D&D 5E Never Give Them Unlimited Black Powder

[Ovinomancer]

I have to disagree with you there - not saying that I am "right" and you are "wrong", but if you look, thematically, Saruman was a representation of technology and destructive industrialization. It would be very appropriate that Saruman invented black powder and knew how to wield it well - so the bomb wasn't a barrel, but a strong metal container that amplified its power. The narrow tunnel also amplified the destructive power.

Sure, you can make that argument, but then you're open to actually looking at how black powder would work. That cauldron would have been a decent bomb, but not blow the wall sky high. The culvert would have channeled most of the blast out the sides, not upwards. Explosives and solid stone don't mix well, which is why mining, even with high explosives, is more about networking smaller blasts to fracture the rock face, not blow it out. As black powder, the scene presented doesn't make much sense. As magical boom powder, it does.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The one where making black powder requires an alchemy check, which I believe is the core rules in Pathfinder/3e. Not certain on 4/5e, but it seems it's part of the OP's world.

So, you assume it's called black powder. I don't recall that from 3e. I do recall smoke powder, which worked pretty differently from black powder. You're spinning, looking for word dodges and vague handwaves, and I don't understand why. You seem to be trying to make the case that the thing being talked about isn't actually real word-like black powder, but some magical thing, but are unwilling to say it's just magic and compare it to black powder. Pick a side, it's okay. I like magic boom powder, it's good stuff. I even like genre-logic black powder. But these things aren't the same as real black powder -- they're made up. At the point that you're making up magic boom powder and then complaining it breaks your game... the problem isn't the magic boom powder, it's how you made it work in the game. This isn't at all about black powder, or smoke powder, or the Flame of Orthanc, it's about the choices you're making in your game to represent whatever fiction you've concocted. The answer is yours, and your answer isn't really better than anyone else's.

If you want to talk about how black powder actually behaves so you can better ground your rules against that, awesome. But taking the name and coming up with something arbitrary and then demanding that others accept your choice as how game black powder works is just weird.

 

[Ancalagon]

Sure, you can make that argument, but then you're open to actually looking at how black powder would work. That cauldron would have been a decent bomb, but not blow the wall sky high. The culvert would have channeled most of the blast out the sides, not upwards. Explosives and solid stone don't mix well, which is why mining, even with high explosives, is more about networking smaller blasts to fracture the rock face, not blow it out. As black powder, the scene presented doesn't make much sense. As magical boom powder, it does.

It could be a mixture of both - you know, mixing magic and technology can yield potent results...

 

[Ovinomancer]

It could be a mixture of both - you know, mixing magic and technology can yield potent results...

Right! But, that's firmly in the realm of fiction, so how it works doesn't at all have to be tied to reality or black powder or gun powder in the real world -- you've made it up already, so it works according to how you've made it up. A large part of the discussion here seems to be around using the fictionally defined substance from one person but arguing it's how it works in general.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

Assuming they're using the stuff in the DMG, then a keg will deal 7d6 damage.
And will take 50 days of downtime to craft.
Each.

 

[MarkB]

it's trivializing, fyi.
It matters when fight after fight becomes trivial, and things lose their challenge. You may not have encountered such an effect yet. Once it happens, it's a death knell to a campaign. So, he's trying to head it off before it does.
You'd get the same thing with a power build, super spell, too-powerful magic item, or the like. It breaks something, and say goodbye to your campaign.

If you're letting your players turn up to a fight, throw a single barrel at the enemy, and boom, the fight goes away, that's your own problem because black powder doesn't work that way.

if they're having to stockpile a large quantity of explosives, plan out how best to deploy them for maximum effect, use multiple skillsets across the whole party to actually set up their ambush, and then, if everything goes exactly right, the enemy goes away in one big boom, that didn't trivialise the encounter - that was the encounter.

 

[Azzy]

Like anything, it's a question of quantity, the ability for enemies to deal with it, and availability of enemies.
Anytime you can directly convert money, which players have plenty of, cheaply into lots of sudden damage, like you can with gunpowder/explosives, that is going to flip your campaign on its ear. The old bag of holding/portable hole trick costs like 30k to pull off, but you can set up a 20d6 mass explosion for a fraction of that.

How many bags of holding did you let your players aquire? As a bag of holding has a capacity of 500 lbs. So a bag could hold up to 25 powder kegs in (with nothing else in it). It takes one action to remove an item from a bag. Then fire has to be set to it (kegs don't come with fuses or other means to cause them to combust as that's generally contrary to its function, so the PCs are going to have to rig something up before hand or open the keg, set the entire keg on fire, or something). Then there's positioning (throwing, dropping, using telekineses*—Tenser's is pretty useless for most cases) the keg to blow up the PC's enemies and not themselves. That's a lot of actions (and resouces, if the PCs are using spells like telekineses*) to weaponize a powder keg that does 7d6 fire damage in a 10 ft. radius. Even with a ton of planning and preperation and best-case scenarios where the PCs can get multiple powder kegs to explode in one go, it's still not efficient and it assumes that damage from multiple exploding kegs stack in an additive manner (which they may not).

And for making gunpowder, do the PCs actually have the proficiency to make it, the ingredients, tools, and time to make it in significant quantities?

*If the PCs are wasting a 5th-level spell to manuever powder kegs they're probably shooting themselves in the foot.

It's a LOT of firepower on the PC's side, and if the enemy can't do the same, they start steamrolling everything. So, you have to treat it just like magic, adjucating how much damage they can do with this stuff, how much it costs, and make it cost something similar to what magic does... and let the enemies do it, too.

laughs in Cyberpunk 2020

Why can't the enemy do the same thing (are they not creatures with at least average intelligence, capable of fine manipulation, have similar resources or trade or pilage those that do)? If they can't, don't the enemy at least have other, equally nasty, resources that it can bring to bear (magic, traps, special abilities, access to friendly, more powerful allies)? Doesn't the enemy have ways to counter, mitigate, or ignore gunpowder/explosives (like immunity or resistance to fire or nonmagical damage, ability to use fire on the party that's carrying gunpowder, etc)? In a game with magic and dragons (especially the fire-breathing sort) there should be more ways to deal with PCs with multiple powder kegs and a torch than in a game where the PCs have RPGs, C4, and assault rifles and you just have NPCs with RPGs, C4, and assault rifles.

 

[Coroc]

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.

Haha, well you know one of the funny things in D&D is: Unlike in RL for every problem there is a solution.

Black powder can get:

• Wet (how boring)
• Stolen (how boring 2)
• Into the face of some one igniting it (Now it gets interesting)
• Backfire (yessss, more of that!)
• Have a slightly larger range than intended, especially when used in large quantities (Ok here you go!)
• Have a much larger range than intended especially when used in large quantities (Including the position where the persons igniting it (Pyomaniac PCs)

felt save from the shockwave

PC: I ve got the poison DM: I ve got the remedy

 

[Coroc]

How many bags of holding did you let your players aquire? As a bag of holding has a capacity of 500 lbs. So a bag could hold up to 25 powder kegs in (with nothing else in it). It takes one action to remove an item from a bag. Then fire has to be set to it (kegs don't come with fuses or other means to cause them to combust as that's generally contrary to its function, so the PCs are going to have to rig something up before hand or open the keg, set the entire keg on fire, or something). Then there's positioning (throwing, dropping, using telekineses*—Tenser's is pretty useless for most cases) the keg to blow up the PC's enemies and not themselves. That's a lot of actions (and resouces, if the PCs are using spells like telekineses*) to weaponize a powder keg that does 7d6 fire damage in a 10 ft. radius. Even with a ton of planning and preperation and best-case scenarios where the PCs can get multiple powder kegs to explode in one go, it's still not efficient and it assumes that damage from multiple exploding kegs stack in an additive manner (which they may not).

And for making gunpowder, do the PCs actually have the proficiency to make it, the ingredients, tools, and time to make it in significant quantities?

*If the PCs are wasting a 5th-level spell to manuever powder kegs they're probably shooting themselves in the foot.


laughs in Cyberpunk 2020

Why can't the enemy do the same thing (are they not creatures with at least average intelligence, capable of fine manipulation, have similar resources or trade or pilage those that do)? If they can't, don't the enemy at least have other, equally nasty, resources that it can bring to bear (magic, traps, special abilities, access to friendly, more powerful allies)? Doesn't the enemy have ways to counter, mitigate, or ignore gunpowder/explosives (like immunity or resistance to fire or nonmagical damage, ability to use fire on the party that's carrying gunpowder, etc)? In a game with magic and dragons (especially the fire-breathing sort) there should be more ways to deal with PCs with multiple powder kegs and a torch than in a game where the PCs have RPGs, C4, and assault rifles and you just have NPCs with RPGs, C4, and assault rifles.

Oh i can see someone even got more creative than me : "..As a bag of holding has a capacity of 500 lbs..."

Yesss here is the excuse for the dimensional rift sending the PCs into that other dimension!

 

[Coroc]

I once had a game in which a character had the special ability to instantly end the existence of the universe. The game worked just fine. Keep going with the game. It will be fine.

Well as i posted in some other thread, i sometimes give that power to the PCs (Ending/apocalypting not the universe but the game world).
When they get soem high powered artefacts in their hand which could solve a major problem, but as well cause a much bigger one. I love these scenarios