A concept that requires you to both interpret the rules literally and then ignore the rules altogether in order to work.
If you interpret them literally, it does allow for FTL communication, but not railguns
The FTL travel has bugged me for a while. Time dilation can’t be a thing if Demiplanes are accessible from anywhere at any time, and the speed of light must be instantaneous. Bothers me to no end
It doesn’t. The rules are specifically different at different scales. Both for distances and times. For combat and out of combat.
For laboratory tests, we asked some monks to spar while passing the note short distances. Our understanding of quantum D&D is confined to small scales.
I want to take this as truth instead of abstraction and see the world as truly having different laws of physics in different circumstances.
Like, slap a person and see if time and space are altered.
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Sending already allows FTL communication.
How do we know that there isn’t speed of light delay in magic?
It would be in the rules of the spell
Exactly. The duration is one round, the distance is “any distance”, and the target can reply immediately. If it had lightspeed delay then the distance would be limited to 3 lightseconds.
And do the exact same to physics and biology too. How fast are these peasants supposed to be moving?
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
That would be fully RAW compliant 👍
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.
All of those peasants will need to perform a grapple check with a +0 bonus.
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.
C’mon, lets not dictate who’s fun based on a shameless attempt to bend D&D rules and physics into a pretzel. You already gave up on physics at the moment you decided a line of people can pass an object instantly. Going from 100% RAW no physics to 100% physics RAW be damned is kind of a smartass move. I honestly doubt people would even be trying this in real games if not for the meme, because how do you even organize a perfect line of peasants in the middle of a combat encounter?
There’s a lot of fun things you can do without stretching believability to the breaking point. One of my favorite Pathfinder characters was an aarakocra barbarian that used enhanced carry capacity to wrestle enemies into the air and throw them at each other. No need to selectively reinvent physics to make it work.
It’s my gods given right to bend the rules until they tell me otherwise! How Crawford hasn’t errata’d this away with an incredibly simple clarification of “items can’t be transferred between more than 3 people per round of combat” is beyond me. Not to mention the innumerable chances for the DM to say “no” before you gather 6k+ peasants. The line existing presupposes quite a bit.
Oh yeah that is pretty silly. You could make the kingdom’s fastest and most people-demanding mail system, but anything more and your DM is just indulging wacky shenanigans. Preservation of momentum and damage by air friction aren’t in the book so that’s not so much bending RAW as it is quickly switching the PHB for a Physics 101 book and expecting nobody to notice. Bugs Bunny might be impressed but puzzled why you’d bother with those books at that point.
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.
No. You can’t.
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First off, as meme mentions, speed has no part in this equation. So you’re not talkin about a peasant rail gun. You’re just talking about a single peasant throwing an item.
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All thrown items use the Improvised Thrown Weapon rules. Those rules state that range gets limited to 20/60. So at maximum you’re throwing it 60 feet. Unless you’ve got wings, a broom or an elevated position then it’s not going higher than that.
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But you’re not throwing it straight up. You’re throwing it at an angle because you’re trying to get it to fall on the enemies position. Even if this didnt violate rules as written (two objects cannot occupy the same grid space, vertical space being treated as occupied for the explicit reason of preventing this “tactic”) then you’re still trying to target a specific point. So you’d be rolling an attack at disadvantage (it’s outside normal thrown range of 20 feet) and wouldn’t even be able to put it 60 feet above the enemy because you’re throwing at an angle to get it to reach that position, not throwing it straight up.
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Everything I’ve ever seen uses Dex saves for falling objects. So enemy is still using a dex save to evade the attack.
So at most you’re doing 50 feet worth of falling damage (5d6) and that’s providing you succeed on in a disadvantaged attack roll and the enemy doesn’t dex save.
I think the idea is to have the final peasant be above the enemy and to drop the “missile.” Assuming the missile is a Small or larger creature, the falling rules from Tasha’s would apply:
If a creature falls into the space of a second creature and neither of them is Tiny, the second creature must succeed on a DC 15 Dexterity saving throw or be impacted by the falling creature, and any damage resulting from the fall is divided evenly between them. The impacted creature is also knocked prone, unless it is two or more sizes larger than the falling creature.
In other words, a max of 10d6 damage, DC 15 Dex save to avoid it entirely.
That’s just circling back to the point of needing to be directly above the enemy which isn’t happening. You’re not having a line of people who are able to transfer one creature from hand to hand only for the last person to be standing on a cliff that just happens to be positioned directly above the enemy. If it’s a line of people then you NEED an elevated position like a cliff or a building, otherwise everyone would need a flight speed and position themselves just a little bit in the air each time.
That “idea” is even worse than what I took at face value. You’d have better chances just throwing it.
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Velocity*
Both?
