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[Kagus]

Speaking of DM assistance, I came across a delightful grapple jump build that is very straightforward and naturally requires a lot of leeway in being allowed to actually put it all together and use it.

Simic Hybrid Beast Barbarian, level 6 and up. That's it. Take Manta Glide and Grappling Appendages as the mutations, and if you really want to crank it up a notch, get a buddy or a feat to give yourself a casting of Jump (it's not concentration, so it's not broken by raging).

Enjoy being able to bonus-action grapple after an attack, then add the *total* of an Athletics check (with advantage, because raging) to your jump height, triple that with the Jump spell, and easily yeet yourself into the stratosphere with your unwilling passengers. This admittedly kinda caps out at 80', and that's only if you spend an action to Dash, but you're still easily hitting 40' on a normal turn. So that's 4d6 falling damage, or 8d6 (hey, it's a fireball!) on the Dash turns, and you just negate all the fall damage to yourself because it's under 100'.


I mean, sure, that character probably isn't going to exist anywhere outside of theorycrafting due to needing to 1) Be allowed to roll a Simic Hybrid Barbarian, and 2) Completely fart in the face of common sense because of the lack of real rules surrounding moving/jumping while grappling...

But it's still a fun thought!

[Loud Whispers]

Grappling is fun. Just the fact that it's useful for all characters endears the action to me; I have a frontline centaur sorceror character which is very squishy but has 16 STR and 16 CHA. Their melee attack alone or cantripts are pretty abysmal, and I get by the suboptimal stats by casting buffs or environmental spells. But when those rare moments come along where suddenly you can grapple and drag something with insane carry capacity from your heavy build & brawny feat, and it all becomes worth it.

Last session was like that. We were facing off against a vampire lord of a blood casino. Our paladin player got charmed by the vampire lord and decided to defect to him (the DM was very specific in his wording; the paladin player was not dominated and was free to act however he would provided he took no hostile action against the vampire. He decided to join the vampire. I was not amused; not because he had betrayed us, but because his character was so inconsistent - alternating between uni professor and edgy nazi scientist whenever he felt like it).

The vampire lord was already a significant threat but with the addition of a paladin giving him +5 to all saves and on demand healing, it was looking like it was going to be TPK. But by grappling the vampire lord, whose lack of thicc quads or biceps was suddenly startlingly apparent, my hasted out grapplesorcerer managed to drag him with a jump spell over the paladin and over a river of magma where my wizard and warlock allies were waiting. Our paladin player tried to misty step over to assist the vampire lord but a dispel magic from our wizard stopped him mid stride, causing him to fall into the magma below.

This paladin player was also carrying many explosives. Yet due to the DM giving him two "get out of jail free" magic items which would put you out of instant death and into death saving throws, or out of death saving throws and into 1 HP, he unfortunately was not instantly killed. This also irritated me, because one of my characters died to one shot disintegration after trying to save his character (who decided to charge into the enemy on his own despite our carefully thought out plan). The fact that he had two such items and didn't give me one was grating. The fact that he wasted two of them to assist another one of our enemies irritated me more.

Our paladin player was assisting this vampire lord so he could get the vampire lord's chainsword. Because of course our edgy paladin who doesn't even believe in any god or moral system (why even play a paladin if you have no moral code? it's like playing a druid who doesn't even know nature exists), he just believes in spiky leather, flaming whips and chainswords. The setting is light fantasy with 17th century window dressing. I make sure to drag this vampire lord and his chainsword close to some little box of WMDs and I set it off with erupting earth. Vampire is erased from existence. So is his chainsword. Paladin player is sad about this loss. Grappling saves the day yet again.

[Grim Portent]

Weird train of thought. At what point does a creature polymorphed into a loaf of bread turn back?

Bread is an object, and objects have HP, so logically it turns back at 0 HP like normal for 5e polymorph. But at what point is bread at 0 HP?

Does cutting a slice off put the loaf at 0? Does it hit 0 when fully sliced? Does it have to be eaten or burnt to hit 0? What if it gets covered in mold and rots into mush?

[IcyTea31]

Objects (capital O) are discrete, so presumably it hits 0 HP when it ceases to be a "loaf", by paradox of the heap.

Is a bread loaf with a single toast slice cut off, still a loaf? Probably.
Is a loaf with many slices cut off, still a loaf? That's fuzzy.
Is a loaf cut in half with a single cut, still a loaf? Nah, at that point I'd recategorize the halves as discrete "halves of a loaf".

A loaf with a single spot of mold is no longer food, destroying it, whereas a little bit of fire only makes it delicious, but too much destroys it. The rules say some materials may take more or less damage from certain damage types, so it makes sense.

[Cthulhu]

In the spirit of rulings not rules I would rule that being polymorphed into a normal loaf of bread would be instantly fatal even if he's turned back, but also extremely difficult, and normally you'd have to turn them into a human bread statue, identical to petrification.  Loaf-polymorph would be like lossy compression and you'd have to expend additional information to delete a large amount of information from the universe, equivalent to casting polymorph and finger of death at the same time.

I don't care what the rules say about it, if anything.

[Kagus]

Building a rogue.

Top of the magic item wishlist is Gauntlets of Ogre Power.


Yeah, this looks right.

[Loud Whispers]

Weird train of thought. At what point does a creature polymorphed into a loaf of bread turn back?

Bread is an object, and objects have HP, so logically it turns back at 0 HP like normal for 5e polymorph. But at what point is bread at 0 HP?

Does cutting a slice off put the loaf at 0? Does it hit 0 when fully sliced? Does it have to be eaten or burnt to hit 0? What if it gets covered in mold and rots into mush?

All of those would probably be 0 HP. DnD benchmark for damage is that everything >50% HP is the character doing their best to avoid danger. Everything <50% is when a character starts accruing injury, things like cuts, scrapes and bruises.
So all of these things would cause the bread to become a person again; thin slice, half slice, toasting, eating or burning - even molding is covered by other forms of damage.

[Cthulhu]

That always bugged me though.  I get the idea and it's generally a good one I think, but say you're at 45/50 hp and drink a potion, that's basically gatorade at that point right? Just restoring lost energy and pepping you up to survive another attack.  But if the same guy is at -3 hp and drinks a potion suddenly it's livesaving healing.

[MrRoboto75]

Building a rogue.

Top of the magic item wishlist is Gauntlets of Ogre Power.


Yeah, this looks right.

"Rogues are ogre-powered"

"Don't you mean overpowered?"

"What?"

[Grim Portent]

My issue is more that the idea of objects having hp breaks down with objects with 1 hp that are basically intended to be cut up and D&Ds rules for objects are so minimal as to be frustrating, though it only really comes up because of the stupid way they did polymorph in 5e. Though it is also too easy to smash stone walls with swords.

In 3.5 if you turned someone into a sandwich and then ate the sandwich they were dead.

In 5e if you turn someone into a sandwich and do basically anything to that sandwich the victim just pops up perfectly fine next to the person who was messing with the sandwich.


Odd thing is, if you smash a person that was petrified by Flesh to Stone then they stay smashed when turned back, so they're dead. But Polymorph any Object-ing someone into a statue means they just turn back and are perfectly fine if they get even partially smashed.

The 0 HP makes you revert mechanic doesn't even stop PaO being a save or die effect, you just have to turn them into an object that doesn't degrade and stick it somewhere safe rather than turning them into a toad and then stepping on them.

[MrRoboto75]

They're at 0 hp, shouldn't they just be a corpse post polymorph?

[Kagus]

Building a rogue.

Top of the magic item wishlist is Gauntlets of Ogre Power.


Yeah, this looks right.

"Rogues are ogre-powered"

"Don't you mean overpowered?"

"What?"

"Roll for Shrek attack damage"


But nah, I'm doing a funky frontline defense-oriented Swashbuckler, and have been getting a surprising amount of usage out of shoving/grappling during fights to help out the team. ...despite just having 8 STR (and getting really lucky).

Now I'm hoping to focus a little more on that to round out my utility in fights, so I'm not stuck just doing "I attack the thing" and then missing half the time. With the gauntlets, my Athletics would actually end up at +10 and make me less reliant on the super lucky rolls.


...it would also mean that I'd have kind of a funny interaction with the big beefcleric played by the somewhat thick-headed braggart in our game, in that I'd actually have more strength than the generic giant tough-guy viking who stands a head taller than my char (and who regularly makes a big deal out of being the big muscleman with his... 13 strength).

[Loud Whispers]

That always bugged me though.  I get the idea and it's generally a good one I think, but say you're at 45/50 hp and drink a potion, that's basically gatorade at that point right? Just restoring lost energy and pepping you up to survive another attack.  But if the same guy is at -3 hp and drinks a potion suddenly it's livesaving healing.

I think it still works. A bit like how bandaging your feet after a marathon and bandaging your wound after a stabbing do different things with the same thing

[MrRoboto75]

Dumb question that came up while zoning out at work...

How well would a portable hole (or equivalent dimensional space) function for the purpose of food preservation?

If it's closed, the internal temperature should equal out over time, there's no way for heat to get in, nor get out.  I should be able to stuff it with snow or ice and as long as the hole's closed it really shouldn't melt.  The air supply is also limited, but I doubt bacteria consume the air all that fast, considering a whole person can last ten minutes.  Unless you could use magic to suck/move the air out before closing it.

All things considered, all I invented was the magic beer cooler.

[Loud Whispers]

Should be pretty decent at keeping food good for a week and a bit, maybe even more. If it's packed with ice then even anaerobic fungi will have trouble proliferating