2y ago

#SorryNotSorry

34 comments

I've never understood the argument for Peasant Railgun just because the argument is self contradictory. You take a very strict RAW interpretation of a mechanic that might be technically possible in the rules and then just abandon that adherence to interpret the results in a non-RAW way
- It's just a "clever" rhetorical trick of considering rules and real world physics only where it enables them to pull bulshit.
  To be fair, it's pretty funny but I would never let that fly in a regular game.
- Yeah. I'm usually not one to accept "The DM can fix it" as an excuse for bad rules, but it absolutely applies here. It's an extremely specific set of circumstances that can only happen if the players are trying to break the game and the DM lets them. It's not a broken rule in practice so much as it is a fun thought experiment for people to talk about.
  I think there are much better examples of broken rules out there.
- That is not true. You are ignoring half the written rules for this to work.

Alright, the peasant railgun operates under the principle that the object moves at an infinitely scaleable speed. However, there aren’t any rules about movement at speed interacting with dropped items so peasant cannon’t. But, what are some major speeds that human bodies tolerate poorly? My thoughts go to wind abrasion, desiccation, eyelids tearing, air pressure bursting bronchi, and simple sonic booms. Say you bind an enemy in a net and send them through the peasant supercollider, what speeds would cause the cause the enemy to take damage?
- D&D rules have nothing about taking damage through excessive speed either, unless you are talking about fall damage, but that's not it.
  
  Sounds to me like you could yeet your party to your destination no problem with it
  
  So, peasant chain up to the closest pit/cliff, yeet enemy at them and watch him disappear on the horizon. Got it. Tie first if flying.
  
  Yes, but accelerating to a specific speed would necessarily involve certain effects, if your DM is halfway fun. The object is dropped harmlessly upon reaching the final peasant but until then, your enemy is on mr bone’s wild ride. If you really want me to offer specific rule-centric (boring) solutions then reverse gravity, 4 100 foot ladders holding queued action peasants, 4x10d6 fall damage to a bound enemy. 8x if you want to occupy all 8 surrounding spots, but we do half-spaces so I don’t know if that would work for other tables.
- I am intrigued by your "peasant supercollider" and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
  
  Pheasant supercollider, possibly.
- At a certain point your blood will be unable to flow because the pumping of your heart won't be able to overcome the high pressure in certain sections of your arteries/veins (which would be caused by the ridiculous acceleration).

On the other hand, it would be a super useful bucket-brigade within the rules as-written
- Pseudo telegram could also work within the "kind of works if you squint" framework of it without bumping into the "now we ignore RAW and use actual physics for the final attack" bit
  
  If you want to set up a proper telegram system with D&D tech, Magic Mouth is a better choice. Let's say you set them up onto poles that are spaced 30 feet apart, 4 magic mouths per pole. Say, the line is going east-west:
  Mouth 1: If it hears a "one" coming from the east, it says "one".
  Mouth 2: If it hears a "zero" coming from the east, it says "zero".
  Mouth 3 and 4: same but from the west.
  Each pole costs 40 GP to set up, so this telegram is rather expensive, costing 7040 gp per mile... but once it's set up, it doesn't sleep, doesn't need payment, doesn't need maintenance, just two people on each end with a binary code table. You could say that these are skilled hirelings, working in 3 shifts that means that the upkeep of both ends of a line is 12 gp per day.
  Peasants shouting the message... well, to make it absolutely sure that the message is heard, you need to put a messaging post every 100 feet. (Loud noises are audible at 2d6×50 feet per the DM screen.) If they are working in 3 shifts, that's 6 sp per day per post, making the upkeep of the line ~32 gp per mile. Thus the magic mouth setup would become cheaper after only 220 days.
  Monodrones are probably much more reliable for that. Or you can straight-up use monodrones to set up a proper Clacks system.
- Or to move anything really. That's why I think they should rename it to the peasant railway.
- I always thought that was all it was intended for, a niche situation where it was necessary to move something quickly. Not everything in D&'D can be solved by damage rolls.
- Could transport a bucket of water from the Atlantic ocean to anywhere on Earth in three seconds.
  
  With a sufficient number of peasants, sure.
- Love it. Sure, the boss takes no damage from the impact, but did you give him any ranks in swim?

That's a very succinct rebuttal... I like it.

Sure, but the final peasant can only make an improvised ranged attack roll for 1d4+STR (20/60).

If we're about to simulate physics, the wooden stick would turn into an expanding cloud of plasma about halfway through the "railgun" anyway.

If you peasent rail gun something upwards, you can throw it high enough to take 20d6 damage falling on someone, given your peasents are able to hand off something 200lbs.
https://olddungeonmaster.com/2016/12/23/dd-5e-falling-objects/
- That doesn't work anyway, as the item would only be dropped next to the final peasant, as per the rules of the game.
- Come to think of it, I'm pretty sure a variant of that attack featured prominently in Final Fantasy: Advent Children.

Velocity*
- Both?

34 comments