Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Here's the peasant railgun:

How quickly would the projectile travel? GURPS has 1-second rounds, so I guess it would go six times faster, right? How much damage would it do?

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

The really funny thing about the peasant railgun? It doesn't work, because just as D&D internal 'physics engine' allows readied actions to work to allow instant movement of an object from one end of the chain to the other, they also confer no momentum on it as a result. Peasant chains are 'great' for instant communication, but terrible as railguns.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

*handwaving motions intensify*

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

That way lies handwave-powered flight.

As for the peasant-railgun in GURPS, chained waits should have a similar effect.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

The railgun would propagate the staff at one mile/second, that's Move 1760. It has 12 HP. So that's a slam damage of (1760*12/100)= 211d or 6d*35. That's almost as much as the 40mm railgun in Ultra-Tech. Range is short, 700 yards (assuming no air resistance and the average peasant being 6 feet).

Now, the peasant FTL telegraph... it is well known that traveling at superluminal speeds allows you to create closed timelike curves, i.e. time travel. I think we have just figured out how to do time travel by RAW in GURPS.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Player: Behold, my almighty Mach 9 peasant railgun!

GM: This isn't going to work, you know.

Player: Of course it is, it's genius! Now, the first peasant uses a Ready to hand over the pole to the second, who -

GM: - uses a Ready to grab and prepare it to hand over to the next one. Next round.

Player: [vader-noooo.mp3]

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

OK, here's how you really do it.
1) Take: Impaling Attack 211 (Increased Range x10 [+30%], Accessibility (Requires thousands of people) [-20%]) [1857]
2) Don't fail the roll and hit something you don't want to.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Thousands of people is probably more than -20%. Otherwise I like your build.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

You'd have to sort the peasants into initiative order for the sequence to work. And that could change every round if you reroll initiative. Really cuts into the RoF when the peasants have to run a mile or two in between shots.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Nah, in GURPS the scheme would be reliant on Cascading Waits. The peasant in the front of the line uses Wait (Throw the weapon once the guy behind me hands it to me), and each of the ones behind him use Wait (Hand the weapon to the guy in front of me once the guy behind me hands it to me), except for the last peasant, who instead just hands the weapon to the guy in front of him, no Wait needed (although he may need to Do Nothing for a second or two while everyone else gets their Waits set). Of course, in GURPS grabbing something and then handing it to somebody else typically takes two seconds - a Ready to grab and secure the item (making it ready for use - in this case, the use is "handing it to the next guy"), and another Maneuver - I assume Ready, as it's the only one that seems to fit - to hand it to the next guy. Now, certainly you should be able to Ready the item "instantly," but that would require a roll akin to fast-draw, and with 2,280 characters, even if they have skill 16+ (rather removed from the "peasant" concept) somebody is going to fail (on average, you're looking at ~32* Failures - each of which would add an extra second - and ~10.5 Critical Failures, each of which would prematurely terminate the chain when a peasant drops the near-sonic projectile, killing several in front of him). A realism argument can be made to claim something like just grabbing something handed to you and giving it to the next guy could be done with a single Ready, but you can't really expect a GM to deviate from RAW for the sake of realism in the process of enabling you to pull off something hilariously unrealistic.

*Initially closer to 31.5, but as each calls for another roll, you have to add around another 0.5 to account for the failures within the new set of rolls.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Honestly I don't think it even works in the D&D physics engine. Surely both pass and retrieve an item are Move Actions, you don't get to do two in a round, which means the railgun can only be two characters long. Sure you can *drop* the item as a Free Action for the next guy to retrieve but if you do that it's completely clear why it retains no momentum.

Instead of just mostly clear - after all if it's still moving relative to you, it's not really retrieved is it? You couldn't, say, drop it to the floor as a Free Action - it'd fly off somewhere rather than land at your feet - or prepare it as a material component to cast a spell if it was going to go flying out of your hand in the next millisecond.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

I can't speak to anything outside of 3.x, but you absolutely can do two Move Actions in a round there - you get one Standard Action and one Move Action, with the option to trade in the Standard Action for an additional Move Action. So you can pass items, messages, etc at incredible speed doing this (but you can't retain that speed for an attack - just as the peasants don't have their hands catch fire for passing an item between them at supersonic speed, the item is treated as moving at a more relaxed speed; this is more akin to a Warp Drive than a railgun).

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

In D&D, the behavior is pretty heavily dependent on edition. Some of them have delay actions, which at least solves the initiative sorting problem. Sometimes they have triggered held actions (the GURPS Wait), though maybe that's just Pathfinder, and sometimes not -- before the houserules show up.

In fact, one reason for the lack of actual military application of the peasant railgun is that field commanders learned not to rely on weapons whose operation is so sensitive to changes in the fundamental laws of metaphysics. Terrific in this campaign, useless in the next. Makes magic look tame and stable by comparison. So there's no way to rely on the weapon system when drafting your military plans.

Swords, on the other hand, almost always work (as Corwin pointed out). In any edition, you can make some progress by whacking things with a sharp piece of steel. Much sounder basis for the foundation of your military might.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Though for some rules sets and targets the damage from a sharp piece of steel may differ enormously from a blunt one. So bring a *single edged* sword, in case it helps to flip it over and thwack it with the dull side.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

The 'ready' action, which is like GURPS' wait, turns up in D&D3, and continues into 3.5 and Pathfinder 1e (not sure about PF2).

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

It strikes me as a specifically computer game and 3e.3.5e D&D idea ... earlier editions of D&D were usually like GURPS, the GM was always right. It was 3e D&D which tried to offer exactly one clear and authoritative answer to any question governed by the rules.

Rules lawyering is an old tradition, but this specific idea strikes me as specific to a particular concept of the game.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

D&D3.x was very clear that the GM could, and should, rule on ambiguous situations, and that they could and should change rules that were resulting in dumb outcomes. I don't know of any GM that's ever allowed instantaneous message movement via chain readies, let alone a 'peasant railgun', nor even teleporting samurai (there was a class feature for them that allowed a step between each blow of a great cleave, so as long as they never missed and every hit dropped someone they could 'teleport' across crowded battlefields).

Likewise, I don't know of anyone who allowed some of those obviously abusive character builds in their games (though less obvious builds certainly slipped through), just as I don't know any GURPS GM that would allow those cheap galaxy-killing area attacks you can legally build. In each case that doesn't mean people didn't have fun coming up with the builds, even though they probably never had any intent to use them in a game.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

I would totally allow teleporting samurai.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

My recollection is that the prestige class in question was fairly rubbish (in that iteration, at least), so it never came up for us.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Teleporting samurai are tight.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

In the days of 3e and 3.5e D&D, I met some players online who seemed to think that they had a right to buy arrows enchanted with Defending Weapon and get armour class infinity by shooting lots of arrows and getting an AC bonus from each. And some who felt entitled to bring in and combine any third-party supplements they could find. I did not sit in on their table to see how things worked in practice.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

I never cared for the peasant railgun idea. Apart from feeling too 'rules-lawyerly' it also relied on ignoring real life just enough to make the game-mechanics internal logic to work, then act as if the results had meaningful impact in real life. I mean once it achieves a certain momentum its going to cause problems for handover unless you're also assuming progressively more superhuman peasants.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

D&D 3e was pretty clear about the same bonuses not stacking (one of the benefits of their attempt at rigor).

Never much cared for the notion of pickup games of random characters and players, though. Characters and their stories fit into the world they're designed for, not necessarily very well outside of that. Setting everything in Faerun only solves part of their problem.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

B355's note on catching says that catching deliberate throws from allies counts as a parry. While that might not count as a "readied" weapon (ie shooting a gun) I don't know that this would be necessary for all objects - do you need to "ready" a baseball, for example?

fast-draw seems to actually include fast-drawing combined with fast-readying (even though these actually seem like distinct actions to me and maybe should include penalties if you're doing both at once?) so using it for JUST readying something already in your hand seems appropriate

I actually like the idea of TG12's "Seizing a Weapon or Object" DX-based control-point rules here, it seems like they could substitute attacks/actions for the traditional "ready" in a lot of cases and introduce uncertainty and attribute reliance to them.

A possible way around quick-draw failure is if all the peasants had the 'no nuisance rolls' perk, which allows you to avoid making rolls (as long as your modified skills is 15+)

A way to avoid that and soft-cap it I think would be to apply speed-based skill penalties to peasants down the line - and I think you would actually have to apply that not just to the receiver but also the passer.

IE choose the "passing speed" you are processing (with some kind of limits on acceleration per person, maybe derived from basic speed) on intake/outtake and maybe use the speed/range penalty to determine a DX penalty to these DX rolls being applied to the readies?

The 1188 miles per hour that Anders references in the first post would be well beyond the -30 to DX penalty on B550 and far beyond human capacity.

Even passing an item 60 feet (20 yards) in a single second is going to be a -6 penalty meaning to have the modified 15 to skill for no nuisance rolls would require a base skill of 21+

This is something required of everyone in the chain - the only way for some people in the chain to take a lesser penalty (passing the item at a slower speed) would be for people elsewhere in the chain to take heavier penalties (passing the item at a faster speed) to compensate for it.

The math required for that could be a little complicated... I could see maybe something margin-based here where if people earlier in the chain are doing really well (passing fastly and accurately) people later in the chain don't need to do as well - but the reverse is also true, failure margins earlier in the chain should penalize people further on, etc.

This kind of feedback-chain would make a lot of sense for handing to people in adjacent hexes (as opposed to throwing to people - where you can miss by an entire hex) since inaccuracy of one teammate can be compensated for by higher DX team-mates - you put your hand slightly off but your next friend anticipates it or compensates for it.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

the original post have a big problem:
a ton of peasants is about 5 to 6 strong peasants, or maybe 7 small and weak ones.

you may get more children peasants with a ton but never enough o power the kilometer+ railgun.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Answer: not without a great deal more hard liquor in the house than I have to hand.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

I thought it's about using electricity produced by bodies of peasants to power a railgun.
It's like making a sword from blood. But futuristic.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

My feeling hasn't changed - I don't think it works even in the D&D RAW, even without a GM call. It requires an obviously false assumption that when each person receives the item it somehow retains a large velocity relative to them, which pretty clearly violates any sensible definition of holding or catching or any similar word.

I suppose you could interpret the RAW to indicate the object accelerates and decelerates to and from greater than 2 line length/turn length number of people times in a turn, which for a sufficiently long line will destroy the projectile. That's nonsensical too but doesn't seem to violate the natural or technical meaning of any of the words in the rule.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Ultimately, the issue is that being able to do this requires the GM to make a very specific and self-contradictory ruling. As I alluded to a few years back (before the thread died and then got necromanced), the GM has to simultaneously rule that the item must be moving at a sufficient rate for it to reach the end of the line within 6 seconds and rule that it's not moving at that rate between peasants (as grabbing something moving at Mach 1.5 isn't within a peasant's skill set, and even if they did somehow manage to get hold of it, it would burn the skin off their hands).

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Well, I guess that's why they ruined Faerun by advancing the timeline 100 years. The value of the setting was in all the innkeepers, bowyers, coopers, wheelwrights and thousands of other NPCs named and given an interlacing web of relationships in hundreds of cities, towns and villages you could visit, in numerous very different lands.

If you advance a setting a century, you're not longer playing in the same setting. Steampunk London 1880 is not going to have any of the same characters or the same feel as just regular punk London 1980. The fact that an occasional person may share a last name doesn't make this the same setting.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Well, yeah. It assumes D&D rules ignore physics, until at the specific point the player trying to get away with the peasant railgun suddenly wants D&D to have rules for physics, so the railgun does something.

Sorry, nope. It continues to ignore physics forever, because D&D has no physics. It has game rules.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

This is why using ring gates and infinite falling to generate rods from god is superior.

D&D does have rules for some physics. The peasant railgun neglects to engage with them.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

However, the physics in Dungeons and Dragons are so limited and obtuse that they barely count as physics. The peasant railgun interacts with the physics, if I remember correctly, in such a limited way that the Dungeon Master gets to decide if it works. Realistically at an Adventurer's League table, it would never fly (the peasant railgun and the thing being thrown). Now, would it work in GURPS? That's also up to the Game Master, like in Dungeons and Dragons, because in a wacky setting, it totally could. RAW? I don't think so.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Even if you allowed your peasants to pass it foward with a single held action that wouldn't give it any momentum because it didn't experience any acceleration. It would just have teleported from the back of the line to the front of the line. +

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

In GURPS, that would be a kind of pseudo-velocity drive.

Re: Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?
 

Strength is a valid concern about the speed you'd generate passing an object, like it should be a combination of DX and ST like how Control Points happen in Technical Grappling