Would the peasant railgun be possible in GURPS?

[Polydamas]

Originally Posted by Rupert

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).

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.

[Jack Sawyer]

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.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Polydamas

shooting lots of arrows and getting an AC bonus from each

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.

[Plane]

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

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?

Originally Posted by Varyon

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.

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.

[Rolando]

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.

[RGTraynor]

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.

[Flowergarden]

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.

[malloyd]

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.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by malloyd

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.

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).

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Setting everything in Faerun only solves part of their problem.

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.