20 KiB
[MK] The Two Year Emperor, Ch61: Speed Kills...and Captures
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Author: u/eaglejarl *
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URL: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/9669819/61/The-Two-Year-Emperor
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Score: 26
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Created: 2014-09-13T05:45:40
Post:
Comments:
u/Vebeltast [+9] You should have expected the bayesian inquisition! (33 minutes later)
I thought that the commoner railgun was good; the commoner self-railgun is even better. This is a thing of beauty. I love you, grapple rules.
u/gregx1000 [+7] (33 minutes later)
So who else thinks Hammond is going to share some sort of knowledge that will make everyone go 'oh shit'? I'm impressed so far with the consistent number of quality plot twists, and there's probably more to come.
u/Zephyr1011 [+1] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (2 days later)
Hopefully. This chapter went near exactly to plan, which was mostly spelled out beforehand, so there wasn't really much tension
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (42 minutes later)
It's a good thing that those sonic booms are fluff and not rules text, because otherwise the Meatball would promptly disintegrate when they hit the wall of air. Fortunately, D&D doesn't have detailed rules for supersonic speeds.
u/Nepene [+2] (5 hours later)
I'm not sure. Max falling speed damage is only 20d6. They have 80d10 health plus constitution, so maybe 400+480. 60 damage vs 880. Does going at mach 11 do 14 times the damage of falling from orbit to earth?
Besides, if it was an issue you could just cast energy immunity: sonic and energy immunity: fire on the outer landguards.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (6 hours later)
Actually, I'm completely ignoring the falling rules. If I weren't, the orbital bombardment wouldn't have worked.
And no, a KEW is moving at 11km/second. Running into something at Mach 11 is only 1/3 of that speed, so not nearly as much damage.
u/Nepene [+8] (7 hours later)
Well, the falling rules only specify how much damage is done to the person. They don't specify how much damage is done to whatever they hit so the orbital bombardment would be fine (at least, with regards to falling damage), if it applied to it, whatever it hit would be less fine. Though I'm not sure if the falling rules apply to objects, if they did, it'd still work.
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8096183/35/Harry-Potter-and-the-Natural-20
Milo abused this in another fanfiction. He's more squishy so maximum falling damage would be bad for him but he avoided it with a spell.
"In midair, he readied an action. He'd discovered from overhearing conversations between the Weasley's about Quidditch that, in this plane of existence, people had a hard time hitting moving targets for some reason—the faster the target, the harder the shot. Milo had no such restriction (in fact, it was significantly easier to hit a running target), which did not stop him from exploiting this quirk of the local rules.
While falling, he adopted an aerodynamic posture to maximise his velocity. As he came within an inch of the roof, his Readied Action triggered."Dimension Door." Milo's view of the Dursleys' roof was suddenly replaced by a view of the Dursleys' tasteless dining room and Petunia's tasteless cooking. Like all Teleportation spells, Dimension Door placed the target on the nearest solid surface, in this case, the dining room table. Dimension Door, however, does not modify the target's momentum."Feather Fall," Milo cast the instant—literally—he re-appeared, sword in hand, standing on the table—still moving at terminal velocity.
Feather Fall, contrary to popular opinion, did more than simply slow a falling creature, because if it did, the sudden deceleration would kill anyone targeted by it. In addition, it explicitly made the target immune to falling damage. It is this effect that Milo required. Milo appeared on the table loaded with an enormous amount of momentum, but, thanks to Feather Fall, the sudden impact had no effect on him. The table, not being a target of Feather Fall, had no such magical protection, and had to deal with Milo's sudden change of velocity in a manner more in line with the laws of physics, as if he had crashed into it at a high speed.
The table exploded the moment Milo's feet touched it, filling the room with splinters, while Milo—now immune to falling damage, thanks to Feather Fall—slowly floated down to touch the floor. Wizards one, physics zero, Milo thought smugly amid the devastation."
Edit. If you did allow this there are fun ways to abuse it. Create a long diamond tube with a vacuum with true creation (you can reinforce it with walls of force later) create a teleport circle at bottom, leave the landguard member till they reach relativistic speeds, then teleport them at an enemy. Maybe give them immunity to fire somehow too. If the falling damage rules were allowed you would have a relativistic landguard member who took a maximum of 20d6 damage from their fall hitting a target with an arbitrarily high energy.
Edit 2. You can further abuse this with polymorph any object to polymorph into a dinosaur killer asteroid.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (22 hours later)
Well, I'm not capping falling damage, but yeah, that would work if 2YE worked like HPN20. I'll have to read the rules more closely to see if RAW really supports it, but that's not my understanding of Feather Fall. My understanding is that it just destroys your momentum / makes you inertialess.
Also, dinosaur killer considered harmful. Falls into the same category as AM bombing the planet out of existence, with all the same pros and cons.
u/Nepene [+1] (a day later)
Probably doesn't work. Falling damage works by RAW, but Feather Fall is a bit iffy in that it says it slows your fall to 60 feet per second instantly and Milo has a quirky interpretation that it's not instant. So no way to do safe relativistic landguards with your world sadly.
Well, you can scale your attack to an appropriate level. A relativistic tarrasque would be fine too.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
slows your fall to 60 feet per second
Per round. (10' per second) And yeah, I agree: as far as I can tell, Milo's trick is not supported by RAW. Also, he readied an action (presumably to cast Feather Fall, since that's the only thing that could make it work), but then he took an action to cast a spell (Dimension Door) which would have canceled his readied action. Also, he cast two spells in the same round: Dimension Door to get into the house, then immediately a Feather Fall to not die. It's the first and only place where I don't think the RAW supports HPN20.
And a relativistic tarrasque sounds awesome.
u/GeneralSCPatton [+2] (a day later)
Feather Fall's casting time is an immediate action. The readied action was for Dimension Door.
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
Ahhh, right. Good point. Ok, I'm happy to be wrong.
u/None [+2] (2 hours later)
[MK]?
u/Zephyr1011 [+2] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (3 hours later)
Munchkin
u/eaglejarl [+2] (4 hours later)
Munchkin
u/Zephyr1011 [+2] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (12 hours later)
At the end of this chapter you say "the remaining five hundred Landguard ". Where did the other 1000 go? The only place I can see is the platoon which collected the fenfrogs, but a platoon is nowhere near 1000, especially when that platoon is out of action for a week and are only collecting a few dozen frogs.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (15 hours later)
Hm, you're right. I had 500 of them blast with Mage's Disjunction, 500 beat Hammond silly, and a few scoop up frogs. That misses 500.
I'm away from wifi atm (this is being written in my phone), but I'll fix it when I can. Thanks for pointing it out.
u/Izeinwinter [+2] (15 hours later)
Well, this is all one round? So a lot of them spent it stabbing things in the maze. They shouldn't all be accounted for in the show down with the lich. Shouldn't be round numbers either.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (16 hours later)
Fair enough. As to the round numbers -- once you're dealing in hundreds or thousands of people, a dozen or three either way isn't that important.
u/Gurkenglas [+2] (19 hours later)
Spock would be proud.
u/failed_novelty [+1] (6 days later)
They could have paused for a round to ready their actions.
u/OffColorCommentary [+2] (2 days later)
Rules nitpick - it doesn't make sense to say some of the Landguard are on the outer most layer or that one is in the center, since the rules they're exploiting to share the same space already nullifies any concept of them having a position relative to another. However, all ranged attacks target a random person in the grapple, so you have a solid statistical defense against someone being hit by more than one attack.
Even more nitpicky rules nitpick - Grappling is transitive (if you grapple someone, they are considered to be grappling you as well), so you can only have a fanout of three people grappling per "layer," not the four in your example. Person 0 grapples persons 1, 2, 3. Person 1 grapples person 0, 4, 5, 6. And so forth.
u/themenniss [+1] Possibly self-aware (2 hours later)
ha. hahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHHHAHAHAHAAHAHAHHAAHAHAHA.
I was waiting for this moment. Damn it I love this story!
u/eaglejarl [+2] (4 hours later)
bow
u/Pakars [+4] (14 hours later)
This is my first time seeing your story, and
it
is
awesome
u/eaglejarl [+2] (15 hours later)
Thank you. :)
u/Laborbuch [+1] (5 hours later)
Am I right to assume the multiple sonic booms are due to echos? After all, not each Mach has it's own sonic shock and the sonic boom is actually a continuous shockfront in the wake of the supersonic object.
I just thought of it, but shouldn't the commoner railgun produce sonic booms as well? After all, if the speed of the item handed over surpasses the speed of sound, it is moving fast enough for a boom to occur. This is probably only an issue for railguns of sufficient length, though.
On another note, eaglejarl, you can put URLs into your profile without ffnet roflstomping them. Though I can see why you'd continue to put it into the chapters—the profile is another degree of separation, after all.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (6 hours later)
Yep, the multiple booms are echoes. Which was totally not the original intent but, since I just said it, now it's canon.
The railgun is weird; the object is not traveling faster than a normal handoff, yet somehow it is also covering (potentially) thousands of miles per second. The original intent as created on the Internet was as a weapons platform; the idea was to hand it along the line until it's at relativistic speed, then let it fly off and blow something up. Doesn't work; it requires switching between RAW and real physics halfway through the trick. I'm fine to use RAW, I'm also fine to do physics...but switching halfway through is bogus.
[put it in the profile] Yeah. Could do. Thanks for the suggestion!
u/Zephyr1011 [+1] Potentially Unfriendly Aspiring Divinity (7 hours later)
If the item is moving at relativistic speed, wouldn't it kill the commoners who it is passed to?
u/Jello_Raptor [+3] The Last Tool User (12 hours later)
It's all about reference frames.
In this case there's three relevant reference frames.
In the first, that of an outside observer, because of how D&D turn physics works, you can only really measure the position of the slug (item being moved via railgun) at the start and end of the round. In this case the round is approximately 6 seconds, and distance covered is effectively arbitrary. So the observed speed is very high.
The second is that of the commoners in the railgun. Because turn order is chosen to facilitate the railgun each commoner will be able to observe the slug for the duration of their round. Initially they see one commoner to one side of them holding the slug , and over the course of six seconds they will move it, at some sedate speed the few meters that is their purview.
The final reference frame is that of the slug is itself, which will see itself move at a bit under a meter per second until it has traversed the full distance, and noting each of the intervals where a particular commoner moves it.
Now, the best way to look at this is as a whole, is that while the slug is in the railgun, it is effectively carrying time. Whenever some entity can observer the slug, time is moving forward for it. The slug can alwys see itself, so time progresses normally. The commoners are only moving through time when they're holding the slug, and are paused otherwise. The outside observer is paused the entire time the slug is in the railgun.
Some consequences of this are, while the commoners or the outside observer might perceive the slug moving through the railgun, they'll never be able to pause and note a point where the slug is only partially through the railgun. (the exception being when the commoner is holding the slug themselves)
u/eaglejarl [+3] (15 hours later)
No, because it's never actually moving at relativistic speeds...at least, not by the D&D rules. This is why the commoner railgun doesn't work -- it relies on playing by RAW while the item is being handed down the line, then suddenly playing by physics when the item leaves the hands of the last person in the line.
If you play by physics the whole time, then the commoners can't pass it down the line at speed. If you play b RAW the whole time, then the item doesn't leave the hands of the last person any faster than a normal throw.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (22 hours later)
If you play b RAW the whole time, then the item doesn't leave the hands of the last person any faster than a normal throw.
Which of course is even better for logistics.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (23 hours later)
Yep. Total win for logistics and communications, total failure for attack.
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (23 hours later)
Wouldn't just talking be better, as you can pass an infinite amount of information per round?
u/eaglejarl [+1] (a day later)
For insecure commo, yes. For secure, you need to pass a physical object.
EDIT: Well, unless you allow your D&D characters to invent sophisticated encryption. Which I could have Jake do (he was going to use a book code, because it was faster than a one time pad), but a normal D&D character would be hard-pressed to plausibly invent it.
u/failed_novelty [+1] (12 hours later)
Nothing in the rule book says you take damage from getting a spear dropped into your hands, no matter how far it has traveled.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (7 hours later)
Well, that happened.
u/ulyssessword [+1] (10 hours later)
Speaking of Time Stop, how does it interact with readied actions? Let's say that Al readies an action to stab the next enemy that is within range, and Bob Timestops and grapple drags Al to a Golem, then past it in his two rounds that he's stopped for. Does the fact that readied actions are instant trump the fact that Time Stop is also instant?
Also two details: Your chapter name is missing a space, it's showing up as killsand (which is an awesome name for a magic item). And I'm fairly sure (but not 100%) that your grapple description is off by one. Person 0 gets grappled by 1234, but person 1 can only be grappled by 567. Person 8 joining in would mean that person 1 was grappling with five people at the same time, as grappling always mutual between the people.
u/eaglejarl [+3] (15 hours later)
Time Stop wins over readied actions, unless the RA prevents the Time Stop. Examples:
Al readies action "stab first enemy that moves past me". Bob casts TS and moves past Al. Bob makes it through safely.
Al readies action "stab the next person who casts a spell." Bob casts TS, but is interrupted by having Al stab him in the face.
[missing space]
Bloody FFN ate the "..." from the title. I am currently driving between point A and point B, both of which are in the middle of bloody nowhere with no wifi. I had wifi for literally 3 minutes -- I had to beg it off a hotel reception clerk so that I could post, and I didn't notice until after I was gone (I'm on my phone now). I'll fix it later.
[fencepost error]
The relevant line is: "Up to four combatants can grapple a single opponent in a given round."
The limitation isn't about how many can be in the grapple, it's about how many can grapple a given target. The description in text was correct.
u/Iconochasm [+1] (11 hours later)
u/Lugnut1206 [+1] (14 hours later)
Is grappling an attack?
I'm not sure how that passage proves or disproves the suggestion...
u/Iconochasm [+1] (14 hours later)
A grapple is a special melee attack. A grapple attempt begins with an attack roll.
u/nerdguy1138 [+1] GNU Terry Pratchett (a day later)
Anyone feel like podcasting the epically awesome pile of awesome epicness that is this story? I would totally Kickstart the hell out of that!
u/eaglejarl [+5] (a day later)
Can't do. I don't own the copyright on the D&D stuff.
Now, if you want to kickstart something, I could do One Hot Night, which is canon in 2YE but does not use copyrighted material. Alternatively, I could write something new. I have a great idea for a collection of stories related to Albrecht's fight / the founding of Grofhamr after the drauga invasion. Plenty of awesome in there, I should think.
Interested?
u/failed_novelty [+1] (6 days later)
How are the Landguard (under Permanent haste, with 'heavily enchanted' adamantine daggers) doing all of this while under the anti-magic field that protects them from kill-you-a-whole-lot-and-banish-the-ashes traps?
I get that the daggers still break DR even under the field, but the Landguard in their heavy armour should be moving 15ft/round.
In fact, shouldn't the Landguard in their heavy armor move 20ft/round (40 with haste)? Or does their armor have an ability that let's them retain a normal base speed?
u/eaglejarl [+1] (6 days later)
Yes, part of the armor's enchantment is that it weighs no more than normal clothes and has no armor check penalty.
The Mach 11 calculations were done before the AMF was applied. They are moving slower afterwards, but it didn't seem critical to mention since there's not a lot of practical difference between Mach 11 and Mach 8 or 9.
Apparently I was wrong about this lack of criticality. ;)
EDIT: Also, the Landguard canonically wear chainmail, which is Medium armor.
u/failed_novelty [+1] (6 days later)
Armor check penalty notwithstanding, medium armor does still limit a normal human to 20ft per round. You might want to tack and does not alter a creature's bade speed to that armor description :-)
u/eaglejarl [+2] (6 days later)
sigh. Fine. :P
The point was that they wear like clothes, work like armor, so sure, I'll add hat. I was thinking "Frodo mithral shirt" when I designed it.