Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SKyOdin" data-source="post: 4654298" data-attributes="member: 57939">It is probably due to the fact that your opening sentences discussed the mechanical and story problems of having gunpowder in a campaign. Gunpowder in D&D is just one of those topics that draws a lot of controversy and heated discussion, mostly because it has rarely been addressed by official sources. The rest of the miscommunication is that you spend a few paragraphs talking about real world nitroglycerine, which got people thinking that you wanted to emulate real-world physics. Since you didn't ask any very specific questions in your opening post (you just gave a blanket "Discuss!"), people naturally latched onto the more familiar issues that were implied in your post.Anyways, I am still a little unclear on what kind of help you are looking for, but I will try my best. It would help if you were a little more clear on what exact properties you are looking for in an explosive. You obviously don't want guns, but your opening post also implies you don't want easily-accessed bombs either.Honestly, I don't think using volatile high explosives is a very good idea, since they are so woefully impractical for anyone, PCs or otherwise, to use. It is really easy to come up with a way to introduce such an explosive into your campaign: it can just be the product of an experimenting alchemist or other person interested in Natural Philosophy. However, a volatile explosive like Nitroglycerine is too unstable for any kind of practical use. For example, a character can put some in a flask and throw it to cause an explosion, but it would logically just explode just as a result of the jostling around that is associated with sitting in a traveler's backpack. A villain could conceivably pour a pool of Nitroglycerine designed to explode if the PC's stepped into it, but it still begs the question of how they got the chemical into the dungeon in the first place. I have heard that Nobel produced Nitro in an elevated tower, and then used gradually slopping pipes and gravity to transport it, but I can't remember the details. If you want to use a Nitro-like volatile chemical as an explosive, it probably won't be found anywhere except in the immediate vicinity of an Alchemy lab. Transporting the chemical overland by wagon on pitted dirt roads would be too dangerous.Personally though, I have no problems with gunpowder in a setting, so I am not so sure I can get into the right mindset to help you with your specific problem.</blockquote>

Verification