D&D 5E What are the "True Issues" with 5e?

[Gammadoodler]

Has D&D ever had information on how much dirt you can move with a shovel?

Who cares? And where in the post you replied to did I suggest that it needed to?

But similarly why did we ever care the exact volume of earth a caster could move with a spell?

 

[Gammadoodler]

I saw what you did there!

Man I wish that was on purpose..

 

[Gammadoodler]

The AD&D DMG (p 106) has a chart for the cubic volume of rock mined, per 8 hours labour per minor.

I guess fantasy worlds don't have child labor laws..

 

[pemerton]

I guess fantasy worlds don't have child labor laws..

Touche!

 

[Oofta]

Who cares? And where in the post I replied to did I suggest that it needed to?

But similarly why did we ever care the exact volume of earth a caster could move with a spell?

For the 6th level spell it does not matter but for the cantrip it must be loose earth. So yes we care.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Sorry, it didn't format well in one line and trying to get that right, I forgot to put in an explanation.

Would a nice table that said what strength or damage it took to hurt different kinds of materials be enough? It feels like you would only need it to say it was thick or thin and what the material was. So if you knew what the stein was made of you would have what you needed.

[I would not be surprised if this is in the 5e DMG already. I am the cliche in that regard.]

If we wanted something, I think it could be abstracted down to strong vs weak, and maybe some materials have resistances and weaknesses to certain kinds of damage.

Tbh though, personally, I'm not 100% convinced we need even that level of detail about general objects in the world.

Personally, I'm primarily concerned with the tools we expect adventurers to use and the macro-scale tasks they want to use them for.

Are they trying to fortify a position with trenches and pit traps? Ok, how do they do that mechanically, what tools would help, and what benefit do they provide?

Are they leagues into the cursed forest and trying to set up a safe place to camp?Ok, how do they do that mechanically, what tools would help, and what benefit do they provide?

 

[Gammadoodler]

The dreaded double post.

 

[Gammadoodler]

For the 6th level spell it does not matter but for the cantrip it must be loose earth. So yes we care.

About the exact volume of earth? Why?

 

[Oofta]

The AD&D DMG (p 106) has a chart for the cubic volume of rock mined, per 8 hours labour per minor. On the same page, it also has a note that "The cost of the ditch 100' in length, 10' deep, and 20' wide assumes that a crew of 3-4 men work for six weeks. If soil is heavy clay, time will be doubled." From that we can extrapolate: if 20,000 cubic feet of soil that's not heavy clay takes 147 days of work, one day of digging is about 140 cubic feet. So that's around 10 to 15 cubic feet per hour of work.

That chart is mind-bogglingly incorrect. There is no way you can tunnel 25 feet in an 8 hour work day for one individual through hard rock. That would likely even be far too fast with the use of explosives.

An example I found after a quick google search from this site (bold added)

Progress through hard rock could be very slow and it was not uncommon for tunnels to take years if not decades to be built. Construction marks left on a Roman tunnel in Bologna shows us that the rate of advance through solid rock was 30 cm (12 inches) per day. ​

​

Even assuming high quality steel for the tools, it's not going to increase it by much. Which is the issue I have - the people that wrote these guidelines had no freakin' clue what they were talking about. So we'd just substitute 1 SWAG for another.

 

[Gammadoodler]

That chart is mind-bogglingly incorrect. There is no way you can tunnel 25 feet in an 8 hour work day for one individual through hard rock. That would likely even be far too fast with the use of explosives.

An example I found after a quick google search from this site (bold added)

Progress through hard rock could be very slow and it was not uncommon for tunnels to take years if not decades to be built. Construction marks left on a Roman tunnel in Bologna shows us that the rate of advance through solid rock was 30 cm (12 inches) per day. ​

​

Even assuming high quality steel for the tools, it's not going to increase it by much. Which is the issue I have - the people that wrote these guidelines had no freakin' clue what they were talking about. So we'd just substitute 1 SWAG for another.

As with alcohol and lawn darts,

Google and D&D often mix poorly.