I am DMing true D&D for the first time. So far it has been one of the most fun experiences in my life. However, I have found myself in a bit of a pickle. Starting off I was very liberal in what I allowed my players to create and do, and now am seeing the problems of this break out in my world. So, now I am tightening the leash a little bit. One player in particular has a very powerful Rakshasa sorcerer and recently has started using the Mage's Magnificent Mansion spell to create a restaurant and sell the food from inside. He is trying to weave a network of mansions from different points together to create a instantaneous fast travel system. The player states that the rules are genuine, but I'm not so sure it I agree. Are there any limits to the this spell in the rules? Can he have more than one mansion at one time and can his servants leave the mansion to act as staff in an eatery?
[RPG] What are the limits of Mage’s Magnificent Mansions
dnd-3.5eproblem-playersspells
Related Solutions
Stun, Daze and similar stuff don't impede your movement...
...they make your mind funny.
While you are stunned, there's nothing holding your body to move. You just can't think right to actually do something. If you take a really hard blow to your head, that won't make your body harder to move - it will make your brain go gonzo for a few secs, before you became aware of what's really happening.
Stun is not about movement, is about senses of what's going on.
Freedom of Movement makes "your body work right", not anything else. It allows you to move, but not allows you to think. You can't think if you're dead. Or Stunned.
Paralysis don't block purely mental actions, so it don't block "thinking". Slow makes your body... well, slower, but it doesn't affect your thinking. Web is... well, a web. It hinders your body, not your mind.
Stun, Daze, Dazzle and similar stuff, on the other hand, makes your senses go wacko, so they aren't really blocking your movement. Stun never stopped you from moving, it just stopped you from thinking for a while - and since you don't think, you don't act.
So, the point is,
If something affect your senses, Freedom of Movement can't help you.
Think like a "Houdini Effect". Houdini can escape from almost anything, considering that he knows what's going on. If you throw him with a concussion inside a closed coffin... well... he will stay there.
So, to determine what Freedom of Movement removes or not, use a simple rule:
Why I can't move?
If you can't move because a spell or something is hindering your body to move, like Web, Freedom of Movement can help you.
If you can't move because a spell or something is making your brain go gonzo, like Stun, or because your body becomes something that can't normally move, like stone from Flesh to Stone*, it won't help you.
*Flesh to Stone don't impede your movement, it merely limits you to the movement that a stone statue is allowed to do. A "Freedom of Movement"-ed and "Web"-ed person would become a completely untangled stone statue.
Also, read Freedom, the 9th level spell:
The subject is freed from spells and effects that restrict its movement, including binding, entangle, grappling, imprisonment, maze, paralysis, petrification, pinning, sleep, slow, stunning, temporal stasis, and web. To free a creature from imprisonment or maze, you must know its name and background, and you must cast this spell at the spot where it was entombed or banished into the maze.
Emphasis mine.
Freedom removes a bunch of effects, like Flesh to Stone and Stun. It would seem rather... strange to say that a way lower-level spell can do almost all the things that a 9th level spell can. Freedom is Freedom, not Freedom of Movement.
Rules as written: No limit
Armors limit your Dex bonus to AC. Deepwardens do not have Dex bonuses to AC, they have Con bonuses to AC. The Con bonus replaces the Dex bonus (and so you would not get it in situations where you lose your Dex bonus to AC), but it still is not a Dex bonus and thus the limits of the armor do not apply. And, indeed, there’s no reason why an armor’s weight or inflexibility would prevent you from benefiting from your resilience and connection to the earth.
Intent: Unknown, and unknowable
As far as what the authors intended, that’s anyone’s guess. The author never wrote anything on the subject aside from the original publication, so we have no evidence one way or the other.
Precedent: No limit
As for precedence, generally speaking the special rules for one ability score do not apply when you swap to another ability score. There are instances where you can replace your Strength to damage with Dexterity to damage, but RAW you do not get ½Dexterity to damage on a light weapon or 1½Dexterity to damage on a weapon wielded two-handed, unless it explicitly says so. (Dragon vol. 221 has the Corsair which explicitly halves Dexterity to damage with light weapons, for example)
FAQ: Limit
However, there is an FAQ entry on the question. The FAQ, it must be very clearly stated, is not errata. It is supposed to only explain the rules that already exist. If its statements contradict the actual rules, officially, the actual rules take precedence every single time. And the FAQ has been wrong many times, in many cases quite blatantly so. Finally, the FAQ is not (usually) written by the original authors of the book, so it does not correspond to the author’s intent, either.
All together, the FAQ is worth very little, and has a very poor reputation. In fact, it’s so bad that when this poster in the thread Squera linked learned that the FAQ said the Con bonus was limited, it proved to him that it actually wasn’t!
At any rate, the FAQ has this to say:
Does the deepwarden’s Stone Warden ability (RS 105) still have a maximum Dexterity bonus to his Armor Class, and does that maximum still apply to his Constitution?
The maximum Dexterity bonus should be treated as the maximum ability bonus given by the armor, so if you were playing a deepwarden wearing full plate, you would only add 1 to your Armor Class from your Constitution.
Conclusion: Rule it based on what improves your game most
Personally, I think it makes almost no sense that restrictive armor would inhibit a Con bonus to AC, I think that deepwardens make sense in heavy armor and shouldn’t be penalized for wearing it, and I don’t think the deepwarden or the AC they can get is overpowered or problematic, so I would not limit it. You may answer any or all of those questions differently. Ultimately, remember than AC is a limited thing, and lots of nasty things ignore AC; having a lot of it only does so much for you.
If you would like a compromise, here’s a suggestion. Purely houserule with no basis in the rules, either deepwarden’s or elsewhere in precedence, but it might be a good solution:
The deepwarden’s Constitution bonus to AC is limited by her armor’s maximum Dexterity bonus, just as the Dexterity bonus it replaces would be. However, the Constitution bonus is not limited for the purposes of AC against touch attacks. For example, if a deepwarden with 18 Constitution (+4) wears Chainmail (+5 AC, +2 maximum Dexterity bonus), and has no other bonuses to AC, his AC is 17 (+5 armor, +2 Consitution), but his touch AC is 14 (+4 Constitution). A deepwarden’s touch AC may not exceed her regular AC.
I don’t think this is necessary, but it does prevent the high-end AC that you might get from armor+Con, while still giving a deepwarden a good bonus for their class feature.
Remember, a class feature is supposed to make you better. Yes, Con, not limited by max Dex, is better than what the deepwarden had before, but that isn’t necessarily a problem. It’s only a problem if it’s “too much better,” and I really don’t think it is.
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Best Answer
The short answer is "Your player is definitely running some sort of con job on you". But here's the specifics for Revised 3rd, with some background from the other editions.
Restaurant: The salient points read as follows.
By the RAW you could certainly create a restaurant "atmosphere" in the mansion. Though a savvy GM might require the wizard to produce an actual blueprint (or understand someone else's) first to do something so specific. After all, not every PC is an architect.
At the minimum caster level of 13, he could produce enough food to serve 156 people a quite impressive meal. And although the Focus cost of the spell is 15gp, the cost of a banquet per person is 10gp. That means that, if the caster can find an average of 6 people an hour willing to pay 10gp per person for the meal (a big if), the first use would net the caster a healthy 1545gp profit with a steady income of 1560gp per casting thereafter. On the other hand, the same spell cast at the same level by an NPC has a cost of 925gp.
There are likely some ways to dissuade this behavior (if you want to), including making it a full-time job for the PC. After all, a 13th level party earns roughly 13,000 gp per encounter. Even split 6 ways, that's a lot more money in a lot less time. But really, such a thing deserves a question in it's own right.
However, it should be noted that the developers of other editions were well aware of the bugs in the spell that the developers of 3rd edition either decided to ignore or thought of as a "feature". In 2nd edition, any food the players eat loses it's effects as soon as they leave so at 10gp a plate you can bet he'd have some pretty upset customers. In 4th, the food is no longer illusory, however the "mansion" only has enough room and food for 50 people, period. Any (presumably uneaten) food disappears if removed from the mansion, nor does it contain qualifiers that indicate the food to be anything other than "satisfying".
Emphasis mine, obviously. The spell rather clearly defines where the unseen servants are allowed to operate and thus by exclusion, where they are not. The unseen servant spell specifies that "if you attempt to send it beyond the spell's range [which, being produced as part of the mansion spell, is presumably the mansion], the servant ceases to exist." In addition, the servants wait upon all who enter, not just the caster which, as I read it, means they wouldn't be particularly suited for most of the tasks a restaurant requires. In fact, the unseen servant spell contains a whole host of other restrictions that are probably well worth your looking up.
Fast Travel Network:
You can cast as many Mansion spells as you have spell slots for each day, however Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion is temporary, meaning if this could work it would be very short-lived. Specifically, each mansion lasts only 2 hours per level.
Each spell creates an extradimensional space. D&D is riddled with extradimensional spaces (rope trick, portable hole) and none of them are inherently connected. Trying to use this as a fast travel network would be rather like saying you put your MacGuffin into one Bag of Holding and pull it out of another.
The spell entry itself actually has a great deal to say on the matter as well. Again, emphasis mine.
I'm pretty sure there's no ambiguity there to wiggle through.
I'm sorry to say that its seems that you gave your players an amount of freedom that most of us could only dream of getting, but this particular player has decided to abuse the privilege. Worse, he's attempted to cover for it by trying to keep you misinformed on the actual nature of the rules. I suppose if one were being generous they could assume that the player misunderstood, but they certainly bear close watching in the future.