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

[Oofta]

Oh, and just to follow up on @pemerton's post, an answer on digging from a Quora answer:

On average Two of us can hand dig and load an 8 cubic yard skip in an 8 hour day,​

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If its clay, then that halves.​

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If its sand our production doubles.​

So that's 4 cubic yards per day, not 10-15 cubic feet per hour. Gygax had no clue about this stuff.

EDIT: having dug out ditches by hand and actually having cubic yards of dirt delivered, 4 cubic yards per day is reasonable.

EDIT 2: D'oh! misread.

 

[Gammadoodler]

Oh, and just to follow up on @pemerton's post, an answer on digging from a Quora answer:

On average Two of us can hand dig and load an 8 cubic yard skip in an 8 hour day,​

​

If its clay, then that halves.​

​

If its sand our production doubles.​

So that's 4 cubic yards per day, not 10-15 cubic feet per hour. Gygax had no clue about this stuff.

A cubic yard is 3'x3'x3' or 27 cubic feet.

4 cubic yards then is 108 cubic feet.

Divided by 8, it is 13.5 cubic feet per hour.

Aka..right on the money.

 

[Parmandur]

Yeah, and the different assumptions on what X is if it is not defined in the rulebook is probably one of the things that leads to most fights on the tables between players and dms.

Like, early on in my first campaign I played in (Lost Mines) the group was camping and resting in the wild. My cleric was in heavy armor. I assumed she would be sleeping in armor (or more to the point, I wasn't thinking about it until it came up) , my DM assumed she took of the armor.

Which, because of a Dex of 8 meant an AC difference of like 9. From 18 to 9 AC.

That led to a discussion ...

Because I wouldn't have build my character in a way that made her totally helpless in her sleep.

So this different assumptions of non defined rules have a direct impact on play and survivability.

And we didn't had Xanathar yet back then which had rules for sleeping in armor.

Uhhhhh, no, sleeping in armor is already a source of Exhaustion, it doesn't work like thst in Core.

 

[Baron Opal II]

P.S. Has there ever been a guideline for shovels?

Excavations
A man can excavate 3 cubic feet of earth per hour, adjusted by their Strength modifier. This occurs at half rate with improvised tools, one-quarter rate with no tools.

Lamentations of the Flame Princess, pg 30

A major table isn't necessary. Yes, of course, we can extrapolate. But a couple of sentences for a starting part doesn't seem like a big deal.

• Yes, it's not D&D, but close enough. It's in the main rulebook for an OSR game.
• Yes, it's not talking about shovels specifically, but it establishes a baseline. Especially when you want an idea of how much time a caster can save.

 

[overgeeked]

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. ​

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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.

This is where “so what? It’s a game” comes in. If the rules don’t match reality you have two choices: change the rules to match the real world, or accept that the fictional world is not the real world and so the game’s rules match the fictional reality.

 

[Baron Opal II]

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

I suspect that question was directed to the participants at large.

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

For the same reason it matters to define the blast radius of a fireball or duration of levitation. Can you dig the defensive trench in time with mold earth? Can you drain the swamp and expose the army's flank with move earth?

When does it matter how big is "big"?

 

[Oofta]

This is where “so what? It’s a game” comes in. If the rules don’t match reality you have two choices: change the rules to match the real world, or accept that the fictional world is not the real world and so the game’s rules match the fictional reality.

I would say bad rules are worse than no rules. Especially in today's environment of a lot of this info being available after about 2 minutes of searching, likely less than it would take to look it up in a book.

 

[overgeeked]

I would say bad rules are worse than no rules. Especially in today's environment of a lot of this info being available after about 2 minutes of searching, likely less than it would take to look it up in a book.

Which is an argument for not including those things in the book to begin with. If they ever happen to come up, and they likely will not, either look them up online or have the referee make something up. It’s only when people insist on the fantasyland of D&D perfectly match the real world that there’s a problem. So don’t do that.

 

[Oofta]

Which is an argument for not including those things in the book to begin with. If they ever happen to come up, and they likely will not, either look them up online or have the referee make something up. It’s only when people insist on the fantasyland of D&D perfectly match the real world that there’s a problem. So don’t do that.

Again, some people are going to care if you have a tent or shovel. I want my D&D to be reality adjacent, similar to an action movie. That doesn't require detailed (or the totally FUBAREd rule we had for digging a tunnel) rules.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I suspect that question was directed to the participants at large.

For the same reason it matters to define the blast radius of a fireball or duration of levitation. Can you dig the defensive trench in time with mold earth? Can you drain the swamp and expose the army's flank with move earth?

If it was directed at the participants ar large, then my post was a curious one to reply to..but these things happen.

As far as the mold earth dimensions, I'm genuinely curious whether any of those questions have actually come up for anyone, and more pointedly, whether anyone's actually done the math to prove a result one way or the other.

Separately, I think you agree with me here that if those questions did come up and get adjudicated using game rules and math, that a symmetrical level of understanding would be useful for mundane equipment and labor used to accomplish these tasks.