Create Pit and Wall of Stone


Advice

Grand Lodge

How would you call this situation?

A mage casts Create pit (or similar spell) and an enemy falls into it. The following round, the mage casts Wall of Stone over the pit, effectively leaving, lets say, and inch above the surface of the pit, and uses the rest of the spell's area of effect to reinforce the wall.

What happens when the Create Pit spell ends and the enemy is lifted back up?

Auto-death? Crushing damage? The GM casts NoClip? STR check to burst through with crushing damage each round (what if it's the spell Spiked Pit)? I can't find any rules or similar situations that might apply outside of a crushing wall trap, or possibly when you teleport yourself into a wall.

What if you had to call this for a PFS game?

Grand Lodge

Crunch

Shadow Lodge

GM casts no-clip


I would not allow autodeath.

I don't know how I would run it.

I understand how the logical conclusion works to reach an autodeath sentence, but as a GM I simply do not allow such powerful combinations.

There is not an official ruling on how it works.

Liberty's Edge

There is GM fiat, pure and simple.

I would use something like teleportation mishap rules. Same school at least. This means 1d6 damage and shunted to a nearby open space.

Dimension Door Snippet wrote:
If you arrive in a place that is already occupied by a solid body, you and each creature traveling with you take 1d6 points of damage and are shunted to a random open space on a suitable surface within 100 feet of the intended location.

This could create a tactical blunder for yourself if the enemy is shunted... right next to the cheeky caster. (Not recommending that, but random is sometimes an a-hole.)

Grand Lodge

I'd let it kill them. If they are doing it lower levels they are wasting 2 spells in a single combat to get a few.

Later when they are facing foes with teleport, D. Door, and can't fit in the Pit you will not have to deal with it. Reward him for creativity and eventually he will move on to another spell combo or signature spell. Sure it defeats a few encounters. There will be more. This shouldn't be you versus them...you don't like that little trick so lets take or make it less effective than it really would be.

There would be a str check. Good luck to medium and smaller creatures but it sure wouldn't work as against a massive str character. It would certainly hurt him bursting through it but it wouldn't be lethal. But against a pack of wolves or what not....squish....

Grand Lodge

I agree with the earlier posters as it shouldn't be an instant death trap although it may preclude them from climbing out before the end of the spell duration.

Another issue is the area surrounding the 10' wide pit. The adjacent 5' are at a heavy slant meaning the wall has 20' unsupported span. If memory serves the spell must be in contact with stone so it has to be wider than this to connect appropriately. Since the gap is 20' it must be arched or buttressed, either way leaving a way out when the pit ends, although they would be prone and have to crawl out which is perhaps worse than being shunted dimension door style.

So, the question is what do you as the GM want to happen? I don't think there is clear consensus regarding this combination.

Sovereign Court

One thing of note - Wall of Stone would need to be cast with at least a caster level of 24 to make it work. It's need to cover the pit entirely -10' by 10'-, and go beyond the sloping edges of it as well (they wouldn't count as existing stone) -10'- in addition to needing to add some extra length for the extra arcing to get it off the ground.

And at that length, (over 20 feet by 10ft - however little over 20ft in length it is) it'd need to be arched and buttressed, reducing the spell's area by 1/2. Since each 5x5 square takes a caster level normally, the total 30x10 arched & buttressed would require a caster level of 24. And it might be too far off the ground then to provide the desired *crunch*.

Since if requires a CL of 24 - the whole thing would, in most games, be a non-issue. And by the time CL24 spells become an issue - I don't think that a stone wall would last very long if either side didn't want it to. Nor would anyone or anything stay in the pit long enough for the *crunch* aspect to happen.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

I'd treat them as being buried alive. A wall of stone is not too dissimilar from a bunch of really large boulders in a landslide.


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The create pit spells create an extra dimensional pit on a horizontal surface. If you change where the surface is, through wall of stone or something similar, you don't cover the pit, you just change (slightly) where it opens.

Grand Lodge

Ravingdork wrote:
I'd treat them as being buried alive. A wall of stone is not too dissimilar from a bunch of really large boulders in a landslide.

If the caster chose not to buttress the wall, I would consider this as a potential outcome as the wall broke the round after casting, doing damage as a localized avalanche. This comes with the understanding that beating a DC 15 reflex means they can crawl out after suffering a few bruises. Since this defeats the main objective of the pit (crowd control) it makes this combination situational at best.


I'd have the trapped creatures take as as having a Wall of Iron fall on you (10d6) before breaking the wall.

This exact spell combo has been discussed in lots of threads. Why not run a search and see what’s been said before?


Here's the earlier discussion on this topic.

-TimD

Grand Lodge

Charon's Little Helper wrote:

One thing of note - Wall of Stone would need to be cast with at least a caster level of 24 to make it work. It's need to cover the pit entirely -10' by 10'-, and go beyond the sloping edges of it as well (they wouldn't count as existing stone) -10'- in addition to needing to add some extra length for the extra arcing to get it off the ground.

And at that length, (over 20 feet by 10ft - however little over 20ft in length it is) it'd need to be arched and buttressed, reducing the spell's area by 1/2. Since each 5x5 square takes a caster level normally, the total 30x10 arched & buttressed would require a caster level of 24. And it might be too far off the ground then to provide the desired *crunch*.

Since if requires a CL of 24 - the whole thing would, in most games, be a non-issue. And by the time CL24 spells become an issue - I don't think that a stone wall would last very long if either side didn't want it to. Nor would anyone or anything stay in the pit long enough for the *crunch* aspect to happen.

Good point. Sort of a non-issue for PFS then. I appreciate the responses! I guess my players will have to stick with fireballing/bombing the pit's inhabitants.

@TimD, thanks for the link. I did a quick search, but didn't see anything. It must have been buried a bit deeper than I looked.


Wall of Ice works better than Wall of Stone. It specifies what happens when you break through it, and as it isn't an autokill most GMs are ok with it. Just like the Spectral Hand + Stone Shape autokill/autotrap, it relies on using common sense to subvert game logic and is very unfun to be on the receiving end of.

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