Toppling Create Wall

[hcobb]

Cut down a large tree and from this carve out a single post four feet by four feet square and forty feet long.

Place this over a large boulder with eight feet of it extending over and the rest leaning against the ground.

On the end of the long end fasten or carve out a bowl and place a one foot diameter iron ball resting in this bowl.

Now Create Wall (summoning 14 short tons of mass from thin air) onto the tip of the short end of the post past the boulder.

What happens?

[Shostak]

You get a wall resting on the ground with the masonry conforming to the shape of the log.

[Skarg]

You get a magic Wall, i.e. a force field that lasts for 1 minute and has no weight and so can't be used to create mechanical energy via gravity.

[larsdangly]

I'm good with letting you launch a catapult this way. It is crazy and goofy, but why not? Cubic yards of rock is cubic yards of rock. And anyway, it's a game so it should be fun.

[Steve Plambeck]

Illusions aren't supposed to interact with inanimate objects, but I don't think of Walls as illusions. I think it's a summoned Wall. The Fire hex burns anything thrown in, doesn't it? The Shadow hex blocks photons. I think these are all summoned things -- just "cheap" summonings that don't cost 1 ST every turn.

I think I'd allow the catapult to work. larsdangly is right, it's too much fun not to!

So every time we Create Wall, is there a temporary hole in a larger wall somewhere? What if it was taken from a dike or dam? Oh my.

[Skarg]

It might be "fun", but if you have clever creative players, you'll sooner or later run into needing to know what the limits are. e.g.:

* Where can you Create a wall - what's the minimum support under it needed to Create it there?

* Can you create them just barely balanced at the top of staircases so you can easily tip them over down the staircase?

* What ST is required to tip a created wall over? Does the slope of the ground it is on matter?

* Can you make them cylindrical so you can get them rolling like a steamroller?

* Can you use them as reusable boulders to crush people below from the top of a castle wall?

* Can you build a siege weapon designed to hurl them as ammo?

* What if a mechanician designs various machines designed to be powered by created walls created inside the mechanism? e.g. a lightweight trebuchet where the weight providing the orce is designed to be provided by a created wall. Or a very tall mechanism designed to harvest power from a descending weight - since Create Wall doesn't care about conservation of energy, this could potentially create a LOT of mechanical energy.

[zot]

Originally Posted by Skarg

It might be "fun", but if you have clever creative players, you'll sooner or later run into needing to know what the limits are. e.g.:

* Where can you Create a wall - what's the minimum support under it needed to Create it there?

* Can you create them just barely balanced at the top of staircases so you can easily tip them over down the staircase?

* What ST is required to tip a created wall over? Does the slope of the ground it is on matter?

* Can you make them cylindrical so you can get them rolling like a steamroller?

* Can you use them as reusable boulders to crush people below from the top of a castle wall?

* Can you build a siege weapon designed to hurl them as ammo?

* What if a mechanician designs various machines designed to be powered by created walls created inside the mechanism? e.g. a lightweight trebuchet where the weight providing the orce is designed to be provided by a created wall. Or a very tall mechanism designed to harvest power from a descending weight - since Create Wall doesn't care about conservation of energy, this could potentially create a LOT of mechanical energy.

p22, " Creates a solid wall in one hex – looks like a real wall"
p139, "A solid Wall is just that – a magically created wall, about 10 feet high"

p22 implies that it is not a "real" wall but p139 seems to imply that it is, in fact, a wall. The "lack of reality", to me, just means that it's going to disappear soon.

You could say that its material has weight in our world or that it doesn't. A GM could rationalize either position because we're talking about magic spells in a world where summoning from "other worlds" is common. I think it's completely reasonable to say that the wall is actually a section of an infinite, giant, squiggly wall from another world and it's not actually resting on anything in Cidri. If you break it, a chunk could fall off or a hole could just appear in it, depending on how you want them to behave. Maybe you can't tip a wall, just break it.

I think the important thing is to have a consistent idea of how they behave.

[MikMod]

It is Create Wall, not Create Boulder.

I think I'd have to rule that walls are stable things, so you need to create it on a solid surface - something that could easily support this Wall.

Otherwise I can see a lot of massive stone blocks appearing to crush people as a really common tactic. Giving people what? One saving throw or they're dead? Sounds unbalanced. The purpose of the spell is to manipulate terrain and block passage, not provide another death spell.

Can you imagine what you could do with a 7-Hex wall if you could crush things with it ?!

[hcobb]

Summon Giant costs more and only weighs a ton.

Now to calculate how many joules I'd get out of a minute long one-hex fire summoned inside a boiler.

[Steve Plambeck]

I summoned chow mien for dinner, but I was hungry again in 12 turns.