D&D 5E Never Give Them Unlimited Black Powder

[Fauchard1520]

There’s a reason that black powder tends to be expensive or scarce in D&D. It’s the same reason why, when my players boarded an enemy pirate ship, I chose to make it a “ballista and crossbows” kind of ship rather than the “pistols and cannons” kind. If you give players the means to blow a hole in your campaign, they’re going to bloody well find a way to do it.

So here's my questions for the board: Have any of you DMs out there made the mistake of giving the party an arbitrarily large amount of explosives? How much damage did it do, and what got blow'd up?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I learned the hard way not to do so in d20 Modern. (To nerf d20 Modern grenades, give them a wider area of effect.) I saw a GM mess up in Pathfinder and allow stockpiled alchemist explosives (turns out that's against the rules, for good reason). In a campaign where the PCs could use a signaling rocket, I replaced it with a magic item because there is no way in hell I'm letting PCs have access to explosives.

As far as I'm concerned, there is no periodic table of the elements in any fantasy setting (not devised until the 1800s in real life) so nobody actually understands chemistry at all.

 

[Don Durito]

Has anyone ever made the mistake of giving the PCs access to high level spells? Or powerful magic items?

Not seeing the uniqueness of the problem here. If the PCs have access to unlimited black powder than they have some options they didn't have before. So what?

 

[Charlaquin]

Smokepowder is the solution. Makes a small boom so you can make functional firearms, but in large quantities only burns smokes without exploding. How’s it work? Who cares, it’s a fantasy setting, it doesn’t have to obey real-world chemistry.

 

[Cadence]

The 10yo-12yo's I'm DMing asked around, and the local alchemist had some. They made quite a distraction at the Baron's castle they were raiding!

 

[dave2008]

What about unlimited Black Pudding?

 

[Fanaelialae]

In one of the first 3e campaigns I played in, the DM allowed one of the players to put 20 oil and an alchemists fire in a sack to create a short range AoE the dealt 20d6 fire damage, save for half (I think the DC was in the 15-20 range). It was absurd. We called them nova bombs.

In fairness, we really only used them if we felt an encounter was otherwise unwinnable. That said, they always won the encounter, regardless of how stacked the odds were.

To his credit, once he realized his mistake, our DM found ways to nerf it without retconning. Mainly by having the nova bomb reduce most treasure to molten slag. That definitely discouraged us from using them as anything other than a last resort.

 

[Weiley31]

Dropping Orbital Strike Bears.

 

[Ancalagon]

Smokepowder is the solution. Makes a small boom so you can make functional firearms, but in large quantities only burns smokes without exploding. How’s it work? Who cares, it’s a fantasy setting, it doesn’t have to obey real-world chemistry.

.... I mean you could do that but... no? That's not how it works, and "magic!" is a weak thing. If you have firearms and don't want explosives, either accept black powder (which is ... mediocre as an explosive) or have something more clever as how it works (and how that makes it not work well as a bomb)

In 2nd ed, you could put warding spells (a variation of explosive runes) on bottles filed with oil. Dump a cart of this on a bad guy and the damage was astronomical. The worry is having a low level PC have a big explosive power. But ... that's technology. I can cast "sending" an unlimited amount of times per day (texting). It's fine, roll with it.

 

[Ace]

There’s a reason that black powder tends to be expensive or scarce in D&D. It’s the same reason why, when my players boarded an enemy pirate ship, I chose to make it a “ballista and crossbows” kind of ship rather than the “pistols and cannons” kind. If you give players the means to blow a hole in your campaign, they’re going to bloody well find a way to do it.

So here's my questions for the board: Have any of you DMs out there made the mistake of giving the party an arbitrarily large amount of explosives? How much damage did it do, and what got blow'd up?

Comic for illustrative purposes.

PC's in one game of mine though some insane critical roles (they were high end arms merchants) got a hold of a suitcase nuke. Since they had been dimension traveling they ended up trading AK's and ammo for boosting it with a magical version of naquada from Stargate . Now back on Earth with a critical failure on another roll they sold it to some really bad people who used it and blew up a country.

The merchants ended up hunted and had to hide out on a very deserted island till they could figure out how to portal back to the the fantasy world with a load of weapons where at least the evil guy they sold the AK's too would shelter them.

We still had fun though which is what counts.