Immovable Rod in a Dragons Stomach
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- Опубликовано: 11 сен 2024
- #dungeonsanddragons #dnd #dndmemes #funny #rpg #ttrpg #dungeonmaster #gamemaster #dragons #tabletopgaming #magicitems #cinderblocksally #criticalrole #wotc #roleplayinggames #wizard #dragon
I think the misty step thing would be utterly hilarious.
Personally, my first players would love this level of simple foiling of plans and would absolutely use it against me the next chance they got.
It plays into our rule “don’t over think puzzles”
The look on their faces would be gold
Now there's just a rod floating out of reach of the players.
Hmm though I'd wonder if they'd use it in the future. Swallows item, enters venue, teleports away to leave it there. Could be used for a rogue doing a frame up
@@tntradernox3654 what if the dragon Misty steps while the players are inside try to escape? Honestly, I feel like the type of people I’ve played with and hang around would have a strategy like this, and use it on the neutral rebelling against evil nature chromatic dragon I’d be tempted to throw into any campaign.
Several sessions later a tiny fey goes up a players bum and plants an immovable rod......
"make a dex save"
"1"
"you swallow a bug"
"That's it?"
*knowing dm look*
That tiny fey is actually the dragon the whole time since it is also a magic user and knows shapeshifting spells
@@cadenmcerlean4920no it's simply known reincarnation spell
Antman up Thanos' bum energy right there. Fits a fey just fine.
Wouldnt even need to be tiny creature. How does the Immovable Rod interqct with being ethereal? Depending on the answer, you could literally plunge an ethereal creatures arm through your players chest, Rod in hand. Then they just...let go.
Adding a level of exhaustion for severe damage is something i never thought of before.
I have a whole chart for possible damage effects. Useful for adding immersion when a character receives a grievous wound such as being downed in combat. (It doesn’t really make much sense to me that you can take so much damage that you pass out from pain/blood loss/blunt force trauma and then be perfectly fine 8 hours later without the aid of magic or medicine).
It’s honestly not that hard to make one, I based mine off the injury mechanics of total war three kingdoms. You don’t exactly want it to be too penalizing however as that can get somewhat annoying. Having them roleplay a limp after getting gashed in the leg or purposefully using their non-dominant hand because they got maimed can open up for some interesting RP possibilities though.
Well, it's not just for the damage, right? It's for the exertion of ripping the rod through itself.
Reminds me of how last week, a player in my party got swallowed by a purple worm, and decided to summon a whale inside of it with a homebrew item. That worm had a bad time
The player didn't?
@@ShacotheLorewould anything other than a raged barbarian jump into the face of a wyrm?
@@-le4qh Yes. Also, the player didn't?
@@-le4qh He was a monk, actually, and he definitely did not want to be swallowed. The whale summoning was a true act of desperation
My ranger got swallowed by a purple worm. Desperation move was to pull a bunch of acorns and pine cones out of his pockets to cast druidcraft. Okay... Roll arcana to see how effective this cantrip makes them grow. NAT 20?! lol😂
One of my GMs has made me fall in love with the concept of otherwise mundane animals enchanted to have the effects of magic items.
Their example was an Immovable Cat. As in "my cat is on my lap, I _literally_ can't get up."
Even Thor couldn't lift the big cat.
A weight that only the worthy cannot lift
Did that as well. Barbarian had to long rest in a lounge chair for another player to prep the right spell to get him out.
"Only the unworthy may lift the cat"@@StarryxNight5😂
Someone's watched the legend of vox machina
indeed
They did that?!
Yup and that was a funny moment in game and in the show
@@pavelcastillo9513 not through the mouth,
To be fair, players have been doing variations on this theme for decades and not just in D&D. The first time I heard a story in is vein, it was about a Werewolf the Apocalypse game in the early 00s and it was inside a white spiral wyrm. The player had a literal chainsaw with them.
I mean, with the misty step, if itd remove the immovable rod, it should also logically remove the person inside, so it would at least not be that bad cause you also help out the person inside the stomach
Depends if they’re holding onto the rod. IIRC, Immovable Rods magically stay in place. Which could make for an interesting “get out of jail free” card if they’re holding onto it. Or a nice bomb if the DM decides the Rod breaks and the power goes haywire.
I'd say that anything inside the dragon's stomach would stay there normally, just like anything worn. The immovable rod would stay behind if activated, but that's an exception since it is, well, immovable.
@@EnaluxemeUntil 8000 pounds of weight gets on them. Then they de activate
The immovable rod would remain ONLY because it’s an immoveable rod. When you activate an immovable rod and then teleport, it doesn’t teleport with you. Everything else you are wearing/carrying does. But if it’s active, it stays put. Teleportation doesn’t break that.
@@aronsvanlaugsson5338entirely correct, it would only rip parts of their stomache apart, but they are more then strong enough to bring up the necessary force, based on them literally being able to rip apart entire cities... Easily... Without even trying. So based on that and the fact that a dragons stomache is very tough, 10-20d6 seems pretty appropriate, I think, though it would surely hurt them enough to eventually just die, maybe because of the acid damage, depending on how gory you want to be.
Also, dont want to be a smartass about it, but wouldn't the stomache just deal acid damage... Because the fire comes from a separate organ and thus doesn't actually pass through the stomache? Though I guess you could argue that besides of their breath weapon they are just generally filled with fire... Btw why dont their claw attacks deal any fire damage, even the ascendant dragon monk, can do that with their normal attacks, so why not real dragons?
I ask too many questions I suppose. Better be beware of the Cinderblock-mafia, unless I wan...
I think the idea of the dragon just letting it rip through them is super metal.
Imagine the party is sent to kill the dragon hearing the stories that surround the ferocious beast and they come up with this clever plan. Then when they succeed and the dragon tries to move and is stuck the dragon begins to laugh loudly as it forces its way forward as the rod tears through muscle and bone coming out the back. The blood falls to the ground mimicking the elemental effect of the draconic nature and the dragon gives a bloodthirsty grin to the party. Watch your party crap themselves
@@thornelson1411 exactly
It *should* land well with your players, though....hear me out.
Dragons, canonically, have high INT (most of them).
They don't just know magic, they're straight up just super smart.
Part of a dragon's challenge should include it being smart, and tactical.
Dragons live for millenia...something like that should be well aware of every trick in the book to extend that lifespan.
That includes devilishly clever on-the-spot solutions to previously unforseen situations.
I did something similar with a Lich once. With the players using a bunch of glyph of warding equivalents (it was Pathfinder 1) to catch the Lich in a massive blast of holy energy. Only for him to emerge relatively unscathed.
"Do you have the slightest *idea* how many times people have tried that on me? One of the advantages of being what I am, you get to learn from otherwise fatal mistakes..."
Curious point: How did he survive unscathed?
Hopefully it was with a trleport under the map or his own glyphs setting of dispel magic lmao
But what happens when you, as the DM, aren't that smart and the players just outsmart you? Do you make some bullshit up to prevent them from doing something you don't want them to even though it would seem ridiculous?
@@Masterslam999 no. The monster just didn’t act as tactically as it could have. Honestly even when creatures could act smarter, I sometimes have them not take advantage of things. Either to keep the party from wiping or to end a fight that is dragging on.
I liked the way Matt handled it, he had it rip out, the dragon took dmg but didnt die as ppl like to believe it would. Potions man leygooo haha
That's exactly what my first thought always is. Like the rod is maybe 2 ft long at most and the dragon is about 50ft long. Even if the rod was in sideways it would only really cause a small amount of damage as the dragon just tears itself off the rod. Also the rod can still only hold upto 8000lbs and chances are a big enough dragon will weigh far more than that. So the rod will just give in anyway since if it tries to hold more weight than it can handle it turns off.
I mean the average hippo can weigh anywhere upto 7000lbs and think how much bigger a dragon is to a hippo or an elephant even. No immovable rod would work on a dragon.
@@Noobie2k7 Bullets are the size of my pinkie toe and yet as it turns out, one ripping through your body does *significant* damage to all those squishy bits.
Agree on the second bit though
@@seasnaill2589 The immovable rod isn't travelling at like 700mph though when it hits the dragon is it. That's not really the best comparison.
Never a bad time to teach players why teleporting into a stomach is a bad idea
i'd say do a mix, have it rooted and grounded with disadvantage on its attacks for 3 or so turns (depending on the party's dps) with maybe a bit of damage being done by the rod depending what the players do, but after the dragon stops panicking and realizes the situation and suddenly it disappears, suddenly the trapped beast they were bullying is angry and behind them, letting their plan work while also hyping up the threat of the dragon
A dragon's stomach might eventually dissolve the rod as well.
Critical Role becomes a really good frame of reference here, because spoilers...
This is exact what happened in the Umbrasyl fight. Scanlan and Vax nearly died pulling off this exact move, but they caused a lot of damage to the dragon
My coolest DnD moment was similar to this. We were playing a level 20 one-shot where Fenrir was trying to swallow the sun. Because the gimmick of the fight was, that he could eat any player we were given a set of boots that had similar effect to immovable rod. As to be expected one of my party members and I got swallowed, but when I managed to fight my way out of the beasts stomach I asked my DM if I could activate my boots in its mouth. Long story short, that's how my hexblade/fighter saved the world, by becoming a choking hazard
Immovable Rod has a weight limit of 8000 pounds, which the adult red dragon exceeds.
Yeah but that's not how physics works, it's the same as stepping on a needle if you put 150lbs of force on a needle, the needle still goes in you,
@@chaoticdetectivepeach If a dragon stepped on a needle, it would be blocked by the scales, then snap under the weight. Also, the immovable rod has weight restrictions specifically for scenarios like this. Any huge monster can just push it over. The magic holding the rod in place fails before any damage is accrued.
@@AvangionQ Ok but it's not a needle, and it's inside them, so it won't be blocked by the scales, nor is it the size of a needle, the point of the comparison was to compare it to a real life event, a human stepping on a needle. In addition, something like a dragon isn't going to immediately put it's full weight on something, so it would still do a very large amount of damage before failing, I cannot be f*cked to math it out, but it's reasonable to assume that at the very least you will see some internal hemorrhaging
@@chaoticdetectivepeach You're the one who brought the needle comparison, now you're trying to walk it back. There's no physics in magic. If 8000 pounds pushes an immovable rod, the rod fails. That's it. That's how the game works.
@@AvangionQ it's not walking it back to reiterate the same point using different words, it's quite literally standing in the same place. Also there's always physics to consider, like I said, you don't automatically put all your weight on everything at all times. But also just in general magic has to follow physical laws to an extent, like if you cast Fireball sweet you made the fire appear, and threw it at someone, but the fire still is gonna work like fire.
"There is a way. The... _other_ way..."
On the subject of being inside of a creature, in my first DnD campaign the DM gave me, a half-orc barbarian-fighter, two magic weapons that complimented eachother. The two weapons were an axe that did more damage the less hit dice I had left, and a sword that did 20 damage and 1d20 additional to both me and my target. So at level 15, we fought several ghostly assassins and a Terrask, and the Terrask ate me. I also had a magic rocket launcher that allowed me to rocket jump as a bonus action and get critical damage with all attacks that land that turn and the next; so I asked if I could rocket jump inside the terrask, and the whole table was in support as I did 21,000 damage and one shot the terrask. Needless to say that was the moment I fell in love with DnD.
That last one is just evil but in a hilarious way tbf
“AH FUDGE RIGHT THE LIZARD KNOWS MAGIC-“
Huge (Adult Red Dragon) can have a top end weight of 25,000 pounds. There is also item durability and armor that can be considered since the rod is classified as "Iron". The Immovable Rod can handle UP TO 8,000 pounds then it fails. You got options. Just like someone tearing out of a purple worm would have muscles close the wound, that can happen too.
Exactly. The rid would just fail to do anything and turn itself off soon as the dragon moved against the rod.
If you established it knew magic before hand, then it's fine to pull the magic card, if you haven't, it feels like your pulling it out your ass and bad move.
Wut? Dragons, literal magical beings, shooting fire, flying, existing for millennia, shapeshifting and OTHER MAGICAL FEATS...cant cast magic if you don't tell your players before hand? Seems more like if you're players somehow thought these WERENT magical beings capable of magic then...well maybe its a different game style you are playing or want to play. Which is fine, but again magic from a magical creature should not be a surprise to anyone in your setting unless YOU want it that way.
@justinmusser8886 It's more presenting that they are capable of magic. As rules as written, them being spell casters is an optional rule, not mandatory, and if you don't present your dragon as a spell caster in any compacity besides to save it's hide. Now you could argue for the fact it was only acting feral or magically inept, and trying this sends them into stage two. But it has to be done right. If you present your dragon as a feral beast with no clues your players couldn't catch before hand, then you go against the characters strengths. If it was a feral beast till you needed magic to save it's ass, that is general a bad move and a show as a bad writer. Maybe a good play into being an improv but as stated above, you shorted your players who could have found this out sooner.
Don't take my word as law, but general idea. Feel free to go against what I say and come out with an epic story line without your players feeling shorted or cheated, but as a writer, sour taste changing the character on the fly just to one up a players cleverness.
Ultimately, if your dragon has abilities that the players got plan around or any character, especially spell casters, show at least hints, clues, or some stories in the world that the characters can find to combat their foe, just in general. Flat out telling them or warning them is also just a poor move, for all the reasons you mentioned.
This is assuming the dragon doesnt chew his food before he swallows though, so misty stepping would feel a bit cheese.
Okay - I happen to have a D&D based interactive that, shall we say, deals with lots of creatures, and playable races, having the Swallow ability, in one manner or another. Now, between friends and allies, it's harmless. But, with an enemy, potentially harmful. So, how to do it? My solution - use the creature's size as a measurement for the damage dice, and its CR and/or Player Level to determine the number of dice, like a Cantrip. Damage type, acid, unless the victim is, shall we say, elsewhere - then there might be additional damage. Let's just say that I have written about a rabbit cleric who was the victim of a dragon that had eaten some Ghost Chili Peppers (or their equivalent) and became hasenpfeffer.
I feel like a red dragon would be able to overcome the 8k pounds of force to turn the immovable rod off.
If the dragon didn't know that an immovable rod was just planted, it would try to move, take some damage, and freeze. Next turn it misty steps away.
Immovable rods fail past 8 thousand pounds. Also on a dc30 strength check it can be moved 10 ft. I always thought I would run it that it needs to pass the strength check then it knocks it loose but it takes 8d12 damage as it mushed a bunch of organs trying. Wanted to reward the effort it took to get in there with damage and a possible rooted mechanic while still giving the dragon an out.
Exactly. My first thought was "that's not how the magic item work."
^^^^🤓
Also consider this> homebrew and rule of cool, numbers can be changed rules can be altered stopped whining, game is supposed to be fun and not taken too seriously, its not a math test
@@nexerkarigum4031
"Blatantly disregarding explicitly written restrictions in order to get a super cheap super low level one-shot on a high level challenge" =/= "Rule of Cool"...
And I feel like you probably know that.
@@nexerkarigum4031
I'd say this falls closer to the realm of Stupid rather than Cool.
I'm really against this mindset of "Reward the effort it took" in DnD. Not on its face necessarily, but when it's a really stupid idea. Just because it took an elaborate sequence of steps and plan to be done doesn't mean it was sensible enough to work
And it's usually incredibly stupid, from what I've seen people mention online
Happened in Critical Role, and in the animated series they made it a sword instead of a rod, and the dragon let it rip through his stomach
Dragon "Woah, you want to get inside me? Nah, I'm not down with that" Misty steps aways, and takes emotional damage
I mean an adult dragon probably wieghs more than 8000lbs plus the rod would take alot of acid and fire damage(magic item so probably with resistance), but the rod would take damage.
I actually had a wildfire Druid’s wildfire spirit fly down a red dragon’s throat mid-flight (120’/round) and activate the immovable rod at the C/T junction at the base of its neck. Sure, the momentum moved the rod 10 feet (with corresponding spinal damage) but there was a lot of dragon to get through with it moving 10 feet at a time.
The carcass of that dragon became the beginning of my artificer character’s magic weapon/armor shop.
you can move an immovable rod with a high enough strength check
also if the dragon is heavy enough it can justput weight on it and it will deactivate
@@dracodish4725 According to the wiki, most adult reds weigh about 5,000. Combined with their lifting capacity of 3,240, they probably could apply the 8,000 force necessary to automatically deactivate it.
Though realistically that would still hurt like hell, the rod is still being rammed into the dragon for 8,000 pounds of pressure against it's much softer organs.
Now I'm imagine the dragon self immolating and a conflagration of flame and smoke burns across the field leaving the adventurers burnt and crispy as they find themselves no longer inside a red dragon.
I would say let the payoff of the plan match the effort it took to do it. If a player teleports in, places it, and the next player vortex warps him out, then yeah that dragon can do it too baby. But if they dress him up all nice and Timon does a hula dance for it, knowing that getting e a t e n is probably gonna hurt, then yeah that rod is gonna take a pretty chunk outta that boi.
I believe in the rods description. If too much force is applied like 1 ton or something, the rod actually turns off.
TFW the dragon Misty Steps the problem away after belching out the half dead party...
My ruling would have been:
As a DM, I see your plan, but for balance reasons I have to disallowb it.
Imagine if the dragon flies away with a whole in its stomach only to cast cure wounds on itself later or something. Crazy talk, am I right?
One of the best optional rules in the recently kickstarted book Ryoko's Guide to the Yokai Realms solves this really well.
Whenever a Kaiju sized monster would be instantly killed or trapped by shenanigans, they can burn one of their legendary resistances to end the effect that would kill or trap them.
Players getting cute with a force cube, immovable rod, ten foot pole, or any other thing in the game that was never intended to deal damage? That's what legendary resistances, lair actions, and legendary reactions were added to the game to fix.
I do this for any gargantuan or colossal creatures the players fight. Fighting the Tarrasque, Godzilla, the Sliver Queen, or any of the 5 Ancient Primal Dragons that breathed life into the material plane is meant to be a climactic boss fight. Not a speed bump the players can sidestep if they stack enough cantrips and common magic items.
As a deliberate action, I'd include either an acrobatics or athletics check to get past the teeth first, and it would be at disadvantage. Not only is the task they're attempting going to be difficult, but it's also gonna be during an attack by the dragon. Aside from that, once in and past the first round of damage, they can absolutely plant that rod.
How it reacts will depend on the type of dragon, Red would likely rip through it and develop a grudge against that party member. It wouldn't surprise me if it used the dash action to fly straight up and violently regurgitate the player from a few hundred feet up.
Have the dragon use Misty Step BEFORE they begin their attempt to get swallowed. Then they can't say that they weren't WARNED that this might happen...
So critical role did this exact thing and it just did some piercing damage. I think it also prevented it from moving for a turn. Seemed pretty fair to me, good reward for the amount of effort put in.
I would probably combine the two.
Have the dragon attempt to move, cant, takes some damage, realizes theres something wrong, then misty steps
If I as a player tried that and the dragon misty stepped, leaving me hanging from the rod 15 feet off the ground I would die laughing. That is an amazing move.
Got flashbacks to the legend of vox machina from this. Scanlan used scanlans hand to go in the back door because the front was spitting acid
This is why it works on things that lack sentience in my games
You can move an immovable rod if you can put 8000 pounds of weight on it. Like it just stops working. Huge creatures start at like 20k so the rod would just deactivate on movement from the dragon.
The dragon would be effectively be held in place unless it makes a strength check.
This was literally done on Vox Machina, although they were not in darkness
Closest thing I've fome to this was when my party gave a juvenile ice dragon kidney stones using an item I gave them called the everburning coals, originally designed to help them keep warm in the icy peaks and quickly realised my adorable band of murder hobos would use them as a form of napalm warfare.
I will say I'm pretty sure that's an optional rule to let dragons know magic
This is a great way to make a giant monster into an entire dungeon. World Turtle stuck in place because a jackhole stuck the item in his shell somewhere and can't move.
@Virgil_Vincent
actually not really, the Immovable Rod would be moved if a force more than 8000 pounds is used against it.
It either rips it out of its chest for 120 damage , or it stays in that location to prevent that from happening. People forget that second option
A barbarian could shove it with an attack before the dragon’s turn and they could deal the massive damage like that.
think a third option might be declairing that the dragon weighs more than the maximum requirements for the staff, and therefore deactivate it like the description said it wil
Or the other 2nd option: Dragons have a shitton of Strenght, they could move the rod I think.
Dragons have been known to shift forms to suit their needs..... what happens if a party is inside a dragon and he suddenly shifts into a much smaller creature
Dragons don't have stomach acids they have their breath attack there is lore on this so 100% five damage
I know this is probably autocorrect, but I like the idea of the dm just saying the whole trip through the dragon only causes 5 fire damage
@@tychozzyx9439 to clarify. a dragon's breath attack is puking. puking Elemental Energy
@@ivarramirezpaulsen8212 Absolutely, no contest there. The first post says "...so 100% (five) damage," emphasis mine. My mind went to a dm treating the comment as RAW with an exchange like
"I don't know how, but the rules say your party's trip into the maw of the dragon clocks in at a whole 5 damage... I guess you all are fine. Maybe I should have used the bite attack?"
@@tychozzyx9439 i misunderstood your first reply. I'm just a Lore Nerd
Show them that the dragon knows how to escape first, by making the dragon misty step to attack them before they try to plant the rod in it.
How does the dragon know he needs to misty step because he has an immovable rod in his stomach?
He does know he has some adventurers inside, nothing more, nothing else.
Misty step but the immovable rod comes with… but only for such magical movements. Dragon deciding between needing to move in this fashion or trying to maneuver the rod out without straight up ripping out its insides could be a healthy balance between an easy win and a single spell negating all that work.
Acid melts the rod. Dragon does not even notice. Maybe a burp?
That's the thing about dumb plans made by bad players; even the simplest spell can completely fuck up the plan.
No fly speed, no problem, chain two immovable rods together and make a ladder two rungs at a time.
a dragon's fire doesn't come from its digestive track.
My friend has an immovable rod, and we literally considered this in last weekends session when we were fighting a bronze dragon 😄
Rod must resist acid every round until it fails and is destroyed. Red dragons are intelligent and would just wait it out.
See, I don't think Misty Step would work, because when you Misty Step you don't leave the contents of your stomach behind
Dragons actually chew their food though so it's unlikely they can get it by just let themselves get eaten
our monk cut his way out of a purple worm, he had less success with the ancient black dragon, we had to save him from that
One should keep in mind that a immovable rod is not an INDESTRUCTIBLE rod. At leas in 5e, magic items (unless specified for the item) don’t have any special defenses compared to a mundane copy of that type of item except for resistance to all damage. If you plop a magic rod in a red dragon’s belly, it‘s gonna melt.
A misty step would take everything in the stomach with it. Or perhaps you cast misty step, but then can't move to step through.
Now I'm thinking of a campaign mission where this exact thing happens to a dragon, and the party can keep it there and take the hoard of loot. Or, you remove it and get a dragon companion that you get to ride into battle that helps you fight invading armies. I call it "The Rod in the Scales."
Technically, 5000 pounds of force is enough to move the immovable rod and a dragon can definitely exert 5000 pounds of force just by moving alone
I had something similar happen to me once; we were fighting a sort of amorphous cloth monster, and we trapped it behind a door after establishing it was too large to just slip underneath the bottom, and I planted an immovable rod on the door to keep it shut.
We forgot the cloth monster had INT 11, and could understand how magic items work--it just slipped a tentacle under the door, reached over, and pressed the button on the immovable rod, turning it off. Then it opened the door.
Dear Cinder, which movies should one not make into a DnD campaign.
Does mazerunner work? Does Blade work? So many questions… and luckily a floating head with 30 intelligence to hopefully answer them
You can use any of the individual Dr. Who movies, but don't try to borrow the cannon that led there. Just go, "You're in a flooding catacomb on Mars, and if the water touches you, you will die. Have fun!"
Also don't use any Indiana Jones movies after the first one. People tend to think Temple of Doom would work, but you'd really need to railroad them until they got into the Temple proper. Just steal the best set pieces for some other evil cult.
Or... Blade but your PCs are the Vampires! Cuz honestly Blade is stupidly powerful. Can they defeat the vampire boogieman? Or will they, like sooo many before them become the hunted?
should also take into consideration that it may also just... stay there and not hurt the dragon. There's these things called cow magnets that are fed to cows to collect metal bits they may eat so that the bits don't tear up the cow's intestinal tract. the magnets are oblong and long, and don't pass through the body. An immovable rod would be far longer and depending on specifics might just chill in the dragon's stomach.
Immovable Rod only works on up to 8000 pounds. Adult Reds are tens of thousands of pounds.
Rod fails.
The other option is that nothing happens, because a dragon could potentially exert enough force to override the rod since the rod can only hold a set amount of force before it gives out.
Dragons breath weapons come from a magical organ in their upper chest. Not suffused in their body. Its actually very interesting. Its called the fundamentum.
No chromatic dragon should be able to easily outsmart the party like that. You save that kinda thinking for metallic dragons so the players feel the difference.
Rod takes damage from being in the stomach and breaks
My favorite joke with the Immovable Rod is: relative to What? In our campaign a crazed inventor created the Rod, and it instantly ROCKETED off into parts unknown. It was immovable relative to...something.
Possible point of referential inspiration, the scenarios happened in some variation during campaign 1 of critical role.
The misty step would be bull if you hadn't already established the dragon being able to cast. If this is the first time it ever happens then it would be justified anger
I could see someone using it to render a dragon's wing. A lot of older dragons may have holes in their wings from either age or combat. Using an immovable rod could tear the wing to the point the dragon can't fly
The whole thing about dragons (in my setting, at least) is that their elemental power is a base form of powerful magic, and can be used as raw magical fuel. So a dragon can cast spells because they have that power. They can dispel magic by just breathing a concentrated blast of their element on it. So if you tried this there, they'd just have to super-charge their own bodies and wait for the rod to be destroyed.
The benefits, mechanically is this: the dragon won't be cheesed by this. The players will get to do a cool thing that will leave the dragon in a weaker state, (as it's held in one place as it tries to boil this thing out), buuuut also, it has a way of getting out of it thats not too problematic. I do like the idea that desperate dragons might just let it rip out, or especially strong or intelligent ones will have a spell in mind to avoid the effect.
Dragons are individuals though, and some will react to this better than others.
I would but allow the precedent of leaving the content of one's stomach behind through teleportation. You could do that with ingested poisons and whatnot. However, teleportation might become the dragon's only viable means of movement. Alternatively, shapeshifting would work since carried equipment can merge with the new form if desired.
The best solution I see for the dragon to solve this issue is to shapeshift as an ooze while having the immovable rod carry over to the new form, and simply slime away, leaving the rod where it is.
answering this question poses another: is the immovable rod inside its stomach immune to teleportation effects, because we usually assume that our stomach contents teleport with us, and the dragon is big enough that such a distinction isn't ridiculous. The same question for the PCs but maybe because they are distinct living creatures they wouldn't misty step, but most other teleports would bamf all of it.
I like the idea of some kind of exhaustion for internal damage. That said, Immovable Rod has an 8000 pound limit and dragons weigh significantly more than that.
I like the Misty Step solution. I would likely have the dragon be immobile for a couple rounds as a reward for completing a dangerous task, then Misty Step.
It would work about the same as the time I tried to use an immovable rod to stop a frigate. The thing you're trying to stop is too big, and the rod drops to the floor. Or the dragon's stomach, in this case.
A lot of dragons can also activate and use hoarded magic items pretty passively, and since the attuned owner of the Rod are now gone gone the dragon could likely just… turn it off.
In 3.5, the dragon would take 30 points of piercing damage as the rod tops through its body and muscular action wound close the wound.
If the dragons important, maybe both? The dragon doesn’t realize what’s happened until the rods already done some good damage, then he uses a spell to leave the fight. Then, probably gets intestinal surgery.
In Critical Role, the gang held an immovable sword inside the black dragon's stomach and it had issues with moving around for a bit until it decided "Fuck it" and flew upwards to let it pierce through him to get it out, taking a chunk of damage and fleeing to go heal himself with magic for Round Two of the fight because yeah dragons have magic too.
Same thing here can be done like you suggested with it piercing it's body. Dragon's are smart creatures and Red Dragons specifically give NO FUCKS so they will do it knowing fully well how hard it is to move those things.(Despite the name, immovable rods can in fact be moved..difficulty.) There are other methods possibly magical that a dragon could do but none pop into my head at the moment, maybe a spell to teleport himself or the rod.
Big problem with this is that dragons tend to chew....
Third Option: The dragon bargains with the party to go back inside his mouth and get the rod out of him. In exchange, the party would get a ton of gold, some magic items, and a dragon that, by a contract of some sort, must aid them at one point in time when called on. It's a one-time use get-out-of-jail-free card, but as a dragon.
Alternatively, the immovable rod has a weight limit. Just rule that the dragon is too strong and rips the rod out of place, but perhaps have it still deal some damage as a reward for their creativity
Rogue: Mourn me not, brothers. For i give my life for a noble cause. One higher than my own. *Yeets self into dragons mouth*
30 seconds later, dragon goes very still, mid air, looks at its stomach.
Warlock: Now, while its imobilised! Loose everything!
Dragon: I'm five thousand years old and you really... *Sigh, eldrich invocation, vanishes in a puff of smoke and reappears even closer to the party, leaving behind a chared corpse still clinging to a floating immovable rod* Boo!
The dragon's stomach presses the button releasing the rod. There are muscles down there that automatically contract to move things along, or the rod becomes immovable relative to the dragon's stomach, not the outer world. It's frame of reference is the stomach.