Peasant Railgun
knightsdigest.com
knightsdigest.com
In the case of the Peasant Railgun, here are a few threads that I would pull on: * The rules do not say that passed items retain their velocity when passed from creature to creature. The object would have the same velocity on the final "pass" as it did on the first one. * Throwing or firing a projectile does not count as it "falling". If an archer fires an arrow 100ft, the arrow does not gain 100ft of "falling damage".
Of course, if a DM does want to encourage and enable zany shenanigans then all the power to them!
And that's... not D&D? I mean players could certainly attempt to have several people pass an object quickly with the Ready action, under RAW. But what happens next isn't "the rod speeds up to such and such a speed", it's "the DM decides whether the peasants need to roll a dexterity check" and so forth.
And to me as a DM, that's why I find articles like TFA annoying. Not because it's confused about fall damage (though it is!), but because it's confused about who decides whether to apply fall damage!
Some people are there because their life is not their own, and they want to live freely in the game; some people are there because their life is an exercise in control, and they want to play with the win conditions.
Every table and game is unique. It’s a microcosm of society that is simultaneously everything to anyone and yet no one thing to everyone. It’s a way to directly engage with the Other via metaphor and indirection.
This is D&D.
Seriously expecting the DM to behave like a buggy video game and give you ultimate power because you found an exploitable glitch in the game mechanics is...well, that has also always happened in D&D, but it's hardly praiseworthy or in the spirit of things.
That’s what separates good games and groups from each other: the collective suspension of disbelief as a shared goal. When everyone is in it for themselves, it rapidly devolves into Mary Sue wish fulfillment and power gaming, and as another deleted commenter mentioned, Calvinball. When everyone is in it together, it builds on itself and each other, and you get something like Dragonlance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonlance
> Dragonlance is a shared universe created by the American fantasy writers Laura and Tracy Hickman, and expanded by Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis under the direction of TSR, Inc. into a series of fantasy novels. The Hickmans conceived Dragonlance while driving in their car on the way to TSR for a job interview. Tracy Hickman met his future writing partner Margaret Weis at TSR, and they gathered a group of associates to play the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game. The adventures during that game inspired a series of gaming modules, a series of novels, licensed products such as board games, and lead miniature figures.
RPGs facilitate group story telling, a shared experience.
Friendliness comes from shared experience - whether it is the classic "first date" of "dinner and a movie" attempting to kickstart a lifelong relationship or a simple nod between bikers as they zip past each other in opposite directions.
D&D provides a structure, making it a shared experience that everyone present can contribute to. And if the people of the group want to house rule a thing, that is a social thread right there.
To apply external pressure to try to get rid of these house rules would be to try to undo an element of the social fabric of the group.
It's not a problem. It's a strength.
The only time it's a problem, is if the social group can't decide and accept/discard a house rule. That is a social issue for the group though, not a problem with D&D.
And it kind of mirrors the many issues we as a society have with law-as-written and laws-as-intended.
D&D 5th Edition is a hodge-podge of sacred cows, marketing-based nostalgia, design cowardliness, and compromise.
Other games don’t get house ruled as much because they’re better games.
D&D 5th is the JavaScript of role playing: it’s the most widespread and in a perfect world everybody would use something else.
For 5e.. 1st campaign, no houserules, 3 years run time including transition to online during covid 2nd campaign, no houserules, just a bit of re-skin warforged are necrons, right? etc in person 3rd campaign, added legacy items inperson, different group concurrent with campaign 4th campaign, some house rules on spellcasting (provokes attacks of opportunity etc), accelerated progression till 9th level, expand legacies to things other than items
Play Pirateborg, Starwars or Dark Heresy etc, don't play a 2nd campaign, no house rules. You just live with the short comings of the system, you won't be there for long.
That said, I ran a 10 year rolemaster campaign, so maybe I'm an outlier. But people who read the books and don't play a heap, seem to have a lot of strong opinions. "City X is a terrible place to live- says some tourist who has transited in airport".
Admittedly, I haven't done D&D5th. Too busy to do anything for a while, but even then, last I did were other RPGs.
Problem 1 is that D&D is the most popular and well known TTRPG, so people who are otherwise not curious about roleplaying games might still wind up playing D&D. They might not even realize there are other similar but different roleplaying games to even play!
Problem 2 follows from problem 1. Because D&D is seen as the 'default', many people try to make it be the one-size-fits-all game. It is actually really bad at this, because it has it's roots in a very specific type of tabletop wargame that is still visible in its DNA even today
So very often you find people who would probably prefer a more roleplaying focused game, playing D&D instead. And despite Wizards of the Coasts best efforts, D&D still plays better as a dungeon crawling wargame style game than a pure roleplaying game
My evidence of this is the insane popularity of Baldur's Gate 3, mostly because it had a lot of deep dialogue trees, not so much because it's a good tactical combat game (even though it is pretty good at that)
TFA isn't that - it's somebody DMing for their own characters, and then calling the (fairly bizarre) decisions they made "RAW".
Two of my favorite bits of D&D (3.5) logic:
* Mounting a horse is a free action. Therefore, much like the peasant railgun, you could set up saddle highways: a post every five feet, with a saddle on top. Then, you mount and dismount between cities as one gigantic free action, allowing instantaneous travel.
* Per the rules governing object visibility at distance, the moon was invisible.
* Arguably, once you started drowning, you could not stop drowning, even if removed from water.
The devs forgot to special case it in the LoD algorithm.
1. D&D mechanics, like all games, are a simplification of the real world using primitives like "firing a bow" and "passing an item" and "downing a potion"
2. The real world is fractaly deep and uses primitives like "plank length" and "quark spin"
3. Therefore there will always be places where the real world and the simplification don't line up. Finding those gaps might be a fun meme, but it's not an exploit. We play with the simplification's primitives, not the real-world physics'.
1. The "combat simulator" built into the rules. I run this according to the spirit of the rules, so that players' investments in classes and feats pays off as expected. Otherwise my players feel cheated.
2. The simulation of the world. This is important because it makes the world feel real and believable (and because as DM, I get many of my plot ideas by "simulating" consequences).
3. The story. The campaign should ideally tell a story. Sometimes this means involving what I think of as "the Rule of Cool (But It's Only Cool the First Time)."
The "peasant railgun", unfortunately, fails all three tests. It isn't really part of the intended combat rules. It doesn't make sense when simulating the world. And it probably doesn't fit into the campaign's narrative because it's too weird.
On the other hand, if a player proposes something really cool that fits into the logic of the world, and that also fits into the story, then I'll look for ways to make it happen.
Let's say the PCs find 200 peasant archers, and set them up on a high hill, and have them all rain down arrows on a single target. That seems like it ought to work, plus it's a great story about bringing the villagers together to save the day. So in this case, I'll happily handwave a bunch of rules, and declare "rain of arrows" to be a stupidly powerful AoE.
But different tables like different things, so this isn't one-size-fits-all advice!
I'm going to be that guy - because I love being that guy, and I won't apologize for it - and point out that we're not even sure if those are primitives!
Since this wooden rod travels several miles in a 6 second time frame - traveling more than 500M/s on average - don't we have to assume it accumulates?
Falling damage is the mechanism that makes the most sense to shoehorn in there. Using an improvised weapon on a rod already traveling more than 500M/s seems even more clumsy, as well as calculating the damage more wibbly-wobbly.
There's also the rule of cool. If it makes the story better/ more enjoyable: have at it.
(Actually, it looks like it's Sage Advice, technically?)
So N people can certainly declare that they all want to pass an object around, for any value of N. But if the object would need to move at supersonic speeds for them to all succeed, then obviously one of them won't succeed. (And the subsequent people won't do anything because the trigger for their Ready action didn't occur.)
No, we don't.
The most recent D&D Dungeon Master's Guide actually puts a note in the book[0] for things like this: The D&D rules are not a physics engine. The D&D rules are a simple framework for creating a game world, but that's not the same thing as being a 3d game engine or a generative data model. It's a game where you're expected to resolve complex events with a single die roll. It's not Unreal Engine 5 or Autodesk Inventor or COMSOL Multiphysics.
Just like D&D's morality and ethics system (alignment) falls over and cries when you poke it with a Philosophy 101 moral quandary, the game's event resolution is not intended for you to model the Large Hadron Collider.
[0]: https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/br-2024/the-basics#Pla...
The basic assumption here is that the rules as written beat physics and common sense. When you play that game, you have to do it rigorously. You can't say that rules trump physics one moment, and physics trump rules the next.
> There's also the rule of cool. If it makes the story better/ more enjoyable: have at it.
That does rule out the Peasant Railgun more thoroughly than any rules argument.
If we assume it does accumulate, then we also have to assume peasant #2000 couldn't possibly pass it successfully.
Or if not infinitely fast, but we're going to assume a chain could accelerate it indefinitely, than it's still more reasonable to assume each pass happens exactly how fast it needs to for 6s/num_peasants, comes to a halt, and then moves to the next. That way all the peasants have the same, minimum, speed, Instead of some slow, other absurdly fast based on an arbitrarily assumed, linear, acceleration.
(Why not assume exponential acceleration and say after 10 passe s it hits light speed)
Would I love to play in a campaign where we are dungeon-crawling scientists who are investigating the theory that we are actually living in a poor simulation? Hell yeah. Just imagine your d&d university admissions departments working out that people somehow can be sorted precisely on a scale of -5 to +5 in terms of natural competency for any skill…
The peasant railgun was a footnote to one of the early chapters. Author specified that he would never, ever allow most of the munchkin tricks he wrote about in a game that he DM'd, but since crazy munchkin tricks are the source of a lot of the humor in the writing, he left them in the fiction.
It's not like Behavioral Science is objective, in our world or theirs...
(Except sometimes maybe as a NPC)
LLM responses tend to give me the vibe of a disengaged office worker who isn't emotionally present and lacks a proper mental model of the topic. It's been shocking to me to witness how frequently people around me IRL fail to notice such writing.
Absolutely — which goes a long way towards how I make the judgment myself, now that you say it. Although it's still hard to be precise about.
(One positive impact that LLMs indirectly had on my life is that they motivated me to look up ways to type em-dashes more easily. I now have my caps lock key mapped as a compose key, and a custom compose-key mapping for it.)
> It's been shocking to me to witness how frequently people around me IRL fail to notice such writing.
To notice, they'd have to themselves be engaged, I suppose. Or at least have some idea about the subject matter.
A flail is basically a stick with a pointy ball chained to one end. It does one attack per turn.
A dual flail attacks twice (it has two balls).
Now replace each ball by an octopus. And each octopi is holding a cat on each of its 8 tentacles. So when you attack, the cephalopods attack, and that means that 16 angry felines attack. I think at the time they came up with this animals had some sort of guaranteed damage exception in some cases (perhaps in a previous DND version?).
Anyway it was completely OP.
Like the inspiring concept, I think part of the joy of DnD is that it's often an invitation to discussions about irrelevant minutae. Provided the rules-lawyering doesn't take up all the oxygen in the room, it's a fun diversion.
It generally devolves into an argument about whether or not human lungs count as an open container, but it always happens.
It's a human consciousness constant. It's amazing.
As per keeping them alive: they take short rests, like everyone else
Unfortunately there was a flood shortly after and our goat army was lost
But I guess first of all the whole party uses the same 5 books and if we'd play a current version then just the base rule book would be ok.
If you're like noelwelsh or me, and prefer to lean into the storytelling and roleplaying, there are significantly better options than Pathfinder.
(And better than D&D of course, but everyone knows how to play D&D. :/)
> [If you] prefer to lean into the storytelling and roleplaying, there are significantly better options than Pathfinder.
That's true in the sense that Pathfinder has far less support for the more modern style narrative-first play and most of its rules focus on tactics. I dislike the premise that story and tactics are opposing goals, though; in my view they're two separate goals a game may or may not have. Pathfinder 2e has both, though its story-support is very traditional. If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver, and it also features significant amounts of tactical combat. If you're just not into the combat, then there are totally far better games. If you like the modern narrative-first game approach to story, then it's also not the best. But I absolutely like storytelling and roleplaying, and I enjoy Pf2e quite a lot.
That's how I feel about D&D - but only in the hands of a decently skilled DM. I think other games provide a lot more tools & framework for the storytelling aspect.
And I like the combat; Pathfinder just has a lot more ... work involved than D&D. It could be, though, that I'm just more familiar with D&D, and if I played as much PF2E as I do 5E, I would find it totally easy and intuitive, too.
It's very much about familiarity. I've played quite a lot of both (and D&D 3.5 and PF1 before them).
It's not wrong that PF2E has a harder and more demanding focus on mechanics and tactics, especially teamwork, which is for both better and worse. D&D5E doesn't just allow for the DM to define more outcomes through narrative-focused hand-waving, it _requires_ it by lacking rules or guidance and having imbalanced granularity in some rules or builds over others. PF2E is more demanding in both design and practice, but in exchange provides more tools out of the box that a GM doesn't need to invent on the fly when players invest time and effort into tactical cooperative play. 5E has the shallower difficulty curve, but experienced 5E players who get past 2E's steeper curve find it has a higher ceiling... _if_ combat is a heavy focus.
I had a rather contentious argument last year with a fellow freelance designer when I tried to suggest that PF2E is a roleplaying game. There's a significant cohort of PF2E players who play it almost exclusively for its combat. To me, that was telling in ways that I think the combat advocate didn't intend. Part of the allergy to D&D4E that players of D&D3E and earlier had when it came out was its narrowing of focus to combat. PF2E is likewise (and borderline ironically) a response to D&D5E's reduced focus on combat balance.
To put it more generally, adept improvisational DMs with players who don't care as much about combat balance or fidelity are better served by D&D5E (or a wide array of TTRPGs with even less focus on simulation in tactical combat over giving players difficult choices, like Powered by the Apocalypse games, Mork Borg and its OSR-adjacent or -derived family of short-lived character gantlets, or narrative playgrounds like Bastionland).
GMs who struggle to create fair mechanics for unusual circumstances mid-game and players who demand greater balance and fidelity in combat are better served by PF2E (or a smaller but still robust field of TTRPGs with more streamlined _or_ more extensive mechanics with similar goals, like 13th Age, the Warhammer family of games, or even D&D4E.)
My biggest issue with their games really - they give you so many options so build characters and then take them away with combat design.
I dunno, I've always been both? I've done damage output analysis in spreadsheets to choose the best feats or spells; and the DM was always surprised at how my different skill point bonuses added up to make massively improbable things probable. But I always thought massively improbable was the point of the game; and he always managed to turn it into a good story. I never would have suggested a peasant railgun, that's just kind of silly.
I actually sat down and worked out all the equations based on the mass of my character and the amount of thrust the decanter provided. Our party would be deep in the wilderness somewhere and I'd say " I nip back to town to pick up some supplies, with acceleration and deacceleration it takes me 17 minutes".
Looking back, I think I was a pretty annoying player, but my DM was very patient. I guess he could see I put a lot of work into the scheme. It was also probably the most exciting application of physics I had encountered in my life so far.
It sounds like your cool application of physics was interesting and harmless. Good on you and your DM for making it part of the fun at the table.
abridged: speak the command word "Geyser" produces 30 gallons of water that gushes forth in a geyser 30 feet long and 1 foot wide. As a bonus action while holding the decanter, you can aim the geyser at a creature you can see within 30 feet of you. The water stops pouring out at the start of your next turn.
Doesn't seem like the decanter has thrust. To design something that thrusts would require your character to have a deep understanding of D&D physics (or maybe just some deadly experimentation?!)
Trying to mix mundane physics and universe book rules (i.e. peasant railgun) in a D&D universe sounds like a dangerous pastime for a character.
Cue the old SF story where Hitler wants to control a portal to other planets. Version 1 destroyed when other end moved into a red sun creating a radioactive lance, Version 2 destroyed when other end put into an ocean creating high pressure hose.
Do you want your character to magically refine Plutonium, Madame Curie?
I was referring to 3e, when the "simulation" aspect of the game was more heavily emphasized. See: https://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/SRD:Decanter_of_Endless_Water
> “Geyser” produces a 20-foot-long, 1-foot-wide stream at 30 gallons per round. ... The geyser effect causes considerable back pressure, requiring the holder to make a DC 12 Strength check to avoid being knocked down.
It was that last line that initially sparked the idea. Given the stated effects, this didn't seem like so much of a physics+rules stretch. The no-friction freedom of movement may have been more beyond the pale. Unfortunately 5e deliberately tried to close all the fun ways one could abuse various items.
Breaking and bending rules is fun in games and a useful life skill. I enjoy seeing the crossover from gaming to life.
[0] This is just an object being passed between creatures not a falling object so the Falling Object rules are irrelevant.
Main character is a self-aware munchkin mage transported to the HP world and DnD rules apply to him only.
Unfortunately the story is unfinished on the most interesting point, but the finished amount chapters is more than enough :)
This is a lot to place on the DM, but I like the anarchy of a system like dungeon crawler classic. You expect some of your characters to die, e.g. in one adventure my character in a last ditch effort to save himself drank a potion of unknown origin, that potion turned him into a mithral statue. It was a fitting end to his short but eventful life.
Another character played by a different player managed through a long process involving books and negociations with his patron to construct a demonic sentient flying dog through whom he could cast spells and see.
This kind of exploration I think encourages players to see their characters much more as characters than machines to be min maxed and it is way more fun.
Give the DM total control to decide the dice roles that determine the outcome of the shenanigans. You try to hire an army of peasants you're going to be dealing with appointing sergeants, logistics, mutany, desertion all before you try to line them up to throw a ladder at some dude, which in the end is probably like a 1d20 >= ac for a chance of 1d4 damage, with of course crit tables, where on a critical success the dude might be tangled up in the ladder and fall over or something.
They immediately wanted to make a hot air balloon to drop the druid onto groups of monsters in his largest shape.
One night, one of the characters was transformed into a frog and knocked off a roof. He triggered a spell, Shadow Wings, which grants the play large wings made of shadow, allowing them to fly. However, the wings are large enough to lift a human... I imagine on the order of a 15-20' wingspan. The DM made it known that it was not reasonable for a frog to fly using them. Much debate happened because... everything flies once. At the end of the discussion, the frog was _not_ allowed to fly.
The result being a new quote came out of that night.
Everything flies once, except a frog.
Of course as games like DnD are also a social affair, it's worth making sure everyone is having fun with something like this, otherwise what's the point?
I never could get into DnD because of the roleplaying. To me games are a set of rules which I view as a puzzle.
D&D may not be for you, but I bet there's a RPG out there that is!
I don't know why people bother to play a game with rules when they don't actually want to engage with the rules ever
And I think you're probably right.
D&D is barely the right fit for the kind of game I like to play. But D&D is wildly popular, and it's much easier to find people who'll play D&D with a heavy emphasis on roleplay, than it is to find people who'll play Heart, or Wildsea, or things that are even further way from the "roll-play" aspect.
For what it's worth, we still engage in combat, we use our various abilities outside of combat, etc. Most of the rules are about combat. Even the magic section is framed around using magic in actions. But exploration, etc., is still a part of the game; it's just that those rules are jotted down on like 5 pages out of the 200.
Yes, to my dismay.
I like classic D&D, dungeon crawling and what people so derisively call "rollplaying". I find amateur theater improv quite tedious and uninteresting
I haven't been able to find other players like me at all for ages. Everyone I meet "Just got into the game because of Critical Role"
I feel quite strongly that my lifelong hobby has been warped away from me. I try hard not to be resentful but it sucks I can't find groups to play with that want the same kind of game I do
I like TTRPGs because they involve other people
There are definitely groups of players where there is an overemphasis on rules and combat.
To each their own.
Why even buy the book if you aren't going to play by the rules in the book? I have never understood this
I thought that would be clear from the context, but I guess it wasn't.
The problem is this isn't actually true. They certainly think of a lot of things, but it's still only a finite, predetermined set. All the clever tricks are common knowledge now. Anybody can read the Wiki and learn how to win without much difficulty. Nethack becomes boring once you understand how it works. If you want to play it but haven't yet done so I recommend avoiding spoilers as much as possible (the cockatrice thing is so well known that I don't think there's any real problem sharing that one; the game was designed around less extensive pre-Wiki-era sharing of knowledge, not zero sharing).
Real D&D doesn't have this problem. A human DM can adjudicate improvisation without needing to program it in advance, and do this while maintaining consistency in a way that LLMs still fail at. Well-run tabletop RPGs are still the best games available for allowing player creativity.
Isn't DnD with roleplaying just a bad fascimile of a theatrical performance? Wouldn't you rather just put on a play instead of play DnD?
A number of the responses here say things like this, and I'm picking this one somewhat arbitrarily to call out that "people" isn't the only dividing line - some people very much favor different sides of it at different times, in different moods, in different contexts, to varying degrees.
For one thing, most of the peasants would die. The few remaining would be so horrified that they'd probably attempt to bring down whatever authority figures exist on to the player characters, unless of course the PCs killed them in cold blood. There are consequences for _that_ too.
For another, whatever they used it against - if it survived somehow - would remember that tactic, and might use it against them.
And as usual, the use of overwhelming force (regardless of source) is something that people talk about. Any observers would report what they saw, and that information would spread. Further consequences there, both to the party's reputation and to the number of enemies that have greater resources than the party.
You're right though that it's just a mishmash of inapplicable rules (it's not a falling object) and mixing real and game world physics only to the players advantage (peasants are able to pass it any distance in 6 seconds but you turn on real world physics when it comes time to apply damage). That's why my general rule is we're either working all in one world or all in the other when trying to figure out what happens in weird situations.
Really, the problem is the very selective application of real-world physics and game physics and then trying to very selectively obtain a particular outcome. If we want to play real-world physics, well, we all know the reasons why this isn't going to work in the real world. If you want to play D&D physics, then yeah, sure, the rod arrives at the other end of the line in one turn but with no more or less velocity than it started with, because "velocity" isn't even a concept in D&D. There is only "damage" in the D&D world, and there are no rules that state that handing off an item to the next person changes its "damage" any. Railgun a Greatsword from one end of the line to the other and a Greatsword still does 2d6 damage.
It does successfully demonstrate that the D&D rule set is a just a complete and utter failure as a Grand Unified Field Theory of Physics. I join the rest of the nerd world in shock and dismay at this outcome and encourage them to try harder next edition. If they'd just listen to my feedback and import the Standard Model this would all go away.
There's plenty of other ways to munchkin the rules to obtain absurd damage even completely within the ruleset. Fortunately. Or unfortunately. The reader may decide for themselves.
When a character falls, he suffers 1d6 points of damage for every 10 feet fallen, to a maximum of 20d6 (which for game purposes can be considered terminal velocity). This method is simple and it provides all the realism necessary in the game, It is not a scientific calculation of the rate of acceleration, exact terminal velocity, mass, impact energy, etc., of the falling body.
So accelerating the object (increasing its damage) up to some arbitrary cap sounds reasonable. Perhaps limited to twenty times.
But really, system does not simulate such for other parts of combat. Like say tabaxi monk with haste bodying someone.
You might as well ask how a character turns into stone when looking at a gorgon
In short, out of sheer malice a DM decided that the rod is indeed immovable, but not in relation to the ground, but to some point in the universe, so upon activation he made it launch at several thousand miles per hour in some direction.
The players have, of course, turned it on him, by using it as a siege weapon on the basis that an iron rod slamming at that speed is bound to cause some damage.
If this is meant to be relative to the cosmic microwave background, then it would be closer to a million miles per hour, with an energy equivalent of about 15 tons of TNT.
But I was playing a phraint, who was good at jumping and could cast a spell to be as light as anything. I asked how high thunder bunnies could jump, and he said maybe 3-4 feet.
So I jumped 6 feet into the air, positioning myself like I was high jumping, and cast a spell to be as light as air -- and I hovered there, out of reach of the thunder bunnies. I carefully took out my long sword and swung, killing several of them. And as I pointed out, "once my attack is done, I've completed my swing, and my sword arm is back up out of harm's way.
He thought about it for a minute and then said, "Okay, fine, you kill all the thunder bunnies," and we went on with the game like he hadn't just tried to off me directly and I'd flipped him the bird.
As long as there is an earth-shattering kaboom, I don't see the problem.
That said, if I ever introduced this idea in a game, he would probably introduce me to a tarrasque (for non-DnD people: the tarrasque is pretty damn near invincible and a railgun would probably just piss it off).
As usual when this comes up, I have to point out that the entire premise is Homebrew - even if Falling Damage rules applied to Thrown Objects (they do not), it would max at 20d6.
The correct ruling is it is an Thrown Improvised Weapon and does probably 1d6 (plus Dex, 0 for a commoner, iirc) - and requires a non-proficiency attack roll to hit.
Why? Because DnD is not a physics simulator. If you want the rules to apply at all, it’s just a thrown object no matter how far it got handed on first. If you want to Homebrew rules about things traveling distances adding momentum, and hence damage, that has nothing to do with RAW.
Source: Forever DM
Anyway, the KotDT players would in several comic make use of the mob rules, hire a ton of beggars, and just "mob" the bosses, as those abstracted, simplified rules for mob fights allowing the otherwise useless peasants to fight a boss monster for relatively little money. Same concept as TFA ;)
[0]: https://kenzerco.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Knights-Of-T...
First, to cover 2 miles in 6 seconds with smooth acceleration you'd need to accelerate at somewhere around 600ft/s^2.
This would give a final velocity of 3600ft/s, or about 2400mph (sorry for all the freedom units, the article started it...)
Just double-checking, that means the distance covered would be about 3600ft/s * 6 seconds / 2 = 10,800 ft, close enough to 2 miles.
Fall damage should be related to kinetic energy I think, so if 60 feet is 2d6, we need to figure out how fast something is going after falling 60ft. That's about 60ft/s -- 60ft ~= 32ft/s^2 * 2 seconds / 2, 32ft/s^2 * 2 seconds ~= 60 ft/s
So the final velocity is ~60x for the rail gun, and the kinetic energy is therefore 60^2 = 3,600x
Therefore the rail would do 3,600x the damage = 2 * 3,600 = 7,200d6 damage. That averages to 3.5 * 7,200 = 25,200 damage, enough to kill just about anything?
DnD rules are not useful for things like that.
If they want to spend 3hrs making increasingly hard rolls as the pole speeds up, more power to 'em.
"it's part of the fun!" -- yeah, it's social -- but for me it's social the same way that a divorce hearing is social.
The flexibility is nice, but id rather have an adventure with friends than busting out contractual minutia to determine how to proceed when friend Y does something the whole table thinks is stupid after his/her 500th attempt at other stupid shit.
Well I haven't kept up with D&D at all since sometime around 3e (maybe?), but I'm glad to hear that falling object rules are still broken as hell
You used to be able to use relatively low level spells that summon e.g. rocks or whatever, up in the air, and have them fall on someone's head for way imbalanced amounts of damage. I don't remember it being 300d6, but still a lot.
https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2010/12936417...
Has a better RAW foundation (The issue being maximising the number of skeletons)
Can I cast invisibility or cloak? Can I use levitation? And roughly how large rock can I create with a create element earth spell?
Alright, so my character's name is Northrop, and let's bomb some cities.
This sounding meta-universe; Wondering whether good, bad, ugly
kinda players required: Chess: 1v1, DnD: 1v6
I don't know what the D&D5 rules are on relativistic time dilation, I guess these would perhaps need to be invoked.
- if the rod travels across 7 light seconds in a round, the only way to avoid breaking relativity is if the 6 seconds the round takes are measured in the frame of reference of the rod
- that would mean that from the frame of reference of the rest of the people/monsters/edgy antiheroes/misunderstood blob creatures, the rod’s “turn” took 7 seconds.
All characters in the D&D universe are accustomed to a reality where each round takes 6 seconds, and everyone - in synchrony - is able to perform an integer number of tasks that fit within that timespan. Rounds begin and end simultaneously for everyone involved in combat. How disturbing would it be for such beings to see those laws broken?
> At the start of combat, the chain of events is initiated and that wooden rod is carried two miles in 6 seconds which means it had to accelerate to the speed of 1900 miles per hour. This is due in part that a medium creature (which human peasants categorize as) takes up a one-by-one 5 foot square. Multiply that space times 2,280, and you easily get a line that spans two miles.
As far as why two miles, specifically? I don't know. Wizards can cast Meteor Swarm out from a range of one mile, so maybe there's something that can counter-act this nonsense from a range of 1.9?
Yeah so, I did have a group in a setting with fusion torches, deliberately accelerate a large mass to a decent percentage of the speed of light, aimed at a planet, just to commit genocide.
Is it possible under the letter of the rules? Technically yes. Is it in the spirit of the rules? Not really, no! And that grey area is where negotiations can happen, and erode one side in favor of the other.
Actually no, because there are no rules for accurately simulating real physics. Strictly by the rules, the last person in the chain of the peasant railgun simply throws it at the enemy for exactly the damage number that it would do under any other circumstances
In a tabletop setting, the rules are there to facilitate the shared experience, whatever it might be. If you have a table that enjoys 6 hours of rules lawyering, great, have fun. If you have a table where every so often you have to stop them from shoving the rules lawyer in a locker and throwing them in the marianas trench, great.
But the key point is, it's a shared sandbox and everyone is supposed to find it engaging, without actively ruining each other's experiences, and anything else is more or less secondary. The interesting part is more or less the human fuzziness and collaboration of it.
I was once in a tabletop one-shot where the DM had premade character sheets for all of us. I noticed almost immediately that there was a tac nuke on mine, and when I asked, the DM admitted that they had accidentally left it on there from the thing it was copied from, and let me keep it.
An hour or two later, when the oneshot had devolved into people all taking potshots at each other from cover, our mission having rapidly unraveled, I pressed the big button on the thing nobody else in the party knew I had, the DM sighed and informed everyone that not only were we all dead, but a significant fraction of the city we were in was now gone.
In many environments, that would have been actively hostile to the other players' enjoyment, and gotten me banned from the table, but in this case, it was both very funny for everyone and not the end of the oneshot, because then on our next bodies, we all rapidly had to switch to fighting to get everyone else blamed for what just happened without admitting anything any of us weren't supposed to know.
So there are certainly tabletop settings where the table vibe is going to be that pitching a solution like the Peasant Railgun is going to fit, and there are certainly cases where even proposing it is going to get you moved down a tier or three on the DM's "do I want them at my next game" internal counter. You just need to not be so bad at reading the room that you actively spoil other people's fun.
The news these days really changes you.