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.
>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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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).
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.
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?).
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
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 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.
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 ;)
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 68.2 ms ] threadYeah 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.
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!
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.
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.
If they want to spend 3hrs making increasingly hard rolls as the pole speeds up, more power to 'em.
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.
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).
[0] This is just an object being passed between creatures not a falling object so the Falling Object rules are irrelevant.
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.
Unfortunately there was a flood shortly after and our goat army was lost
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 :)
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