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!
The underlying issue with TFA is that it's a player describing a thing they want to attempt - and then also describing whether the attempt succeeds, and what the precise result is.
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.
Finding fun and unexpected rules interactions is certainly D&D. Finding obviously broken and unintended interactions that make no sense in-universe, purely as intellectual sport, is also 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.
It's actually a well-known (at least in my blog circles) problem with D&D. Everyone house-rules things to such an extent that the only thing that most tables have in common is how leveling up works, and which spells they use.
Rules lawyering as a concept wasn’t invented at a D&D table, but the creation of the phrase almost certainly involved sitting at one.
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.
> 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.
I disagree. I have played since red box, played all the versions including 4th, I play 5th ed a lot.
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".
I would have thought that if the rules were the issue the "house rule" fixes would be similar if not the same. But the comment I replied to suggested everyone was doing different things to the point where only some of the rules were the same.
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)
That's how D&D goes, player comes up with the plan, tries to argue what they think the rules say should happen and tries to convince the DM if they disagree. DM gets ultimate say but it's still a collaborative process at it's core.
TFA is actually the first time I've seen the peasant railgun interpretation that actually causes damage. Other conversations I've seen all concluded it wouldn't do any damage, which made it even funnier depending on your point of view.
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.
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'.
My approach is that there is a tension between three things:
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!
Enough peasants should be devastating, right? Get a couple thousand and at least some will crit per round. Rolling it might be hard. Against a sufficiently armored enemy, might make more sense to just do “expected number of crits per round” or something…
To me this is one of the better things about combat in Dwarf Fortress and one of my least favorite things about most rule sets. It doesn't matter how "high level" you are; outside of specific edge cases a ridiculous number of opponents all landing hits simultaneously ought to do anyone in. Unfortunately most rule sets seem to stop at "lol high AC" with little to no nuance.
Considering a crit always hits in a lot of systems, I don't see how a swarm of weak enemies couldn't overwhelm high level players given enough numbers.
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!
Haha, yeah, I, I was considering putting some disclaimers around those. "What actually are the true, base-level primitives of physics?" has been an ongoing project for centuries. :)
> 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.
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.
The problem with this interpretation is that it relies on hyper-literal RAW when it's convenient and physics when it's convenient. If you apply the rules of physics to the wooden rod, then the answer is simple: the peasant railgun cannot make the rod travel several miles in 6 seconds. If you apply D&D RAW, the rod can travel infinitely far, but does not have momentum and doesn't do anything when it reaches its destination. You only get the silly result when you apply RAW to one part of it and ignore it for another part.
Yep. And if we apply hyper-literal RAW rules, then gravity also doesn't accelerate items, it simply sets their velocity to some arbitrary degree. None of the falling rules I've seen have ever mentioned acceleration, only fall speed.
(Actually, it looks like it's Sage Advice, technically?)
Arguably higher fall damage from higher heights models acceleration. If there were no acceleration then fall damage would be the same regardless of the distance you fell.
But if we’re (incorrectly) interpreting the RAW as the laws of physics, then the fall damage isn’t modeling some underlying law of physics. It just is the law, there isn’t some underlying physical property called “acceleration” to talk about.
If we were trying to create a real-time simulation system, then YES you are totally correct. However, many table-top RPGs rules only make sense in the context of adjudicating atomic actions (such as one creature passing an item to another) rather than multi-part or longer running activities. Readied actions are already a bug-a-boo that break down when pushed to extremes. While not listed in the rules, it might make sense for a DM to limit the distance or number of hand-offs that the "rail" can travel in a single round to something "reasonable" based on their own fiat.
Agreed. Chaining readied actions is the real issue here. Maybe the mechanical fix is - as you say - a limit on that. I would simply say that a readied action can not be in response to a action that has itself been readied.
I think the more simple and complete solution is to limit multiple characters interactions with one object similar to the way the rules limit one character interacting with multiple objects. Note that even without readied actions, an infinite number of characters could still pass an object in the space of a round, each passing it on their turn, so long as they were arranged in space in initiative order, so limiting readied actions both doesn't solve this (and allowing readied actions to be a bypass to others readied actions opens up as much space for exploitation as it closes.)
The simple solution is just to recognize that the Ready action lets somebody attempt to do a thing, it doesn't mean they automatically succeed.
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.)
> 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?
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.
> 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?
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.
>>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?
If we assume it does accumulate, then we also have to assume peasant #2000 couldn't possibly pass it successfully.
It's far more reasonable to assume it moves infinitely fast between peasants, but comes to a halt at each one.
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 expect a DM to accept a peasant railgun? No.
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…
There is no way the rules for gun could be used to carry five people at seventy miles per hour. For one thing, the idea that a, "piston rod" could somehow catch the bullet without being damaged is preposterous, not to mention the idea that it could turn some kind of "crank shaft." How fast do you think this, "flywheel" would have to be moving? While I admit that we've used the fact that some low-velocity bullets can't penetrate thick plates of steel armor in the past, the idea that the rotation of the armor could push a second bullet back in to the barrel of a gun that had just been fired is beyond reason. No, I do not want to hear about how you've put the mechanism from the flour mill we fought in last session into a metal box and filled it with oil. Roll for initiative.
Player creativity should be rewarded. I'd let them use it once, but if they try it more than that, the bad guys hear about it and suddenly they'll look at the wrong end of a bunch of those railguns.
This; applying the falling object rule makes no sense. But we can compare it to a falling object that has attained the same velocity - this will have fallen (under Earth gravity) 48k feet, or the equivalent of 800d6 damage.
For what it's worth: having seen that someone else suspected ChatGPT usage, and reading it again, I can understand what sorts of heuristics it might have tripped. But on overall intuition, I didn't get that impression on a first read.
If LLMs had the necessary theory of mind to model context well enough to write the comment in question the world would be a very different place. Writing style and fitting in to the context are entirely different things.
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.
> Writing style and fitting in to the context are entirely different things.
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.
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?).
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.
Every single group I have ever played with, when playing with brand new Players, has had someone try to drown enemies with create water inside their lungs.
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.
Even after 30 years of playing Shadowrun we still occasionally debate whether a fire ball with radius X will ignite the fuel in the driving vehicle. At least in this case it's a minor detail because iirc the rules actually state the fire manifests in the whole ball shaped area where there's no solid matter.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Sadly Owlcat outright seems to encourage that since many encounters in the game have such bizarrely min/maxed characters as well and even on normal difficulty you can get softlocked if you didn't make sure to get a spread of important spells/feats.
My biggest issue with their games really - they give you so many options so build characters and then take them away with combat design.
Pathfinder 1e had so many books and character options for broken builds that my table came up with this rule: if you can't hold the books your character needs in one hand for a minute, you can't play that character. Gives me warm and fuzzy memories :D
Man that's mean for old Shadowrun. Base rulebook is huge, and then you have like 4 additional ones - because it's so old that stuff was not incorporated yet.
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.
I've only played a little bit of Pathfinder 2e, but it seems like a game explicitly aimed at min-maxers. There are so many various conditions, so many ways things interact, so many ways to build a character badly that you basically have to be a munchkin to build something playable.
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. :/)
That's very funny, because I think it's the opposite. There's a ton of interactions, but those (in my view) are to encourage group tactics. Individual characters can definitely be built wrong, but so long as you have at least a +3 in your class's key attribute the difference in power between a vibes-based player and a hyperoptimizer isn't all that large. Feats in Pf2e mainly add versatility instead of power. Lots of first edition players hate it for that reason (first edition seems to be the hyperoptimizer's dream game).
> [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.
> If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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 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'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.
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.
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"
"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..."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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!
That was us way back in the day. The same dungeon map over and over with nothing but random encounters. I forget how long it took before someone finally lived to make 2nd level.
The first dungeon from the red-book DM guide was merciless for parties of less than 6ish. Before you even got into the dungeon, there was a carrion crawler that got a guaranteed surprise round with 6 attacks with paralysis on each attack. The only time it didn't TPK a new group I ran it with was when the thief ran back to town.
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
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.
> 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,
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 strongly believe that the influence of Critical Role has been detrimental to D&D. So many people believe that the "acting" style (for lack of a better term) is the right way to play, and that others are invalid, because their introduction was from that show. Moreover, a lot of DMs stress out putting pressure on themselves to try to run sessions on par with what these shows have. I wish people would embrace just hanging out with friends and rolling dice more.
I'm right there with you. I want D&D to be the equivalent to a board game night, not amateur improv sessions with a ton of pressure on the DM to deliver an 'experience'
Finding local players is always an issue, but there's tons of folks who prefer the more classic style of D&D. Take a look into Dungeon Crawl Classic and OSR takes on D&D like the Black Hack. Those tend to put dungeon crawling front and center. Finding a group usually involves trawling OSR discords or GMing your own local playgroup, but sometimes you can luck out at your local game store.
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?
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.
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?
(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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No no no the last peasant gets to make an Improvised Weapon attack at least! d20 + Dex to hit and 1d4 on hit. Thrown it has a normal range of 20 feet and a long range of 60 feet.
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.
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.
The article cites the falling object rules, which I think do mention velocity. This is from the 2nd edition DM guide:
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.
The average velocity is that but that's not the true velocity of the rod. As it's passed from person to person it has to briefly stop then the person swings it to the next person in line. Through the Power of Almighty RAW this happens as fast as is required for it to take place in one round but the peasant can only move it that fast to pass it. When thrown the strength abandons them and it's just a peasant throwing a pole; d20+Dex to hit 1d4 on hit 20/60 range(improvised weapon rule).
If one is actually taking this seriously, the simplest ruling would be that peasants need to pass a dex check to handle an object moving at such high speeds.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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 ;)
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Every table and group has it's own ideal version of the game and you can play either in D&D. I think a lot of people fall into the play to win because it's simpler and fits the mould of most games people are used to playing so it makes more sense to apply that pattern to role playing games.
To me, I see pushing rules boundaries as part and parcel with exploring fantastical worlds. Elves, dwarves, and dragons exist. Those aren't "real". Magic spells that allow you to fly and shoot fire from your finger-tips also exist but also aren't "real". If we're already breaking biology and meta-physics, why assume basic physics works exactly the same way either?
For some, I think it is re-capturing the child-like attitude of wonder, excitement, adventure, and asking the question "what if?". This, of course, may be tempered by campaign tone; something that might happen in a DnD campaign but likely not in Call of Cthulu, Kids on Bikes, Monster of the Week, etc
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.
Yeah, the whole thing gets messy in an interesting way.
- 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?
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?
...also, why does it have to be a ladder? Where does the ladder come from? And why can't you have all 2280 peasants just do a normal attack to do 2280d6 (or whatever) damage?
>What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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!
The underlying issue with TFA is that it's a player describing a thing they want to attempt - and then also describing whether the attempt succeeds, and what the precise result is.
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!
> And that's... not D&D?
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zng5kRle4FA
Finding fun and unexpected rules interactions is certainly D&D. Finding obviously broken and unintended interactions that make no sense in-universe, purely as intellectual sport, is also 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.
It's actually a well-known (at least in my blog circles) problem with D&D. Everyone house-rules things to such an extent that the only thing that most tables have in common is how leveling up works, and which spells they use.
Rules lawyering as a concept wasn’t invented at a D&D table, but the creation of the phrase almost certainly involved sitting at one.
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.
Problem?
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.
Nah, it’s a problem. Most other RPGs don’t have this effect because their rules are internally consistent.
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.
I disagree. I have played since red box, played all the versions including 4th, I play 5th ed a lot.
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".
I would have thought that if the rules were the issue the "house rule" fixes would be similar if not the same. But the comment I replied to suggested everyone was doing different things to the point where only some of the rules were the same.
Admittedly, I haven't done D&D5th. Too busy to do anything for a while, but even then, last I did were other RPGs.
There are two problems
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)
You've missed my point - D&D has many forms, but they all involve a DM, who takes part in the game by making decisions and interpreting rules.
TFA isn't that - it's somebody DMing for their own characters, and then calling the (fairly bizarre) decisions they made "RAW".
That's how D&D goes, player comes up with the plan, tries to argue what they think the rules say should happen and tries to convince the DM if they disagree. DM gets ultimate say but it's still a collaborative process at it's core.
TFA is actually the first time I've seen the peasant railgun interpretation that actually causes damage. Other conversations I've seen all concluded it wouldn't do any damage, which made it even funnier depending on your point of view.
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.
You're making an assumption about the distance to the moon.
> Per the rules governing object visibility at distance, the moon was invisible.
The devs forgot to special case it in the LoD algorithm.
My take has always been:
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'.
My approach is that there is a tension between three things:
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!
Enough peasants should be devastating, right? Get a couple thousand and at least some will crit per round. Rolling it might be hard. Against a sufficiently armored enemy, might make more sense to just do “expected number of crits per round” or something…
To me this is one of the better things about combat in Dwarf Fortress and one of my least favorite things about most rule sets. It doesn't matter how "high level" you are; outside of specific edge cases a ridiculous number of opponents all landing hits simultaneously ought to do anyone in. Unfortunately most rule sets seem to stop at "lol high AC" with little to no nuance.
Considering a crit always hits in a lot of systems, I don't see how a swarm of weak enemies couldn't overwhelm high level players given enough numbers.
> primitives like "plank length" and "quark spin"
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!
Haha, yeah, I, I was considering putting some disclaimers around those. "What actually are the true, base-level primitives of physics?" has been an ongoing project for centuries. :)
I'm going to be that that guy and say "plank length" is probably constant for a given plank. Planck length, on the other hand... :)
> 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.
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.
The problem with this interpretation is that it relies on hyper-literal RAW when it's convenient and physics when it's convenient. If you apply the rules of physics to the wooden rod, then the answer is simple: the peasant railgun cannot make the rod travel several miles in 6 seconds. If you apply D&D RAW, the rod can travel infinitely far, but does not have momentum and doesn't do anything when it reaches its destination. You only get the silly result when you apply RAW to one part of it and ignore it for another part.
Yep. And if we apply hyper-literal RAW rules, then gravity also doesn't accelerate items, it simply sets their velocity to some arbitrary degree. None of the falling rules I've seen have ever mentioned acceleration, only fall speed.
(Actually, it looks like it's Sage Advice, technically?)
Arguably higher fall damage from higher heights models acceleration. If there were no acceleration then fall damage would be the same regardless of the distance you fell.
But if we’re (incorrectly) interpreting the RAW as the laws of physics, then the fall damage isn’t modeling some underlying law of physics. It just is the law, there isn’t some underlying physical property called “acceleration” to talk about.
Is RAW being ignored in another part? AFAIU it's applied consistently.
If we were trying to create a real-time simulation system, then YES you are totally correct. However, many table-top RPGs rules only make sense in the context of adjudicating atomic actions (such as one creature passing an item to another) rather than multi-part or longer running activities. Readied actions are already a bug-a-boo that break down when pushed to extremes. While not listed in the rules, it might make sense for a DM to limit the distance or number of hand-offs that the "rail" can travel in a single round to something "reasonable" based on their own fiat.
Agreed. Chaining readied actions is the real issue here. Maybe the mechanical fix is - as you say - a limit on that. I would simply say that a readied action can not be in response to a action that has itself been readied.
I think the more simple and complete solution is to limit multiple characters interactions with one object similar to the way the rules limit one character interacting with multiple objects. Note that even without readied actions, an infinite number of characters could still pass an object in the space of a round, each passing it on their turn, so long as they were arranged in space in initiative order, so limiting readied actions both doesn't solve this (and allowing readied actions to be a bypass to others readied actions opens up as much space for exploitation as it closes.)
The simple solution is just to recognize that the Ready action lets somebody attempt to do a thing, it doesn't mean they automatically succeed.
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.)
> 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?
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...
> 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?
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.
>>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?
If we assume it does accumulate, then we also have to assume peasant #2000 couldn't possibly pass it successfully.
It's far more reasonable to assume it moves infinitely fast between peasants, but comes to a halt at each one.
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 expect a DM to accept a peasant railgun? No.
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…
Nah, there's always sub-integer Charisma modifiers to those results.
It's not like Behavioral Science is objective, in our world or theirs...
There is no way the rules for gun could be used to carry five people at seventy miles per hour. For one thing, the idea that a, "piston rod" could somehow catch the bullet without being damaged is preposterous, not to mention the idea that it could turn some kind of "crank shaft." How fast do you think this, "flywheel" would have to be moving? While I admit that we've used the fact that some low-velocity bullets can't penetrate thick plates of steel armor in the past, the idea that the rotation of the armor could push a second bullet back in to the barrel of a gun that had just been fired is beyond reason. No, I do not want to hear about how you've put the mechanism from the flour mill we fought in last session into a metal box and filled it with oil. Roll for initiative.
Player creativity should be rewarded. I'd let them use it once, but if they try it more than that, the bad guys hear about it and suddenly they'll look at the wrong end of a bunch of those railguns.
This; applying the falling object rule makes no sense. But we can compare it to a falling object that has attained the same velocity - this will have fallen (under Earth gravity) 48k feet, or the equivalent of 800d6 damage.
If you’re using the falling object rule then cap it at an appropriate terminal velocity, maybe 200 km/h.
Did you use ChatGPT/an LLM for this comment or do you just write Like That?
LLMs had to learn from somewhere, a lot of internet comments write Like That
It's very jarring when you see it nowadays, and rather unfortunate for people who have that style of writing.
But maybe less and less will, if all it gets them nowdays are accusations of using/being an LLM.
I've often written lists of bullet points with bolded headings and nowadays every time I do I feel I have to say that it's not written by chatgpt
And, "I'm not a cat."
(Except sometimes maybe as a NPC)
Just wait until your LLM starts accusing you of being an LLM
I just Write Like That. It always takes me longer to write things than intended because I tend to overthink things, too. :/
For what it's worth: having seen that someone else suspected ChatGPT usage, and reading it again, I can understand what sorts of heuristics it might have tripped. But on overall intuition, I didn't get that impression on a first read.
If LLMs had the necessary theory of mind to model context well enough to write the comment in question the world would be a very different place. Writing style and fitting in to the context are entirely different things.
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.
> Writing style and fitting in to the context are entirely different things.
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.
It was a good comment!
Welcome to the erosion of trust we are seeing live. Soon we won't trust anything outside of a speaker we can touch physically.
ChatGPT was sticky for me very early because its writing style reminded me of my own ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It does read very chatgpt-y
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.
I hope there were some buttered toasts attached to the cats as well, for additional infinite energy.
I relish any opportunity to post this link: https://youtu.be/Z8yW5cyXXRc?si=Upb6xmcOcPWzTDLb
This is amazing!
How do you explain an octopus holding 8 cats, let alone keeping the octopodes alive for more than a day?
Probably there was no need for that, because game evening has ended while everyone was arguing about correct plural name for octopuses :)
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.
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
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
It'd need to be enchanted with "Create Water".
Every single group I have ever played with, when playing with brand new Players, has had someone try to drown enemies with create water inside their lungs.
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.
Even after 30 years of playing Shadowrun we still occasionally debate whether a fire ball with radius X will ignite the fuel in the driving vehicle. At least in this case it's a minor detail because iirc the rules actually state the fire manifests in the whole ball shaped area where there's no solid matter.
A wizard did it.
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
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.
Perfect chance for the army of goats to be corrupted by dark magic and become evil goats that are intent on killing the party.
That's like the hypothetical question of "1 adult vs 100 children, who would win?"
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.
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.
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.
Sadly Owlcat outright seems to encourage that since many encounters in the game have such bizarrely min/maxed characters as well and even on normal difficulty you can get softlocked if you didn't make sure to get a spread of important spells/feats.
My biggest issue with their games really - they give you so many options so build characters and then take them away with combat design.
Pathfinder 1e had so many books and character options for broken builds that my table came up with this rule: if you can't hold the books your character needs in one hand for a minute, you can't play that character. Gives me warm and fuzzy memories :D
Man that's mean for old Shadowrun. Base rulebook is huge, and then you have like 4 additional ones - because it's so old that stuff was not incorporated yet.
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.
I've only played a little bit of Pathfinder 2e, but it seems like a game explicitly aimed at min-maxers. There are so many various conditions, so many ways things interact, so many ways to build a character badly that you basically have to be a munchkin to build something playable.
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. :/)
That's very funny, because I think it's the opposite. There's a ton of interactions, but those (in my view) are to encourage group tactics. Individual characters can definitely be built wrong, but so long as you have at least a +3 in your class's key attribute the difference in power between a vibes-based player and a hyperoptimizer isn't all that large. Feats in Pf2e mainly add versatility instead of power. Lots of first edition players hate it for that reason (first edition seems to be the hyperoptimizer's dream game).
> [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.
> If you enjoy in-depth stories with lots of intrigue &c, Pathfinder can totally deliver
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.
> 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.)
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.
> 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 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'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.
That's what session 0 is for.
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.
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"
"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..."
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.
I was just chatting with a player about how shitty the Wish spell, as written, is.
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.
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.
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.
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-...
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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!
That was us way back in the day. The same dungeon map over and over with nothing but random encounters. I forget how long it took before someone finally lived to make 2nd level.
The first dungeon from the red-book DM guide was merciless for parties of less than 6ish. Before you even got into the dungeon, there was a carrion crawler that got a guaranteed surprise round with 6 attacks with paralysis on each attack. The only time it didn't TPK a new group I ran it with was when the thief ran back to town.
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
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.
> 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,
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 strongly believe that the influence of Critical Role has been detrimental to D&D. So many people believe that the "acting" style (for lack of a better term) is the right way to play, and that others are invalid, because their introduction was from that show. Moreover, a lot of DMs stress out putting pressure on themselves to try to run sessions on par with what these shows have. I wish people would embrace just hanging out with friends and rolling dice more.
I'm right there with you. I want D&D to be the equivalent to a board game night, not amateur improv sessions with a ton of pressure on the DM to deliver an 'experience'
Finding local players is always an issue, but there's tons of folks who prefer the more classic style of D&D. Take a look into Dungeon Crawl Classic and OSR takes on D&D like the Black Hack. Those tend to put dungeon crawling front and center. Finding a group usually involves trawling OSR discords or GMing your own local playgroup, but sometimes you can luck out at your local game store.
You should play Nethack. Not a TTRPG though.
I have played plenty of Nethack
I like TTRPGs because they involve other people
> 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.
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
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.
Check out simple combat games by Steve Jackson Games (melee, wizard) circa 1977. No RP required
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?
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.
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?
(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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No no no the last peasant gets to make an Improvised Weapon attack at least! d20 + Dex to hit and 1d4 on hit. Thrown it has a normal range of 20 feet and a long range of 60 feet.
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.
Yet the rod traverses a mile in 6 seconds. How can that be? Without acceleration.
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.
The article cites the falling object rules, which I think do mention velocity. This is from the 2nd edition DM guide:
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.
The average velocity is that but that's not the true velocity of the rod. As it's passed from person to person it has to briefly stop then the person swings it to the next person in line. Through the Power of Almighty RAW this happens as fast as is required for it to take place in one round but the peasant can only move it that fast to pass it. When thrown the strength abandons them and it's just a peasant throwing a pole; d20+Dex to hit 1d4 on hit 20/60 range(improvised weapon rule).
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.
Conservation of mass, energy, momentum, etc does not exist in D&D.
Game mechanics that don't actually simulate physics
You might as well ask how a character turns into stone when looking at a gorgon
Magic. The end.
You're already relying on the rules' inconsistency with Outside physics; commit to the bit.
If one is actually taking this seriously, the simplest ruling would be that peasants need to pass a dex check to handle an object moving at such high speeds.
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.
> 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.
It was not.
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
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.
Did you also gain 4 levels from all that sweet xp?
I don’t remember the result, and the entire endeavor had spun pretty far out of control by that point obviously.
> 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).
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-T...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HackMaster
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?
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.
“Some of the peasants dutifully stand in line while the majority look bewildered at your request.”
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.
If you’re looking for the original reference, it’s moved from 1d4chan (dead) to 1d6chan:
https://1d6chan.miraheze.org/wiki/Peasant_Railgun
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.
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.
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.
You don't even need a ladder/rod. Just one more unlucky peasant!
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.
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.
> 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.
I'm more about a mage hand giving wet willies
Much prefer Skeletron.
https://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/2010/12936417...
Has a better RAW foundation (The issue being maximising the number of skeletons)
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.
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.
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
"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
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.
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?
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?
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.
Every table and group has it's own ideal version of the game and you can play either in D&D. I think a lot of people fall into the play to win because it's simpler and fits the mould of most games people are used to playing so it makes more sense to apply that pattern to role playing games.
To me, I see pushing rules boundaries as part and parcel with exploring fantastical worlds. Elves, dwarves, and dragons exist. Those aren't "real". Magic spells that allow you to fly and shoot fire from your finger-tips also exist but also aren't "real". If we're already breaking biology and meta-physics, why assume basic physics works exactly the same way either? For some, I think it is re-capturing the child-like attitude of wonder, excitement, adventure, and asking the question "what if?". This, of course, may be tempered by campaign tone; something that might happen in a DnD campaign but likely not in Call of Cthulu, Kids on Bikes, Monster of the Week, etc
Has anyone ever written a book about using math to exploit game mechanics like this? I would buy it in a heartbeat.
Why the number 2,280? What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?
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.
Given how grid-based combat works, I'm not even sure that D&D exists in a Euclidean-adjacent space time.
Nothing in any of the D&D universes suggests that it follows the same physical laws as ours, and many, many things say otherwise.
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.
Yeah, the whole thing gets messy in an interesting way.
- 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?
Perhaps time is quantized and to the outside observer, the action takes 12 seconds?
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?
...also, why does it have to be a ladder? Where does the ladder come from? And why can't you have all 2280 peasants just do a normal attack to do 2280d6 (or whatever) damage?
>What keeps you from adding peasants until your projectile travels at 0.99c?
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.
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.
> 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
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.
extremely disappointed this isn't an instructable
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.
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.
Oops! Your site is hugged to death at present.
Hit by another kind of peasant railgun, in a manner of speaking.