Dumbest questions of the year

[moritheil]

I'm astonished that a lot of these were considered anything but trivial. For example, take the mage hand/thimble question:

Stewart asks, I'm running a pirate-themed game, and one member of the party has a few ranks of sorcerer. Running out of battle spells and thinking on her feet, she cast mage hand on a thimble, and wanted to direct it with all five pounds of pressure mage hand allows into an enemy's eye, which she said would be enough to do some damage. Now, this is a pirate game after all, so her ingenuity did nothing but bring joy to this DM's heart. I had her roll a ranged touch attack, she passed it, and the thimble did its gruesome work. But now I've been thinking, “If this is so easy, why isn't everyone doing it?” Thus, I turn to you. Can you use mage hand this way?

Mage hand exerts up to five pounds of pressure. It's variable dependent on the object you're supporting. You can't tell a Tenser's Floating Disk to suddenly exert its maximum pressure and make a slam attack, and neither should you be able to concentrate five pounds of pressure on a thimble, needle, etc. with a spell not designed to cause damage. There is a separate cantrip for firing projectiles, and it is called Launch.

If you run out of spells as a multiclass sorcerer, that is when you use your weapon (or curse your lack of foresight for not having one.) Sorry, but rather than true ingenuity I see poor planning and an attempt to drag real-world physics in to justify abuse of magic.