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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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’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

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 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.

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 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.

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

> 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).

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.

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

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.

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.

You don't even need a ladder/rod. Just one more unlucky peasant!

> 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 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'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)

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

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.

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 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?

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?

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.

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.