10 ms·

Peasant Railgun

• eszed 1y ago
  Oops! Your site is hugged to death at present.
  • moffkalast 1y ago
    Hit by another kind of peasant railgun, in a manner of speaking.
• ourmandave 1y ago
  I hadn't heard of this until it was called out in a paragraph in the new DND 2024 rules explaining that the game is an abstraction and not a physics textbook.
  • nkrisc 1y ago
    I think games this are most fun when you play within the bounds of the rules (as written) and not consider them reality simulators (...magic...). Then you can approach the rules as merely constraints in which to optimize solutions to problems. 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.
    • pavel_lishin 1y ago
      For what it's worth, there are plenty of tables that focus a lot less on plot & roleplaying, and more on the combat & puzzle aspect. There are even whole RPGs that are effectively dungeon crawls, where your characters don't need much of a personality, and are often explicitly disposable. D&D may not be for you, but I bet there's a RPG out there that is!
      • bluefirebrand 1y ago
        I personally haven't found much luck with finding tables that focus less on plot and roleplaying. Ever since Critical Role became very popular, the hobby has skewed heavily towards Roleplay and it's really disappointing 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
        • antisthenes 1y ago
          > 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 There are definitely groups of players where there is an overemphasis on rules and combat. To each their own.
          • bluefirebrand 1y ago
            An overemphasis on playing the game using the rules in the book? Why even buy the book if you aren't going to play by the rules in the book? I have never understood this
            • deleted 1y ago
              [deleted]
            • antisthenes 1y ago
              An overemphasis on never having any homebrew rules and only using the rules in the book verbatim and being OCD about it. I thought that would be clear from the context, but I guess it wasn't.
        • pavel_lishin 1y ago
          I'm heavy into roleplay, and that's how I prefer to play D&D. 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.
    • throwawayoldie 1y ago
      Which is a perfectly fine way to play if everyone at the table is having a good time. I think of RPGs as the lovechild of wargames and improv theater: some people favor one parent, and some the other.
      • dllthomas 1y ago
        > some people favor one parent, and some the other 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.
    • spacemadness 1y ago
      DnD 5e seems like it’s already on the generic rules side of things and gives DMs a lot of room for interpretation. That’s why the railgun seems silly. “I guess that’d be a persuasion or performance check, your pick”, etc.
    • wheybags 1y ago
      I don't really understand this - to me, DnD without rp is just a bad facsimile of a video game. Wouldn't you rather just play skyrim? Or Baldur's gate in coop mode, if you still want to be social?
      • mrob 1y ago
        The only video game I can think of that seriously tries to replicate the experience of playing old-school D&D is Nethack and its forks. Nethack goes to great lengths to allow for player creativity, even at the cost of game balance. E.g. there are monsters (cockatrices) that petrify on touch. If you kill one, it's possible to pick it up (wearing gloves) and instantly petrify other enemies by hitting them with the corpse. This isn't without risk, e.g. if you fall into a pit trap while attempting this you'll end up petrifying yourself, and enemies can do the same to you if they're capable of wielding weapons and are wearing gloves. There's a simulationist approach to its design that goes beyond other games. There's a community saying: "the dev team thinks of everything." 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.
      • BlueTemplar 1y ago
        (BG3's local co-op is worse than the one that its predecessor : Divinity : Original Sin 2 had, which had dynam8c split screen, where the split screens merged when both characters were close enough to each other.)
      • nkrisc 1y ago
        If I wanted to play a video game, I'd play a video game. I'm not talking about video games, I'm talking about tabletop games (and even board games). Besides, video games a fixed, finite experience. Very few video games (if any) can do what a tabletop game can do (basically anything you all want to do). 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?
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I've definitely had to raise the fact that D&D is not Real Life Simulator at games, both as a DM and a player, when people have argued either that "the rules technically allow this", and "well, in real life, it would work like this." (Sometimes as part of the same argument!)
• pavel_lishin 1y ago
  A note to my fellow DMs: if your players badger you into allowing this, remember that their enemies - typically BBEGs like Kings, Dukes, Wizards, Liches & the like - are much more likely to have two thousand peasants at their disposal than the party is.
  • joseda-hg 1y ago
    BBEG: "I have to give this one to you heroes, I thought peasants were a lot less useful than you did apparently, time to make use of those conquered villages I guess"
    • pavel_lishin 1y ago
      "Looks like I'm going to have to conquer a lot more villages. Say, come to think of it, is there any reason the peasants have to be alive to fire the railgun? I don't have to feed zombies..."
  • wizzwizz4 1y ago
    And if the players seek out the right artefacts of power (or bribe a level 17 wizard), they may be able to Wish away the loophole, bringing their nigh-indestructible enemy back down to mortal (unmortal?) levels.
    • pavel_lishin 1y ago
      I was just chatting with a player about how shitty the Wish spell, as written, is.
• jks 1y ago
  Why the number 2,280? What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I'm guessing to get a nice, round number of two miles: > 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?
  • rich_sasha 1y ago
    It's worse, if I follow the logic, the projectile will travel any distance in 6s, so long as you have enough peasants. I don't know what the D&D5 rules are on relativistic time dilation, I guess these would perhaps need to be invoked.
    • pavel_lishin 1y ago
      Given how grid-based combat works, I'm not even sure that D&D exists in a Euclidean-adjacent space time.
      • dsr_ 1y ago
        Nothing in any of the D&D universes suggests that it follows the same physical laws as ours, and many, many things say otherwise.
      • aidenn0 1y ago
        I demand at least a semblance of pythagorean distances for this reason; (N+M/2 is close enough for the distances involved in combat). The 5e default of diagonal moves being equal to grid-aligned moves is significantly more painful to my brain than dividing by two is.
• disillusionist 1y ago
  I personally adore the Peasant Railgun and other such silly tropes generated by player creativity! Lateral problem solving can be one of the most fun parts of the DnD experience. However, these shenanigans often rely on overly convoluted or twisted ways of interpreting the rules that often don't pass muster of RAW (Rules As Written) and certainly not RAI (Rules As Intended) -- despite vociferous arguments by motivated players. Any DM who carefully scrutinizes these claims can usually find the seams where the joke unravels. The DnD authors also support DMs here when they say that DnD rules should not be interpreted as purely from a simulationist standpoint (whether physics, economy, or other) but exist to help the DM orchestrate and arbitrate combat and interactions. 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!
  • hooverd 1y ago
    Did you use ChatGPT/an LLM for this comment or do you just write Like That?
    • otikik 1y ago
      It does read very chatgpt-y
    • bluefirebrand 1y ago
      LLMs had to learn from somewhere, a lot of internet comments write Like That
      • hooverd 1y ago
        It's very jarring when you see it nowadays, and rather unfortunate for people who have that style of writing.
      • 1y ago
• noelwelsh 1y ago
  I think of a spectrum of RPG participants. At one end you have the mini-maxers, who want to squeeze every advantage possible out of the rules, and at the other end you have the story tellers, for whom the rules are a just framework to hang a story on. I've always been at the story teller end and while I appreciate the ingenuity in the peasant railgun I'm not very interested in playing a game where it features. If I'm going for slapstick I'd rather have a setting that explicitly encourages and handles it (e.g. Paranoia). OTOH, navigating different player desires is one of the big challenges of RPGs, and if people at the table really want to play a certain I think it has be allowed to an extent.
  • foota 1y ago
    I'd argue in some ways it's a triangle, with RAW vs RAI being the third point. Someone can minmax either under RAW/taken to the extreme, or under RAI or they can do silly things under RAI or RAW/home brewed.
  • ourmandave 1y ago
    That's what session 0 is for.
  • spacemadness 1y ago
    Not exactly tabletop, but this is the issue I have with every Pathfinder build I see for Wrath of the Righteous. Everyone dips into these nonsensical combinations to get a better armor rating, etc. So then you get a Paladin that decided to become a witch for part of the campaign for “reasons”. You can roleplay something, sure, but it’s rather forced by the numbers.
    • Semaphor 1y ago
      It’s because those online guides are only relevant for people playing on unfair, yet those guides never/rarely mention that. Even on core I can do pure RP builds (with TB combat at least), all that minmaxing is only really important for the "I’d rather play a puzzle" difficulty.
    • pavel_lishin 1y ago
• Ekaros 1y ago
  My ruling on this would be that there is no acceleration. Last peasant just drops it on ground. Thus making it pointless setup. That seems most consistent way to me.
  • JoeAltmaier 1y ago
    Yet the rod traverses a mile in 6 seconds. How can that be? Without acceleration.
    • Ekaros 1y ago
      And who says the acceleration must be constant? It might be that it reaches maximum speed at middle and then drops to zero at end? But really, system does not simulate such for other parts of combat. Like say tabaxi monk with haste bodying someone.
    • jerf 1y ago
      I would also rule that in the D&D world there is effectively is no such thing as velocity or acceleration. Note that weapons do not do damage because of their weight or velocity; they simply... do it. Your Greatsword does 2d6 damage, because in their world, that's just what it does. Weapons may have "heavy" and "light" categories but those interact with other rules and are not the cause of damage. Velocity doesn't exist in the sense we think of it. A vague analog does, but it's really quite vague. 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.
• stego-tech 1y ago
  This is an excellent example of the difference between the letter of the rules/law, and the spirit of the rules/law. 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.
  • rtkwe 1y ago
    Nope, it's not a falling object so those rules don't apply, each step is just a peasant with a pole passing it from person to person. d20 + Dex to hit and 1d4 improvised weapon damage on a hit as thrown by the last peasant.
  • bluefirebrand 1y ago
    > Is it possible under the letter of the rules? Technically yes 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
• Nevermark 1y ago
  You don't even need a ladder/rod. Just one more unlucky peasant!
• generalizations 1y ago
  If I were the DM, I'd allow it.....but the players have to roll for each commoner sequentially to see if they can do their part. And the rolls get harder. If they want to spend 3hrs making increasingly hard rolls as the pole speeds up, more power to 'em.
  • mey 1y ago
    Yup. Each peasant after say the first 4 give me a DC check that gets harder to catch/pass the projectile down the line. If you need to be a 3rd level monk to potentially catch the missile, and not even rethrow the missile unless you get the damage to zero, this isn't getting up to any dangerous speed before hurting someone in the line. At least under my ad-hoc ruling.
• bovermyer 1y ago
  If I was a GM encountering this from players, I would absolutely allow it, and then the players would discover the consequences. 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.
  • petsfed 1y ago
    There's also an opportunity for essentially an Oppenheimer-type NPC to explore it, but then at the end of 2 miles of ladder-brigade, it just falls disappointingly on the ground, and you have a battalion of thoroughly demoralized peasants in a combat zone to contend with.
• aitacobell 1y ago
  I'm more about a mage hand giving wet willies
• kibwen 1y ago
  In earlier editions, a similar hack was to line up an arbitrarily long line of chickens (or similarly expendable 1 HP creature) and use a combination of cleaving feats to meat-teleport from one end of the line to the other in a single round.
  • Loughla 1y ago
    My favorite exploit was when a set of players realized the druid could transform into [large animal] and if taken to 0 hp, would revert to their druid form. They immediately wanted to make a hot air balloon to drop the druid onto groups of monsters in his largest shape.
• greesil 1y ago
  I was the master of techniques like this playing Warhammer 40K. Hello conversion beamer on a jet bike. That's a nice squad of terminators you have there, blorp. I'm surprised my friends let me play like this.
• putzdown 1y ago
  I know that folks are just having fun with this, but it embodies one of the things I dislike about D&D, one of the reasons I simply ignore most of the “rules.” At heart a role playing game happens in the imagination of the players. You can play RPGs entirely in those terms, with no real rules and very few numbers, just storytelling and imagination. On the other hand there are of course many tabletop games that do rely on structure, rules, and numbers, but these tend to limit the scope of what may happen in the game by virtue of having limited elements and rules. You cannot earn a trillion coins in Powergrid, there simply isn’t the time or resources. What is so strange about D&D is that it tries somehow to join these two models of gameplay: the subjective/imaginative and the objective/numeric. When it works, it’s fine (though, as I said, I personally tend to find the imaginative, storytelling part for more compelling than the objective, more tabletop-like part). This railgun embodies some sort of weird distortion in the whole affair. No: of course peasants cannot throw a pole however many thousands feet in a matter of seconds. If the rules somehow imply they can, the rules are dumb. Even if you accept the rules, use your imagination: what will happen to peasant hands and heads with an object passing that rapidly along them? What would happen to peasant skin if it tried to pull a pole with the kind of forces we’re talking about? I truly don’t understand how D&D players think. No disrespect: I’m not saying anyone is dumb. I’m saying that I can’t picture how I would be thinking about a game, or rules, or a line of peasants, such that I would consider for a moment the idea that they might propel a pole in railgun fashion. It’s… kinda funny… kinda. But the fact anyone pursues the joke more than two seconds, much less actually attempts this play with real DMs, is unfathomable to me. I don’t understand how you would be trying to merge the domain of rules with the domain of imagination in order to get yourself into this knot. Does that makes sense at all?
  • noelwelsh 1y ago
    Like you, I'm very much in the role playing is story telling camp. I think the difference is people who, like you and I, want to play in the world, and people who want to play with the world. I.e. they are playing a meta game where they play with the rules to "win". This makes no sense to me, because there is no winning when you play in the world. It's the story you tell that is the point. But I can understand their POV because I do play to win in other domains.
• drivingmenuts 1y ago
  > One of the major problems would be the absolute destruction caused to those you convinced to line up for this weird tango. 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).
• rtkwe 1y ago
  The problem comes from trying to mix real world physics with game mechanics only in ways that benefit the players and also applying rules where they don't fit [0]. Only the game mechanics allow you to pass it between the peasants so fast and the game already tells you what happens the last peasant throws it and it's a (likely non-proficient) attack with whatever item they're passing with the same range limitations that javelin or improvised weapon has. The item is only on average moving 1900 mph but it's really just being rapidly handed from person to person so the true velocity is a rapid sawtooth as the person moves it to pass it to the next person, enabled by the power of RAW itself to these feats. [0] This is just an object being passed between creatures not a falling object so the Falling Object rules are irrelevant.
• otikik 1y ago
  This reminds me of the "Dual Octo-cat Flail", invented by a friend of mine. 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.
  • dexwiz 1y ago
    How do you explain an octopus holding 8 cats, let alone keeping the octopodes alive for more than a day?
    • otikik 1y ago
      The cats are attached to the octopi same way the octopi are attached to the flail, obviously. As per keeping them alive: they take short rests, like everyone else
    • Yizahi 1y ago
      Probably there was no need for that, because game evening has ended while everyone was arguing about correct plural name for octopuses :)
      • petsfed 1y ago
        Obviously it's octopoxen 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.
      • sapphicsnail 1y ago
        My ex's goal in life is to get people to say octopodes because that's the proper Greek plural. Hasn't taken off yet
    • 1y ago
• Klathmon 1y ago
  Our group once badgered our DM at the time into allowing the parties pet goat to deal some minimal amount of damage in combat. Then we backtracked and bought a hundred of them from the local shepherd and had a small goat army for a bit. Unfortunately there was a flood shortly after and our goat army was lost
  • tonyarkles 1y ago
    My experience with a few fun DMs is that you have to be really careful with the shenanigans. I'm not surprised at all about the flood that took out your goats. I'm impressed with the restraint demonstrated by your DM in fact... one of my old DMs would have almost certainly done something more damaging first; off the top of my head, good chance we would have woken up to discover that the goats had eaten all of our clothing in the middle of the night.
    • ecshafer 1y ago
      Perfect chance for the army of goats to be corrupted by dark magic and become evil goats that are intent on killing the party.
      • Cthulhu_ 1y ago
        That's like the hypothetical question of "1 adult vs 100 children, who would win?"
    • gwd 1y ago
      Or, you know, having to deal with all the goat excrement; or either stopping for several hours three times a day to "pasture" (and having to find a place where the locals will allow you to do that), or carrying grain for 100 goats around with you.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• Yizahi 1y ago
  If anyone enjoys this kind of foolery, I recommend a Harry Potter x DnD crossover fanfiction: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Natural-20 https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-... 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 :)
  • pavel_lishin 1y ago
    I've also read the HPMOR series (it was ... not something I'd recommend), and started one of the ratfics about D&D world - and bounced off of it quickly.
• fitsumbelay 1y ago
  extremely disappointed this isn't an instructable
• ticulatedspline 1y ago
  Other problems aside, wouldn't it be more damage to just use the ready action to have them all attack (2,280d4?)? also wouldn't the projectile inherit the peasant's THAC0 which is probably terrible?
• ajkjk 1y ago
  I always felt like the best part of tabletop games was telling a good immersive story, which necessarily means that the world have some semblance of realism, which means the peasants would obviously refuse to do this, not to mention fail, and also that no PC would ever try to do it because it's absurdly out-of-character.
  • throwaway173738 1y ago
    “Some of the peasants dutifully stand in line while the majority look bewildered at your request.”
• Semaphor 1y ago
  This reminds me of Knights of the Dinner Table [0], a 90s D&D Parody cartoon magazine that later spawned its own TTRPG Hackmaster [1] (first with the 4th edition based on licensed D&D 1st ed, 5th ed is fully standalone (and less humorous, I don’t think you can even die during character creation anymore)). 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-The-Dinner-Table-001.pdf https://kenzerco.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Knights-Of-T... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster
• dmoy 1y ago
  > Falling Object rules for 5e. 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.
• zeroq 1y ago
  Back in the days we used to troll GMs at conventions with stuff like that. 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.
• jvanderbot 1y ago
  Imagine for a moment an army of 1000 archers firing longbows at a target. You'd expect 5% of these to hit by rolling 20s, and 5% of those to do critical hits by rolling two 20s. Repeat every 6 seconds for 50+ d8 dmg against any target, no rule twisting required DnD rules are not useful for things like that.
• fizlebit 1y ago
  I actually prefer a game where the rules mostly come from the DM. I think it is better if there is no players handbook. The characters develop along their story arc, e.g. at some point you character acquires new powers, e.g. your character has been spending a lot of time developing new combat moves, they kind of level up and now the DM explains a new mechanic. Your character has become adept at disarming opponents and now gets such and such a bonus to attempt a disarm. 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.
• pugio 1y ago
  When I was a kid I had a character that could fly. I realized that a Decanter of Endless Water put out a pretty powerful constant thrust. Then a Helmet of Freedom of Movement could be interpreted to remove all excess friction due to win resistance (forget the details but it was something about removing any factor that would inhibit your movement). Constant acceleration and no friction... Unlimited speed. 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.
  • gridspy 1y ago
    I think your DM might have changed their tune had you used an OP shield and turned yourself into a flying projectile. 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.
  • robocat 1y ago
    https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4615-decanter-of-endless-water https://www.dndbeyond.com/magic-items/4615-decanter-of-endle... 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?
• RHSeeger 1y ago
  Back when I was in college, we used to play various tabletop RPGs a lot. For one of them (DragonQuest), the rules we had were fairly complex (game rules + house rules) and covered a lot of situations. The general rule of thumb was that, if you came up with something that the rules said was ok, even if a bit ridiculous; you could do it. The caveat being, it would be discussed post-session to see if it should work going forward. But everything flies once. 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.
• protocolture 1y ago
  Much prefer Skeletron. https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2010/12936417/ https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2010/12936417... Has a better RAW foundation (The issue being maximising the number of skeletons)
• gcanyon 1y ago
  My math doesn't agree with theirs. 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?
• gcanyon 1y ago
  This kind of creative thinking reminds me of a time I was playing Arduin Grimoire (anyone remember Arduin Grimoire? Anyone? Bueller?) and the DM decided he was done with me, so I opened a door and saw... a million thunder bunnies. Only a hit point each, but they caused some damage, and there were a million of them. 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.
  • nilamo 1y ago
    Did you also gain 4 levels from all that sweet xp?
    • gcanyon 1y ago
      I don’t remember the result, and the entire endeavor had spun pretty far out of control by that point obviously.
• labster 1y ago
  If you’re looking for the original reference, it’s moved from 1d4chan (dead) to 1d6chan: https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Peasant_Railgun https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Peasant_Railgun
• sn9 1y ago
  Has anyone ever written a book about using math to exploit game mechanics like this? I would buy it in a heartbeat.
• internet_points 1y ago
  My first thought on seeing the headline was that the IDF had invented a new and more effective genocide-machine. The news these days really changes you.
• rincebrain 1y ago
  People who argue over "does this follow the rules" are missing the point. 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.
• kaichanvong 1y ago
  sadly, remember how some people, took 1-word, then picked a different word that was away from chess. Passant. It is quite different. This sounding meta-universe; Wondering whether good, bad, ugly
  • kaichanvong 1y ago
    "Peasant Railgun (DnD) is a weapon of mass game-breaking destruction", passant kinda breaks the point of how simple the game plays out kinda players required: Chess: 1v1, DnD: 1v6
• serf 1y ago
  rules negotiation is exactly why i've always preferred video game interpretations of the rulesets. "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.
• krige 1y ago
  My favourite piece of DM dickery that is a perfect yin to railgun's yang is the Immovable Rod story. 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.
  • Asraelite 1y ago
    > but to some point in the universe 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.
    • IAmBroom 1y ago
      It was not.
• Leszek 1y ago
  I once destroyed an entire small enemy camp in a 5e campaign by causing an avalanche using Create Water -- arguing that the 10 gallons of water I create would be a whole lot of snow when taking into account the relative density of water and snow. Definitely a Rule of Cool moment, I don't think the spell wording is even that amenable to this interpretation.
  • chipsa 1y ago
    10 gallons of water is like 80 pounds of snow. Even with the relative density, 80 pounds of snow isn’t going to do much for avalanche.
• Nihilartikel 1y ago
  I once had a kind DM accommodate my misuse of the 'summon steed' spell to materialize my war horse within the allowed 30 foot range above an enemy to drop it on their head.
• bilbo-b-baggins 1y ago
  I’m surprised that in 5e where this appeared nobody noted that Falling Damage applies to characters falling, and maxes out at 20d6 (PHB). There is no specific height by d6 rule for being hit by falling objects, only some guidelines about improvising damage dice from environmental things based on how deadly it should be. 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