Can a Large creature enter the extradimensional space created by the Rope Trick spell?

Question

The spell Rope Trick contains the following language:

The space can hold as many as eight Medium or smaller creatures.

We used to think this means Large creatures can not enter the space.

However, there is this tweet from Jeremy Crawford:

The rope trick spell doesn't prohibit a Large creature from entering the spell's extradimensional space, since that creature takes up less space than the eight Medium creatures mentioned in the spell's description.

JC's tweets are not official any more, and I surprisingly cannot find an existing Q&A for this.

Can a Large creature enter the extradimensional space created by the Rope Trick spell?

Answer 1

By RAW, only Medium or smaller creatures can enter

However, RAI may have been something different, as Crawford's tweet indicates. Let's look at what definitely fits and how large a Large creature is, and try to interpolate how a DM could rule.

8 Medium creatures can fit, according to the spell.

All creatures, even within the same Size category, have different sizes and weights. So to avoid comparing apples to oranges, let's look at what happens to any Medium creature affected by the Enlarge spell:

Enlarge. The target's size doubles in all dimensions, and its weight is multiplied by eight. This growth increases its size by one category-- from Medium to Large, for example.

Size doubling in all dimensions correlates well with the weight multiplier - doubled height, width and depth would imply a creature of eight times the volume.

So a single Large creature is as large and as heavy as 8 Medium creatures, which happen to be exactly what fits inside the space created by a Rope Trick.

So it could fit

This leaves room for DM interpretation - is the space of the proper shape to fit the creature?

• If the space is roughly spherical, there may even be some extra room under the "ceiling", previously unused by Medium creatures, leaving floor space for one or two Medium creatures.
• If the space is a tight corridor, precisely fitting Medium creatures in a row, a Large creature probably couldn't squeeze in unless very "slim" (like, say, a snake).

But can it enter?

Fitting inside is one part, the other is actually being able to enter the Rope Trick space. The spell states:

[...] [T]hose inside can see out of it as if through a 3-foot-by-5-foot window centered on the rope.

This indicates a 3x5 foot aperture. This is explicitly a viewing window, but could reasonably to be assumed as a minimum size for the entrance, if so adjudicated by the DM.

Whatever the size of the entrance, the rules for squeezing into a smaller space\$^1\$ state:

A creature can squeeze through a space that is large enough for a creature one size smaller than it. Thus, a Large creature can squeeze through a passage that's only 5 feet wide. [...]

This matches up pretty well to ONE of the two dimensions of a Rope Trick opening - a Large creature could be able to squeeze through, albeit with some difficulty, if you read the "wide" as relating to "width", and not "the least of width and height".

We're getting pretty heavy into interpreting rules in a specific beneficial way, so as always, the feasibility will depend on DM ruling.

\$^1\$ Thanks to mdrichey for pointing this rule out.

Answer 2

As written, no

If you take out the adjectives, it says:

The space can hold as many as eight … creatures.

So it can hold 0-8 creatures. The “medium or smaller” limits the size of those creatures.

It also means that it can only hold 8 tiny creatures.

That may not be what they intended, but that’s what they wrote.