Hey Veeky Forums I've encountered a problem recently in a game of D&D 5e (with a metric fuck ton of additional races to...

>(We do have a sorcerer in the party if that helps
Telekinesis?

use a complex pulley system.

Or stick wedges into every few steps so you can coil around.

Are you trying to say a Lamia would spend all day looking at the ground instead of where it was going?

If not the fact that I'm ill and can't draw for shit, I would make you a diagram explaining it to you. But as we already established, I can't draw, so let's try to explain it.

It would be simply impossible for a lamia or similar creature to travel with human part "up", since slithering with torso "up" would cause a MASSIVE strain for the spine and half of skeletal muscles. And that's just basic biology, with no way to work around it.
It would be very, very painful for such creature to move in such way. The much more practical way of moving would be to keep the human torso close to the ground. Not ON the ground, but very close to it. Kind of how snakes move IRL when closing on their prey.

Also, assuming we are talking about purely normal evolutionary design, lamia shouldn't have collarbone, making those arms capable only in moving in two axis and not three, basically making them very weak in lifting and similar activities. So no lamia archers, not to mention strongmen... at least not with arms.
Spend with that herpetologist friend few weeks three years ago trying to find logical explaination to have such organism evolved in natural way, with no "wizard did this" bullshit. It's pretty much impossible, unless VERY specific circumstances happen and it involves going back and forth from marine life (basically, you need a land reptile doing an adaptation to water environment and then again for land environment; for the record, we have marine mammals, but that's only half the way - to put that into perspective, you would need a dolphin to adopt back to land life)

user, I don't know if you've heard, but Lamias are creatures in fantasy settings where the normal physical laws we know of are expanded to include things like magic and gods.

It is perfectly fine to just say "a wizard did it" because in these setting magic literally is a facet of physics.

Yes, their basic biology should mean that they lean far forward where moving, I'll give you that- but there's no reason a god or whoever created them (because most of the time lamias ARE a race explicitly created by some god or something) wouldn't give them collarbones.

>Fantasy setting means logic no longer applies
>Any setting that doesn't follow this logic is having fun the wrong way

Honey, have you ever heard about high concepts?
Like this one - "Hey, let's brain-storm a reason how to get a serpent-like creatures into our homebrew, which was entirely based on being logical and grounded in real laws of physics and basic biology".
You know, world-building and stuff like that.

And about collar-bone - assuming we are talking about the same bone here - they literally make no sense for them. I mean... do you even reptile? It's like saying it's ok for a fish to have lungs, because hey, fantasy!

>using herpetology to niggle about why lamias shouldn't work, rather than figuring out why they work in spite of it being seemingly impossible

Lame.

... so you can't read, can you?

Because we did exactly the reverse - finding a way, reason and explaination how to make lamia work, while also doing it in a setting so low on fantasy it makes Thief's "The City" looking like high heroic fantasy.

No, you made your own snake people that expressly don't work like a lamia works, because you're busy circle jerking about why a lamia wouldn't work the way they're depicted in myth and fiction.

What myths and which fiction?

Again, let me repeat myself, and I really don't like doing that:
It was a mental excercise to justify something that shouldn't work, unless you apply hefty dose of "wizard did this". And we still managed to make it work, including all the implications of all the choices made during the design.

Meanwhile, you are busy being angry on people having fun doing world building for no apparent reason other than they are doing something differently than you do.
Would post you the entire notes about the specific race and entire reasoning for it, but I honestly doubt you can read Polish, while I don't feel like translating all of it just because someone is fussy in the net, not to mention my deficit grammar.

They just rear up like cobras, and can choose to move while reared or not, like cobras.
They can do this because they are fucking huge.
This is the most satisfying explanation.

That would make them what? 12 meters long? 15?

Get a size altering potion or spell.

This

Anyone who says otherwise, knows jack shit about creative applications of telekinesis.
You can fucking FLY wit it, motherfucker.

You have arms.
You have a snake body and snakes can climb up fucking walls. IF you have rope and pitons have a fellow player do that and secure yourself to it.
If your DM is too much of a jackass about allowing you to climb up, then don't.

Yes.
They're pretty huge.
This has implications on how much they eat, the size of their social groups, and how they move around.
And it's why problems like OP's are actual problems.

grip with your vagina

Have you ever considered not going up, finding a longer way around, waiting at the bottom as the others go up or anything like that?

If they have climbing gear they might be able to throw some stuff down to help you climb / hammer some things in. They can go back to town for those if you're really that desperate.

>And that's just basic biology, with no way to work around it.
utterly false. you don't understand the first thing about natural selection.

Different user, but literally the fuck natural selection had to do with this, you moron?

Is this some sort of intelligent design bullshit right here? Because it's too brief to be sure, but definitely sounds like a start for angry creationistic rambling.

Why wouldn't your DM just allow the first vaguely reasonable thing? Now that game is bogged down in boring-ass discussion about cliffs and half-understood and ill-informed physics and biology speculation. Just keep the fucking game moving and don't waste everyone's time like this

I assume you still have arms, right? Listen, just like a human - as long as he isn't morbidly obese - is able to hold onto a bar to sustain it's own weight on the arms alone, a Lamia should be able to do so, too.
Just grab the ladder with your hands and sort of stick your snake parts to the cliff side, then slowly pull yourself up.

Alternatively, look at your skills. You have something called "Climb". Take 20 on that test.
If your DM insists on being an ass, he's clearly bitter because you're playing an unconventional race. Say that you're just going to wait down there or find another way up then.

Shit, forgot this was 5e.
Use Athletics, in this case.

Yeah, the GM seems like a shitcunt.

>pull with arms
>push tail into the side of the cliff/ladder
>push downwards and against the corner of where the rung is carved into the mountain when you pull up so that your arms dont die

like, look at pic related, just do that and sort of slug your way up

Lamia's snake-bits would weight a lot more than human's legs, though, so pulling it with just arms would be high impossible. However, I don't see why they couldn't just use the scales on their underside to get a grip on the corners of the steps. That's how snakes actually climb, and weight wouldn't really be an issues as it's evenly distributed along the length of the body.

>Again, let me repeat myself, and I really don't like doing that:

>Dieting Elf: The Manga: Snakegirl Edition
FUND IT!

>A fat neckbearder talking about Veeky Forums

And don't pretend it's not a case, because just about ANY person with ANY climbing experience will tell you that it's legs, not arms, you use to climb up, with arms being used to clinge to the wall, while legs push you up.

You are literally taking your knowledge from vidya, where this is common reversal to put entire emphasis on arms and neglect legs in climbing.

You have a herpetologist friend who doesn't know what Bipes is? Or just how often lizards experimented with limblessness? How sad.

Plus chameleons in some ways evolved a mammalian-like pectoral girdle with high shoulder mobility. All you need to do is have an arboreal reptile that developed a snake-like body for clinging onto limbs but retained its forelimbs for clamping onto larger branches (which would acually solve the problems some lizards have now).

Arboreal locomotion leads to binocular vision and shortened rostra in many lineages, and in this case retaining the arms would be helpful for prey manipulation and dismemberment as kinesis of the skull is not as useful.

Then the proto-lamia gradually become more terrestrial. Not in the way humans did, but more like big cats; proficient on the ground but still doing well in trees.

The functional organization of the body just shifts from having the head and body as independent units to having the head+torso and abdomen as independent units.

I might be no herpetologist, just a lowly veterinarian, but still - none of those solutions allow a range of mobility or arm strenght (especially lift) hominids have, so what's your point exactly? That reptiles can't compete, unless they magically gain different set of muscles and additional bones?

Probably most sensible explanation for lamia is that they're not reptilian at all, but mammals that just happen to have a snakelike lower body (technically they wouldn't even have reptile-like scales, but rough skin that looks scaly).

I know one artist who did that, and also made them related to mermaids (so presumably lamias are mermaids that have re-evolved to terrestrial lifestyle, or they're sort-of proto-mermaids that have lost thier lower legs but haven't become fully aquatic yet). In fact, they weren't supposed to have scales at all, but smooth, hairless skin like marine mammals.

that's a suprising amount of thought put on a minor detail in worldbuilding for a stupid fetish setting

>n fact, they weren't supposed to have scales at all, but smooth, hairless skin like marine mammals.
So what gives them friction required for movement? Snakes have special type of scales on their "leg" part, creating enough friction while slithering around. If it was perfectly smooth, they would need much more energy for that.

>He says that my character would weigh too much do that.
Odd, anacondas do it and they weight 4 times what a human weights.

Also I know that feel, back in 3.5 I had a trapezist centaur monk and my GM didnt allow me to roll climb, tumble or other athletic rolls (counted as fail always) because his small mind couldn't grasp how my char with 26 Str 22 Dex could do it.

IIRC, they were still drawn with the snake-like belly scales, so presumably they had developed those for locomotive reasons, even if the rest of the skin was not scaly.

I guess I will play devil's attorney here, but it kinda makes sense that centaur would be unable to scale a vertical wall, since, well... centaur? I don't unnderstand why athletics were a fail, but I kinda get why climbing was a no-no

Isn't the "standard" bundle of rope 20 meters long?

>Let me repeate myselfe and I reallye don'te like doinge thate

I'm sorry kid, I didn't mean it as anything personal

>do you even reptile?

Snake with pair of boobs and he's bitching about collarbones...

Who said anything about boobs?

Its neck would be modified so it can look straight ahead while laying low.

>It is perfectly fine to just say "a wizard did it" because in these setting magic literally is a facet of physics.

>lamia finds a portal to our world
>is immediately crushed by her own weight after entering

Now that's just silly. It would be much more exciting a narrative for a creatire to retain their magical traits after world-hopping. Don't you want to enter a realm where all the supported like is really tiny or thin like paper and reign as some kind of god among them?

considering that you used a wizard for the construction, not the sustaining, not really?

that and we already solved this by physics and snake proportions by having lamias be huge.

But what if it's very smol instead

then it's small

echidnas ( the mammal, not the legendary mother of all monsters, though her too) have scales and are mammals,lay eggs to

Aren't echidnas the ones that don't actually have nipples and just secrete milk from their skin?

They are fucking weird dude.

No wonder they have the same name as Echidna.

>(We do have a sorcerer in the party if that helps.)
Does he have:
Enlarge/Reduce
Levitate
Spider Climb
Fly
Gaseous Form
Wall of Stone (for ramps)
Telekinesis
Etherealness
Reverse Gravity + Feather Fall

If he doesn't, throw him to the curb he's either useless or level 1.

What about square-cube law?

They can easily hit ten, twenty feet long without running into square cube problems.

All monotremes (so two kinds of echidnas plus the platypus) do that. They're about as primitive as a mammal can get and still be technically a mammal. They presumably share a lot of features with the Permian "mammal-like reptiles" (which, strictly speaking, wouldn't have been reptiles since they were diapsids like modern mammals) from which modern mammals descend.

I meant synapsids, damn it. Mammals are synapsids, reptiles and birds are diapsids (except turtles, maybe? Turles are weird).

Have you ever considered the basic problem of, well, weighting so much and having only this much of lung capacity? Same with heart.
And few other really important organs

snake lungs are really tubular than a humans
here's a snake diagram

yeah well here's yurlungur
he doesn't need your fucking permission to breathe

yeah, there's a variety of solutions from oversized organs to auxillary organs depending on who you talk to and which era of lamia thread we are in.
thankfully, snakes that size already exist, so we know we don't have to work very hard to make it work.

we are talking lamia's, not a diety who has the form of a snake. nice choice though i forgot he existed

But snakes usually don't have human torso attatched.
Not a human brain. And while they lenght a lot, they weight relatively little.

Speaking of which - you ara aware lamia would have to be warm-blooded, just like about any reptilian fantasy race... right?

*Nor

Not necessarily on the warm blooded count, there are a variety of creatures with various blood warming practices.

And yeah, as has been stated, enlarged or redundant organs as is necessary.
It's not like those anacondas have been exactly optimized for cardiovascular work.

...

Goats and horses are pretty different.

>since slithering with torso "up" would cause a MASSIVE strain for the spine and half of skeletal muscles
Cobras have no issue moving with their front third totally upright--even lunging long distances from that position. Miraculously they don't snap in half.

If your problem is "it's too big to support itself without breaking its own bones" or whatever, that could be said of basically any creature of size "large" and greater. Especially the bipedal ones. They'd have a much harder time.

What additional bones? If anything, mammals have reduced the number of bones in the pectoral girdle compared to lizards. And IIRC, the arm muscles are mostly the same. The main difference is that mammals have a "floating scapula".

The point is that lizards (i.e., chameleons) have been able to develop highly mobile mammalian-like limbs (though not a 1:1 comparison due to slightly different selection pressures) when placed in the proper environment.

Also, you don't have to have human-like arms emerge all at once. All you have to do is have an organism in a situation where hominid-like traits are selected for. Say you start with a chameleon-like reptile that already has a bias towards pectoral girdle mobility (though maybe not as specialized in the manus as chameleons are). If tool use and manipulation become a major selective factor, proto-lamiae with more robust, dexterous limbs will be selected for.

Snakes have tubular lungs (or rather lung, left lung is vestigial in most species) as part of their "reduce everything possible to turn body into a sausage. A humanoid torso might help compensate for that.

Plus snakes don't have a diaphragm, I forget what they use to ventillate the lungs.

For starters my character can lift himself with one hand, I could fucking climb using only my hands, what part of Str 26 is hard to grasp?

If I can't climb with my hands, neither a wizard can cast shi

Third pic related