% accurate in terms of "rules" but a lot of fun.

I don't think this answers your question though. Let me do some research and I'll get back to you.

Ark

Arkanis,

Do sheep get static cling when they rub against one another? Can this cause fires or shock an unwary adventurer?

DM Ioulaum wrote:Arkanis,

Do sheep get static cling when they rub against one another? Can this cause fires or shock an unwary adventurer?

I had to call a buddy of mine who has sheep on his farm about this one. He was a little puzzled so I asked him if he could rub a couple of his ewes together (they didn't like it apparently) and it produced no static. I told him that maybe it was a male/female thing, but he said that his ram wasn't interested in participating in our test... He (Rasputin... dumb name, but not my Ram) is a little mean apparently. Anyhow, I then called another buddy of mine who works at the National Research Council and we talked about "electrostatic discharge" or "ESD" for about twenty minutes. (Apparently static electricity is a cause of ESD... who knew?) I learned a lot about protons, electrons, and the creation of an electrostatic field. When I finally got around to asking him about sheep he paused and laughed. He thinks that sheep fur/wool is too damp to allow a field to form (dry air/surfaces are better for generating it) and that they probably wouldn't be very good conductors of static electricity. Then I asked him, "OK but what if we lived in a world where the was magic, and magical creatures?" This was met with silence, then a cough, then a sigh, and he asked me, "This is about that game you play, right?" To which we both laughed. He said that he would leave the magical machinations to me on that score. I've had other questions before about how the laws of nature/physics work/differ between the real world and the FR in the past and it usually engenders a lively debate. I would conclude that if sheep in the Realms had a predilection to electricity, that is to say somehow they mutated/were cross bred with a magical, electrical creature, that they could indeed generate an electrical field. Given their low INT I would surmise that it would be an innate ability, and used mainly in self defense. In larger numbers sheep of this magical breed, when startled/frightened/threatened could potentially cause a lot of electrical damage collectively which would prove interesting in the outcome - lightning bolt? Some kind of shock wave? Would they be immune to their own magical effects, or would it fry them as well? All interesting points to consider...