D&D 5E When RAW goes too far
jasper
Rotten DM
MOM MOM MOM Morrus is getting is science on my fantasy. I really really hate when a nerd tries to bring his view of physics into D&D to get his way. Or just so he can fill the forum with a wall of funny logical text. Or just to hear his lips flap and waste game time at the table.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
God I read some threads on another forum recently where RAW definitely went far, far too far. RAW gotta check itself before it wrecks itself.
Oofta
Legend
[cranky old man voice]
Yeah, this reminds me of the hand crossbow wars of 2015. People insisting, insisting I tells ya, that you could continuously fire two hand crossbows without droppin' either one. Cuz the rule never said nuthin' about needin' a free hand to reload.
Then I'd go on about how it also never said you needed to obey the laws of gravity and ... wait where was I?
[/cranky old man voice]
Yeah, this is nothing new. Although, come to think of it I probably don't need to clarify that I'm a cranky old man.
Yeah, this reminds me of the hand crossbow wars of 2015. People insisting, insisting I tells ya, that you could continuously fire two hand crossbows without droppin' either one. Cuz the rule never said nuthin' about needin' a free hand to reload.
Then I'd go on about how it also never said you needed to obey the laws of gravity and ... wait where was I?
[/cranky old man voice]
Yeah, this is nothing new. Although, come to think of it I probably don't need to clarify that I'm a cranky old man.
wingsandsword
Legend
Like the "commoner railgun" idea I heard proposed back in the 3e era.
It's been many years, but the gist of it was a long string of hired NPC's to create a cheap cannon-like siege engine that fires cannonballs at supersonic speed. This is done by lining up the NPC's, and each one holding action with a readied action to hand the cannonball to the person next to them. By some technical wording of the rules that I don't recall, supposedly all these actions would go off on the same round, meaning that you could accelerate a cannonball to go an arbitrarily high speed (a 5 ft. square per commoner hired) within a single 6 second round. . .so you could get that cannonball up to hypersonic speed to use as a superweapon.
Nonsensical twisting of the rules to break and ignore physics is what happens when you stick to the RAW of any game to the exclusion of common sense. There's a reason we have living gamemasters.
In the interests of safety and hygiene, the CDC recommends cooking RAW for at least a campaign year under the supervision of a certified non-munckin GM. Failure to do so can result in your game becoming infected with all manner of illnesses, including, but not limited to, Endless Rule-Lawyering, Creative Character Sheet Maintenance, Three Dice Monte, and Game Physics Bergemot Poisoning.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Like the classic "Oh we got 300 gold out of the chest?" - Three different players write "300 gold" on their character sheet.
Also the I have 50' of rope right here, its on my character sheet he says, pointing to the fresh pencil scrawl at the bottom of his equipment list.
Ruin Explorer
Legend
Or one I haven't seen this century but did see a bit in the 1990s - Player has to use an eraser on their HP because the HP box has got to be a mess, and "can't remember" what current HP they had so silently and conveniently writes in a number that is a few points (or even a lot of points) higher than what they actually had.
After a few times I started tracking PC HP on my side as well as monster HP...
The gold problem was solved by making one of the players "party treasurer" and giving her the job of writing down any loot etc. found and who was carrying it. The moment she was away for a week it turned into a complete free-for-all of course!
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