D&D 5E When a rule is clear but leads to illogical efffects

[Ath-kethin]

The question is not and has never been "are spiders immune to poison?"

It is "is stabbing a swarm of spiders with a poison-coated rapier an effective means of using said poison to poison them?"

Obviously, this would be a terrible way of trying to poison said spiders in the real world. In the real world, you would try to use some sort of area affect poison like an aerosol spray or poured liquid.

To those arguing that what the rapier wielder is REALLY doing is not stabbing, but whipping the rapier around and splashing poison on the spiders -- no. The rapier is doing PIERCING damage, and unless the poison being used is specifically a contact (as opposed to injected) poison, it is poisoning the spiders not by touching them but rather through entering their bodies via a wound.

You can defend game-world vs real-world logic, physics, and whatnot, but the reality is that stabbing a swarm of spiders with a poisoned rapier is an effective way of killing them ACCORDING TO THE RULES because 5E simplified swarms to the point of frequent silliness.

Are you OK with that silliness? That is a question for you and your table to answer.

Exactly my point(s), right down the line.

I have been reading the responses on this thread with some amusement; the fundamentals of my original post seemed to have been lost in the flow very quickly.

I am 100% with the silliness. This game consists of a bunch of adults sitting at a table eating junk food and pretending to be elves. Approaching the situation like it's a case of negotiating settlement rights on the West Bank is the stuff of psychology textbook case studies, not fun evenings out with friends.

By the RAW, you can kill a mass of malevolent tiny insects by poking them with a stick, and you can do it in a matter of seconds. You can also smash a spiked ball into a comrade and somehow injure only their body lice.

These are reasons I love this game, not points of complaint.

 

[SkidAce]

... (remember, back when 3.0 first came out, internet gaming forums were still limited to Usenet's rec.games.frp.dnd and the like).

Nah, we had ENworld.

 

[Werebat]

Nah, we had ENworld.

Hence and the like.

And 3.0 (2000) predates ENworld (2001), although not Eric Noah's original website.

The point is, it was a different world, where it was not nearly so easy to min/max and powergame with the sort of rules 3.x used. It was nowhere near the point where it would eventually get (where any keyboard monkey with a search engine could use keywords to find a build that just might break their DM's game, and then smugly declare that "a creative DM" wouldn't have a problem with their totally rules-legal character...)