Quote Originally Posted by Anonymouswizard View Post
Not Rules As Written, but RAW also implies that the projectile is at rest after the final readied action, and therefore plops to the ground.

Hence my short lived draft for 'the Tippyverse, but with lines of commoners instead of teleportation circles'.
Well RAW doesn't have any chance of such fumble, sure. But shenanigans like the Peasant Railgun "work" only because they're RAW when convenient, and "real-world" when convenient. If everything works per RAW, then the last peasant tosses the object as the rules say that would happen - which is exactly the same as if there was just this one peasant (so, it doesn't really do anything, unless you count it as a regular attack with an improvised club with the peasant's stats, which still doesn't amount to much). That's what the Peasant Railgun does by RAW, because the rules do not lay out any additional effect to a thrown object based on its presumed speed or how far it's traveled in the same round.

On the other hand, if you want to apply the (entirely reasonable) philosophy that the effects described by the rules should be amended/modified by what makes sense with real-world physics and such (given reasonable exceptions for magic and other fantasy elements)... then sure, an object accelerated to such an extreme speed would indeed cause massive damage, but the thing is, it wouldn't be accelerated because... why would it? What, realistically, gives your peasants the ability to pass things around with perfect accuracy in an extremely small amount of time? If people had that ability, a "peasant railgun" would be a trivial matter anyway, D&D RAW or no. Or, coming at it from another angle, if you want to inject reasonable consequences of physics into your game, a line of peasants passing an object around would only be able to pass it a limited distance per round, based on the speed such an object would reasonably attain.

In other words, the Peasant Railgun is a perfect example of people trying to have their cake and eat it too. Either RAW is absolute, in which case it doesn't work, or it isn't, in which case it also doesn't work.