roachpatrol: somethingdnd: badger-actual: Holy shit. A WMD for the D&D world. never let engi
roachpatrol: somethingdnd: badger-actual: Holy shit. A WMD for the D&D world. never let engineering students design magic items i’m pretty sure this would be most effective in naval combat, to hull big ships. a regular arrow will kill someone plenty dead in small skirmishes. a regular cannon ball, discharged over a battlefield, is fired at a nearly horizontal angle, so it takes out as long a line of combatants as possible while skipping along the ground, and would probably do just as much damage along that line as this device, rather than going off on the first dude it hit and taking out just one ring, while whatever load of rock and rubble a catapault would dump onto a battlefield would take out a much wider blast radius than just 10 feet. but a 10-foot diameter scoop taken out of the hull of a ship is a pretty big deal in any universe. if you stuck with arrows to deploy this device, it also wouldn’t be anywhere near as heavy as the 12000 pound cannons required to fire a six pound cannonball, and there’d be no dangerous recoil or risk of explosion on the firing ship. but a professional archer with a longbow’s range would only be about 400 yards (though very accurate) while a six-pounder could go up to 1500 yards (though less accurate). so it’s a toss up which method would be better, unless you’re working in a world without gunpowder, in which case your ships would be closing in much more closely to exchange crossbow/arrow fire, throw flaming crap, or try to ram and board, and you’d do just fine with tension-launched rift devices. come to think of it, were these things to be invented in a time before gunpowder, the ensuing arms race would be all about range, not explosive power or accuracy: whoever could accurately hit the other guy from furthest away would automatically win. we’d be seeing some really interesting sea-trebuchets in a generation… you could, of course, just manufacture a lot of sea mines, and dump them. The issue with this device is that a portable hole is listed (in the D20 SRD) with a cost of 20,000 gold pieces and a small bag of holding with a cost of 2,500 GP. Thus the combination is marginally less expensive than the warship you’re trying to sink with it, with a listed cost of 25,000 GP.Better by far to just pick up a Wand of Fireballs, which carries 50 charges, and costs only 11,250 GP. While it has a shorter range (600 feet at caster level 5), the fireball will ignite everything flammable in a 20 foot radius of the point of impact, incinerating sails and rigging even if it doesn’t destroy the ship entirely. -- source link