I just did my first read through on Lightless Depths, and I have a scientific question:While the part can survive the air pressure two miles down, how will they survive the water pressure when they flood the city when maximum dept for a human diver is about 900 feet (313 meters). I understand the whole suspend disbelief thing, but most of my players are either college students or college graduates, and I know this number won't fly. Is there a spell or magical item that will help them survive the pressure or do I need to come up with something on my own?
Play a warforged? But I imagine even they have a crush depth.
Resilient Sphere 4th level would keep you alive but it would just leave you surrounded by water until the duration ran out.
"The subject may struggle, but the sphere cannot be physically moved either by people outside it or by the struggles of those within." - Now that doesn't rule out the thing floating like a bubble since it specifically mentions people (read any creature) moving it, not other effects, but it probably means all effects.
Telekinetic Sphere 8th level can at least move, so you could certainly float to safety in that.
With Wall of Force you might be able to seal off an escape route.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 6
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I just did my first read through on Lightless Depths, and I have a scientific question:While the part can survive the air pressure two miles down, how will they survive the water pressure when they flood the city when maximum dept for a human diver is about 900 feet (313 meters). I understand the whole suspend disbelief thing, but most of my players are either college students or college graduates, and I know this number won't fly. Is there a spell or magical item that will help them survive the pressure or do I need to come up with something on my own?
You could always make the power of the tear fail slowly, rather than all it once. It must somehow be equalizing the pressure now, so it could be that the city fills because the pressure exerted by the tear is failing, rather than because it collapsed immediately.
Russ
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Well they wouldn't have the entire ocean around them pressing in on their bodies. Hopefully they'll be on their way out before they are totally immersed in it. It's not like if they stick a toe in a couple inches of water, it's going to be crushed. Also if the water pressure was that great down there, when the Tear pushed all the water away from the city, wouldn't all of the aboleth exploded from the difference in pressure?
Creative Director
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I suggest you ignore the water pressure thing entirely. If you take water pressure into account, you should also take into account that the heat at that depth (a couple miles) would make the entire place a VERY different zone. In the real world, the temperature at three miles underground is about 160º F. The Underdark, as D&D would have you believe, can't really exist in the form it exists (in the Forgotten Realms, the Underdark goes below 15 miles).
Likewise, the fact that giant bugs can't remain bugs once they get too big (they'd suffocate), invisibility makes you blind if the your eyes are invisible (otherwise the light that you use to see just passes through your eyes), dragons are too big to fly, and so on and so on more or less renders most D&D games unbelievable.
If you've got a group of players who are very scientificly minded and/or have difficulty with suspension of disbelief, the best thing to do is to simply alter the depths that we're talking about in "The Lightless Depths." Rather than being 2 or so miles down, have the caves go only a thousand feet (at most) down underground.
And let us not forget: The place is inside a sphere of the dead spirits of Olman warriors powered by Tlaloc's wrath. That probably makes certain types of science break down all on its own.
Science and D&D.
Well lets think about this one. They are in a giant cavern with the water held back....yet the cavern extends below them right. So as long as they don't have 2 miles worht of water above them, and the caverns are refiling, then they would not have that much pressure on them. (Still reading the last part of the adventure, so I could be wrong, maybe at some point the tunnel completly refill while the players are still down there? not sure).
Anyhow, how I read it, since the water is rushing it, it has no notable pressure to it, other than the pressure that is rushing it into the tunnels and chambers. So as long as the players leave, and get out of dodge as it were before the place completly refills, they should never run into more than regular water pressure.
I would agree with Mr. Jacobs though, keep your dang Darwin loving science out of my rainbow colored, hard and fast alignment, magic loving, D&D.
Also as I recall there are a few spells that either change the players into gill creatures (like polymorph) or create bubbles (as talked about above) or increase the toughness (like Bear's Endurance) and other approaches that could help a player survive in the great pressure. As I recall in the Adventure Redshore (20th level adventure from a few years back) there was talk of ocean pressures and what not.
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Creative Director
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Water pressrue is one of the hidden perils in D&D land. One of the jokes here at the office is that there's nothing living below 100 feet down in the oceans of D&D, since things below there would eventaully be killed by the pressure damage. In the core rules, there's really not much that protects anything from pressure damage, yet pressure damage is part of the game. It's frustrating.
Stormwrack addresses the issue fairly well, giving guidelines as to how creatures can become accustomed to water pressrue (but failing to explain why they don't suffer depresurization when they come up to the surface to attack people). In writing "Razing of Redshore," I had to come to terms with the fact that a part of the adventure was set miles underwater, where any creatures there would take like 250d6 points of damage per minute from the pressure. Likewise, in "Lord of the Scarlet Tide" (which also had deep underwater encounters) I had to come up with something to offer protection from water pressure.
My current favorite solution is to allow freedom of movement to grant complete protection to pressure damage. It already lets you move through water with ease, so it's a logical extension that the spell protects you from pressure damage. There are also plenty of spells & stuff in Stormwrack that address the issue.
Science and D&D don't always mix well, alas.
Water pressrue is one of the hidden perils in D&D land. One of the jokes here at the office is that there's nothing living below 100 feet down in the oceans of D&D, since things below there would eventaully be killed by the pressure damage. In the core rules, there's really not much that protects anything from pressure damage, yet pressure damage is part of the game. It's frustrating.
Do you think that Free Action would be enough to counter that?
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Creative Director
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Do you think that Free Action would be enough to counter that?Water pressrue is one of the hidden perils in D&D land. One of the jokes here at the office is that there's nothing living below 100 feet down in the oceans of D&D, since things below there would eventaully be killed by the pressure damage. In the core rules, there's really not much that protects anything from pressure damage, yet pressure damage is part of the game. It's frustrating.
I do.
If it doesn't, there needs to be SOME spell in the game to address the issue. If you use Stormwrack, you can use spells like transformation of the deeps etc. to do the same thing, but the point is that pressrue damage is in the core rules, so there should be some effect in the game that protects from it.
The way I read it, the PCs won't even get wet unless they stand around in Golismorga for 16 hours after destroying the tear.
Hehehe...I'm still thinking back to James' comments on invisibility. I keep picturing a haunted house adventure where all the furniture is being moved around, and it's really just an invisible stalker bumping into things because it can't see where it's going!
And in advance - apologies to anyone who knows a visually impaired person and hasn't got a sense of humor (as many visually impaired people have about their own condition).
The way I read it, the PCs won't even get wet unless they stand around in Golismorga for 16 hours after destroying the tear.
That is my read as well. I found the whole airbreathing thing a bigger concern. If you are worried about being crushed under two miles of water, then obviously you have already taken care of the.... *gurgle sputter sputter gurgle*.
I understand the whole suspend disbelief thing, but most of my players are either college students or college graduates, and I know this number won't fly...
It's not a suspension of disbelief thing -- real-world physics doesn't apply to D&D worlds (as well as biology, geology, et cetera, ad infinitum). Important laws are violated routinely.
IMO players should accept this simple fact and move on.
Jack
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Hehehe...I'm still thinking back to James' comments on invisibility. I keep picturing a haunted house adventure where all the furniture is being moved around, and it's really just an invisible stalker bumping into things because it can't see where it's going!
And in advance - apologies to anyone who knows a visually impaired person and hasn't got a sense of humor (as many visually impaired people have about their own condition).
Wow, hope no blind people are reading this.....
And if you are could you let me know what screen reading software you are using as I find JAWS really rubbish at handling webpages.