How the Immovable Rod can DESTROY a D&D Campaign

Moral of the story: Every magic item is as broken as the Dungeon Master allows it to be! Yes, this does get pretty unhinged by the end. But isn’t that the true spirit of D&D? 😅 Let me know your thoughts on all of the above! Cheers.

Immovable rod is anchored to the planet as a reference so that last example wouldn't have worked otherwise it'd anchor like that any other time it's used and kill everything around it.

With that last example, remember that the planet is also moving through space, not just around its star, but also around its galactic center. If the immovable rod worked the way this player wanted, then each rod would be usable only once before instantly disappearing into the depths of space or being destroyed as it smashes into the planet's surface. Doesn't seem like an item any wizard would bother to make.

In a joke oneshot, my players entered the workshop of an insane artificer who'd made tons of humorously useless magic items. One of which was the immovable shield. It had no switch off mode and permanently inconvenience hovered in the middle of the hallway half-blocking one of the main doors.

I like the idea that the rod adopts the frame of reference of the user, so "immovable" simply means it continues with the momentum the player has at a round of 0 movement.

The last scenario makes the rod utterly useless as an immovable rod, and so this simply does not happen The rest are just players being inventive and I would allow them to, mostly they would work, sometimes an enemy would be expecting this ...

My group is full of a bunch of aerospace engineers and the DM specializes in astrodynamics so when we got the immovable rod we had to choose at that point which reference frame to fix it and then we could not change it later. So you essentially had to choose whether you were going to have a super-weapon or something that would be useful in a number of situations

For the last one, my response would have been, "Ha! You think this is a heliocentric solar system? You think this world ROTATES???"

I think for my games, I'm going to account for this by saying that the immovable rod technically moves. It's not possible for an object to be absolutely stationary when all movement is relative. What happens when you press the button on the rod is it becomes locked into the velocity of the person who pushed the button. That means if you activate it on a ship, the rod will travel alongside the ship at the exact same speed as when it was activated. This will only become a problem once the ship changes its speed or direction.

I would only ever allow the 'Orbital Strike' Immovable rod, to be a 'cursed' immovable rod, and completely indistinguishable from a 'true' immovable rod (which works on a geo-reference frame) until activated. It would probably be known in-game as the Extremely Movable Rod.

I just like the idea of having two immovable rods and using them as mobile monkey bars/ climbing holds in a heist or infiltration scenario.

6:54 fun fact: pathfinder has a variation of the immovable rod called the "immovable arm" which seems to be made exactly for this purpose. It is, as the name says, a prosthetic arm with an immovable rod worked into it. It even has rules to discover the button!

On the Tarrasque: "You damned well know that's not what the game creators meant by being fixed in space. Try to Rules Lawyer me again and your character is facing an unstatted deity"

The problem here is more the Rulings of the DM, rather than the Immovable Rod itself.

The rod assumes that the point of reference for its lack of movement is the planet, so the rod and the terrasque are both being carried by the planet at the same speed. So the last scenario obviously cannot work.

When the Owlin came out I rolled one up for a one shot and used an immovable rod as a "put it anywhere bird perch". It was fantastic. I can't remember if we fudged the activation and deactivation being a full action or bonus or what but I wasn't doing any of these over the top abuses, just had a cute little owl fly around and then perch on the rod wherever they wanted. Pretty sure I was using that psychic rogue class too so they could snipe enemies with psychic damage from range. It was a lot of fun.

Pfft. No u can't save the rod. U got tossed across the cell when 90K pounds of sea water shoot into the boat u just decided to scuttle

Milkbeard might have had the rod pinning him down, but the shallow water terrain of an ocean implies that what is beneath him is sand, which is very easy to dig out, slipping out from under the rod, therefore saving him from drowning.

That last one is basically “how to turn your DM into a flat-Feruner”

Great video! So hilarious you covered this item. I'm currently at the end of the third party campaign "Call From The Deep" and the Bard of the group took this item. We all raised out eyebrows because it seemed so random. I believe the DM let the length be 3 feet. I can't remember the exact details, but I believe he attached the rod to the ship's anchor, activated the rod, dropped said anchor and caused our ship to do an almost instant u-turn to which we were able to wreck the other ship. It was such an amazing sequence of events. So many uses for the item when you actually think about it.