D&D 5E When RAW goes too far

[jmartkdr2]

well my all time favorite still is the dual wielding of jousting lances to get two attacks from one mounted charge, please don't ask for the nonsensical justification.

my reaction: Help! (like in the tweet)

Still legal in 5e. :/

And honestly, that doesn't bother me in itself - I'm sure someone, somewhere, at some point in history showed up to a skill-at-arm portion of a tournament with two lances, told everyone to "hold on to their butts"(or the local equivalent thereof) and proceeded to spear two different apples off the ground at the same time (spearing apples being how you showed accuracy with a lance - these days they use foam blocks of more consistent size) and everyone who saw it was duly impressed, because that's pretty impressive.

But that doesn't fit with the fantasy of a lance, which is about big charges for a lot of damage that plow right through a block of minions or take down a giant. Which would work if lances were two-handed weapons that only need one hand while mounted, like they were in 3e.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

[cranky old man voice]

Yeah, this reminds me of the hand crossbow wars of 2015. People insisting, insisting I tells ya, that you could continuously fire two hand crossbows without droppin' either one. Cuz the rule never said nuthin' about needin' a free hand to reload.

Then I'd go on about how it also never said you needed to obey the laws of gravity and ... wait where was I?

[/cranky old man voice]

Yeah, this is nothing new. Although, come to think of it I probably don't need to clarify that I'm a cranky old man.

Well, I mean, the hand crossbow can’t be exactly a RL version of the weapon anyway, so I still allow it.

I figure the person specialized in them has rings and hooks built into their xbows that allow easy “cocking” of the cord+tensioner.

 

[Shiroiken]

I personally have found RAW to be one of the most idiotic concepts, because it always leads to pushing logic completely out of the way. I tried running various games by RAW, but every time it led down too many arguments. I've started running things close to RAW when something new comes out, because a lot of things "broken" turn out to be fine (only Healing Spirit got the immediate ban, because I can do math). I change things that are a problem, because RAW doesn't matter; it's my game.

5E got it right by starting things off with "the DM decides the outcome," rather than focusing on rolling dice for everything. It still throws my players for a loop when they go to do something, and when they roll dice I start describing the outcome before I even see the roll.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The dual gunslinging Hand Crossbows is still a very cool image. It's cool enough I'd work to make it happen for an interested PC. Clip-fed hand crossbows is a doable alternative. I'm not one to let the rules get in the way cool.

I went with a revolving chamber, similar to a toy my wife has. Gives it reload 6. My PC just figured out the schematics to make it +1, with double range, and a “sympathetic quiver” that magically feeds arrows (they aren’t “bolts” if they have fletching) into the chambers once a chamber is emptied.

Just gotta track down the rare ingredient and get some downtime!

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Like the "commoner railgun" idea I heard proposed back in the 3e era.

It's been many years, but the gist of it was a long string of hired NPC's to create a cheap cannon-like siege engine that fires cannonballs at supersonic speed. This is done by lining up the NPC's, and each one holding action with a readied action to hand the cannonball to the person next to them. By some technical wording of the rules that I don't recall, supposedly all these actions would go off on the same round, meaning that you could accelerate a cannonball to go an arbitrarily high speed (a 5 ft. square per commoner hired) within a single 6 second round. . .so you could get that cannonball up to hypersonic speed to use as a superweapon.

Nonsensical twisting of the rules to break and ignore physics is what happens when you stick to the RAW of any game to the exclusion of common sense. There's a reason we have living gamemasters.

Well, there was no rule to convert that movement into an attack or damage so RAW using it as a weapon was out. In physical terms, despite its movement it somehow never acquired velocity or momentum; when the last commoner let go of it it would fall at their feet just like any other item they dropped. But yes, you could move a cannonball an arbitrary distance in six seconds.

(Heroes of Might and Magic 3, of all games, had a hidden rule to prevent this type of exploit: units "remembered" how much movement they'd taken that turn, even if they were transferred to a different hero.)

 

[CleverNickName]

Sometimes, the DM just has to break out the classic response:
"That's how I'm going to rule it; we can discuss it further after the game."

 

[CapnZapp]

...lead to a great many arguments about how the Feat was supposed to work, since it was clearly broken as-written.

The truly ironic thing, of course, is how 5th Edition's balance between melee and ranged combat is broken already to start with, and Crossbow Expert is one of the culprits (Eldritch Blast + Agonizing Blast is another).

That is, never mind the chatter about hand use. The fact you can leverage the -5/+10 mechanism at range (through Sharpshooter) and still use Crossbow Expert to make a bonus action attack on top of all your regular attacks makes Crossbow Expert the one feat that fails the most.

That is, unlike other overpowered feats, this one fails on everything it sets out to do, and the game would be straight-up better without it.

And if that's a new revelation to you, well, it isn't to me!

 

[Lanefan]

Make sure that opening doors are RAW as well. I hate to think if I was turning the door handle wrong too!

In one adventure module I own, going by the module's actual words (which count as RAW for the module) makes opening any door hard if not impossible.

The wording goes something like "Unless stated otherwise, handles and hinges for all doors are on the left..."

 

[jgsugden]

In one adventure module I own, going by the module's actual words (which count as RAW for the module) makes opening any door hard if not impossible.

The wording goes something like "Unless stated otherwise, handles and hinges for all doors are on the left..."

The handle and nihge were on the left, but the latch was on the right. It just had a very long metal bar in the middle of the door.

 

[S'mon]

Pretty sure the 2E PHB or DMG cites this or another example in a sidebar. Falling onto a solid surface is definitely survivable. Falling into lava on the other hand probably not.

Lava is viscous and several times denser than human. I bet landing on it is much more survivable than concrete!