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Peasant Railgun

Peasants are the common commoner amongst the NPCs of many a tabletop role playing game. It doesn’t matter the setting, there's going to be a variety of "common" NPC that's peasant-like in some way. The subject of peasants has come up in my Dungeons and Dragons gaming group once again as the Peasant Railgun meme makes its way through the internet once again. A crazy idea that's been around for many years. Not sure what we’re talking about? The concept goes something like this: we find a big bad target, line up a group of 2,280 peasants all in a row over the distance of two miles, have them all ready their action, and then have them pass an object (usually a spear) down the line over the course of a six-second round, until it reaches the last person in line who throws the ammo at the target - gaining  "velocity damage" based on falling object damage, and dealing somewhere near 400d6 worth of damage. If this idea sounds ridiculous to you, and you’re a regular reader of the blog, welcome back to another edition of Never Say Dice Ruins Your TTRPG Memes. You can see our previous work regarding animating skeletons and the Divine Bovine earlier in this series. Now, let's set our aim on the Peasant Rail Gun.

Stay On Target

It just wouldn’t work. But why? Most reasonable players are going to want to understand why a particular idea will or won’t work within the rules as opposed to just hearing "because I'm the DM, that's why a wizard did it." There are a ton of problems with the Peasant Railgun, so let's take each idea-breaking issue one at a time until this goofy meme finally collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. First, yes, we all understand that, logically, something moving a distance of two miles in six seconds would need to go fairly fast. We won’t get into how fast, but let's take this issue as our first problem. While the object is accelerating quickly, there is no such thing as "extra acceleration" or "velocity damage in D&D." There is falling damage, but that's not really comparable to what's being described here. If, for the sake of argument, we say there is some kind of momentum-enhanced damage that incorporates the speed at which an object is traveling.. how are the peasants even handling it? Sure, the first few probably aren’t going to be moving very swiftly - this spear isn’t instantaneously fast. After that, though, we’re talking about an object that is hard to grab, hard to hold onto, hard to guide, and hard to let go of. How long before somebody gets injured trying to move it and we see wrenched shoulders or skin being burned off palms? How long before somebody gets it wrong, misses, and skewers the person in front of them instead of just passing it? Even if you’re not allowing for "extra damage" building up, a spear can normally do 1d6 damage - an amount that could be deadly to your average peasant. 

This then leads you to the question of coordination, which is... how? 2280 peasants is a LOT of people to wrangle. You might get around by having some clever announcer, magic effect, or cue for everyone to go off of. Even if you get around that, though, they’re still all going to have to do their thing "at the same time," per the meme: holding their action to pass the spear along. That means they’re all going to have to roll initiative checks. For the sanity of the DM, one might reduce this to a few "group initiatives," but even then you’re going to have to hold action to go at the lowest initiative. Even reducing it to a mere 23 "group initiatives," your chances of rolling a 1 are approximately 88%. Okay, maybe there's a bit of a chance to roll above a 1, but on 23 rolls your chance of rolling below a 5 is approximately 99.8%. The target has an 80% chance of rolling a 5 or above. Those are not good odds for your railgun. This means the target is going will almost certainly end up going first. Given that your range with a spear is 20 feet (you really don’t want to roll this railgun at disadvantage, do you?), and that most adversaries are going to have a speed faster than 20 feet, AND they’ll be going before the PRG… your target is going to be either out of range or have moved past the front of the PRG before you can actually "fire" it.

Negative, Impacted On the Surface

But could it actually work? Still no. Okay, we all like the "rule of cool" and trying crazy things. We should still try and be fair about it, though. Is a DM going to grant "velocity damage?" Probably not. Maybe a few extra d6 on top of the damage of  spear itself, just to be kind? Certainly not 400d6. Are 2,280 peasants going to even be able to pass it along? Along with that "group initiative," we might consider adding "group dexterity saves" after the first few groups, with an increasing difficulty. Is someone likely to get injured? You better believe they will! So please, do try this in your games.

Even if the DM is being kind, this still isn’t likely the route you want to go. Even allowing for the "full 400 d6 damage" you’re looking at an average of 1,400 damage per shot. That's if you hit. Consider instead having 2,280 peasants with shortbows. You’re keeping the d6 damage from spear to arrows. You’re increasing Range from 20 feet to 80 feet. Plus, even if you’re looking at a 50% miss rate, you’re still going to average closer to 4,000 damage per round... with an easy follow up shot the next round. So instead of some crazy railgun – give them a volley!

Hopefully, you have a DM that's nice enough to allow you to make a decision on whether a crazy idea like this might be worth trying, without penalizing you too badly. Try to remember that there are probably simpler options than whatever crazy scheme you've just concocted with your group. If you don’t believe us about the railgun, you’re likely to find plenty of other people's posts that go into fantastic detail about why this just isn’t the best idea for your party. So, until the next terrible meme, or at least until next week, enjoy your tables and your dice!

- A

Send questions, comments, and new types of damage that won't work in D&D (but might on an insurance claim) to neversaydice20@gmail.com or tweet us @neversaydice2.

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