To paraphrase in our own words, this one goes a little something like:
Player: I cast Immovable Object on the BBEG’s pants. Distance spell so I don’t need to touch him.
DM: Okay, but I don’t think it can be worn, held or carried.
Player: Nope, read it. No saving throw either. I’m going to up cast it to 6th level to make it permanent.
DM: Okay... well, he’ll just wiggle out.
Player: Not done yet. Action Surge: Distant Spell Immovable Object at 6th level on his tunic. He can make a Strength check to move them, but is otherwise trapped. Oh, and the target number is 26. Then I’ll cast Suggestion telling him he needs to struggle to escape his Immovable Pants... forever!
DM: [groans]
Sound ridiculous? You know it does! How ridiculous is it, though, and could we make all this reasonable and even workable?
Immovable?
We can all agree this sounds pretty ridiculous right? The most important thing to note right off is that this comes from the Explorer’s Guide to Wildmount. That happens to be a semi-third party sourcebook created by Matt Mercer and the Critical Role team, and published by Wizards of the Coast. Anything created by an independent third party should already be taken with a grain of salt (regardless of who publishes it), especially given that it's unlikely receive the support and updates/"arcana" that official materials do. Or, in other words, are our sources reliable? Credit where credit's due, though, on including the spell Immovable Object, which is something that's been missing from D&D... though perhaps it wasn't intended to be this powerful. The inanimate carbon rod immovable rod magic item has been in nearly every edition of D&D going back to 1974, although it was absent in the AD&D era. The rod itself isn’t without controversy. Could it, in fact, stop a planet from spinning? We’re not here to debate that at this time, though. All that aside, this is a "graviturgy" wizard spell, and in this specific use case one would need two 6th level spots to cast it. Perhaps the chart is wrong, but that looks like you'd need to be a 19th level wizard to cast that. We can handwave the distance spell as being a metamagic/feat picked up somewhere along the way, but you’ll also need a few levels to get the fighter’s Action Surge. You can also probably wave the necessity of using Suggestion, since, at that point the BBEG is pretty much yours to do with as you please. In other words, we’re talking near godlike levels for this trick, so maybe it actually should work... just not for everyone. We can still be more reasonable about this though.
Movable
So, we ask, can we make this work for gameplay at a more average table, with more average characters? Well, if we don’t care so much about making it permanent, we can shrink the requirement down to two 4th level (or 5th level) spell slots and decrease the duration to 24 hours from permanent (a pretty significant decrease, if you think about it). You can get to that at 8th level, although the check to move "immovable" items would be substantially lower. Perhaps you can get away with just one spell, though: a frozen tunic over pants seems much more difficult, if not impossible, to wiggle out of, should it become "immovable." That means we could also do away with the Action Surge requirement, which brings it down to just 7th level. That still seems pretty unreasonable, though. Suggestion, which is also a 2nd level spell like Immovable Object, has a Wisdom saving throw.... seems like one gets left out of the meme. Perhaps a dexterity saving throw to avoid the touch (or ranged touch attack). That's still fairly powerful to hold the NPC back for a full 24 hours. Of course, having Suggestion, one could just "concentrate" on that for up to 8 hours and leading the NPC to do nothing for that time, or send them on an 8 hour walk, or wild quest, or... whatever else. That would only cost you the 2nd level spell slot. You could walk them right to jail, if you want
As always, creativity should be rewarded in D&D, but we still should make our requests reasonable, and our actions economical. One can only imagine that these spell misuses only exist as rage bait, but we still need to protect the game from those who think overpowered misinterpretation is a great idea. You absolutely can make these kinds of things reasonable, though, as long as the GMs and players are working together to find the best path as a team, rather than adversaries trying to outwit each other. Until next time folks, enjoy your spells, your dice, and your tables... movable or not. (Also, stop pantsing people, you bullies!)
- A
Send questions, comments, and terrible rod jokes to neversaydice20@gmail.com.
