This is why the only thing I really write down and do for my campaigns is the characters, the world in some cases, and the general outline of what the bad guys are doing. Everything else is improv based on the actions of the players and the roll of the dice.
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Look. When you gave me that cloak of spider climb you should have known being on the ceiling would become a core tenant of my personality.
They unsliced the bread, very impressive
It's the Sandwich Alignment Chart except the options are Lawful Stupid, Chaotic Stupid, Stupid Good, and Stupid Evil
Which one is the tri sandwich, that is my choice.
Clockwise from top left:
- Lawful Stupid: Follows the rules, to a fault.
- Stupid Evil: Needlessly cruel, for precisely zero reason.
- Chaotic RanDumb: "See, it's a sandwich! Trololo, Kek"
- Stupid Good: "As you can see, this is the only way to make a sandwich that can be perfectly split amongst the party of three people. We must completely redefine what a 'sandwich' is, put in all of this effort to defy the laws of mathematics and spend the entirety of our time arguing and devising purity tests"
There was an arc in the webcomic Girl Genius (highly recommended, by the way) where a couple of the characters were in a tight spot in a dungeon somewhere. Surrounded by bad guys and running thin on options. So one of them pulled out a wine-bottle-sized glass bottle labeled "bottled ocean". (I might be getting one or two small details wrong, but stay with me here.) He threw it on the ground and a big-ass tidal wave worth of water emerged and swept the characters, along with a bunch of the bad guys, all the way out of the dungeon. It was quite perilous, of course. (There was a chance they could bang into a lot of shit on the way, for instance.) Definitely a reckless move. But it worked, carrying the characters to safety. Risky, but an ace-in-the-hole if you really need it.
I was DM'ing a Pathfinder game at the time, and of course I had to make sure my PC's got a "bottled ocean" in their inventory.
(My version, rather than stoppered, was fully sealed. Like, an ampule rather than a wine bottle. Still wine-bottle-sized, though. And my version had a label on it that said "bottled ocean.")
Upon receiving it, they reasoned that if it was a "bottled ocean", it must be under tremendous pressure. They decided they'd try to construct a "gun" out of it. Mount the ampule in the gun, somehow (very carefully?) drill a small hole in the bottle, and rig a trigger to where they could open the "hole" on command. They figured with the amount of pressure it was under, it would create a stream strong enough to cut through enemies. Like an industrial CNC water cutting machine. Or like that one puppet-master Akatsuki guy from near the beginning of Naruto Shippuden who used high-pressure water jets as a weapon.
They never made good on their threat to try to engineer such a thing. Never used the "bottled ocean" for any other purpose either. But I had to admire their creativity.
Had they succeeded in making such a gun (and it would definitely have involved a pretty high roll), I might have ruled that even if it worked, the shooter would have to roll a... maybe athletics check or be pushed back, say, 5 feet in the direction opposite the direction they fired. (Unless maybe there was a sufficiently strong wall or whatever behind them, or unless they were prone. Maybe make that 10 or even 15 feet if fired by a small creature.)
Edit: Found the specific Girl Genius comic where the "bottled ocean" (or as the source called it, "ocean in a bottle" -- I misremembered) was mentioned: https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20030827 . That one and the next three or four show how it's used.
I might have ruled that even if it worked, the shooter would have to roll a... maybe athletics check or be pushed back, say, 5 feet in the direction opposite the direction they fired
That's sad, considering they would have gone to all that effort for a one time use ability.
Who said anything about one-time use? I had in mind a one-time-use item (an "oh shit, we're in a tight spot and need a big emergency 'abort' button, even if even that option is risky" sort of item) when I gave it to them, but I definitely wouldn't have made what they came up with a one-time-use item. (Unless they rolled relatively low on the process of engineering the gun in the first place, in which case I might have been like "yeah, you've got something that you think will probably work like maybe once, but you're not confident it would work more than like once or twice without failing catastrophically".) Probably a roughly infinite number of uses. (Unless they, like, propped it on a rock and left it "on" over a long rest or whatever.)
I figured they had an "ocean" worth of water. (Well, as I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I think it would be reasonable to make it well less than a literal ocean, but still, a fuckton.) And they'd be firing in like less-than-6-second bursts. They'd have to shoot that thing a lot of times to exhaust its water stores enough to start losing pressure.
And, just to be clear, what I had in mind was a very narrow and high-pressure stream that would do a shit-ton of... I dunno, slashing(?)... damage to enemies. Maybe even cutting holes through one guy and doing damage to the guy behind that guy if the enemies happened to be lined up (or if the PC wanted to orchestrate that). But such a powerful weapon would need drawbacks, I'd think. Like maybe a minus to the dex roll to hit? Or even disadvantage on the roll to hit. Plus the whole pushes-the-shooter-back thing would be interesting in some situations. (Could even be used strategically. Even if you missed, maybe this would avoid attacks of opportunity because you didn't move out of melee range. You were pushed by the force of the water? Maybe?)
(Also, to be fair, I'm thinking in 5e rules here and the original campaign in which I introduced this item was PF1e. Anyway.)
Anyway, what I'm getting at is that I never had one-use in mind for what they came up with. And it sounds like you might have thought I was saying its only effect would be to push the shooter back or something. Not at all what I meant.
Ah yeah, that's what your original comment sounded like it was getting at.
I was thinking 'one time use' because the ampule seemed like it would have been a consumable to me, puncture once then gone. Guess it's one of those things that needs a spec sheet to know what everybody has in mind :D
How did they turn the slices back into a loaf?
To be completely fair, I'm on all sides of this image. D&D on its best day is chaotic improv with dice rolls. Sometimes you're the hero, sometimes you're all the villains.
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