So I have this rule in D&D where if you know how to make it irl then you can make it in the game provided you have the right resources. Well one day my player comes up to me and asks “can I build a nuke?” To which I remind them of my rule, then they inform me that they not only know every step of making a nuke but also every step on how to make an antimatter bomb, heat seeking missiles, as well as fighter jets. I then asked how they planned on getting the resources to which they reminded me that I had mentioned that this world had the same resource layout as the real world. They are now wreaking havoc on my campaign, what should I do?
Here's the deal; the problem isn't actually your house rule, although that's definitely not doing you any favors. The problem is that your player isn't interested in engaging in the shared fiction. The rules alone aren't what keeps any given D&D group on the same page, they just structure the experience. That structure has to be supported by a foundational level of buy-in, and that's what you don't have.
You can reset the campaign to zero and try to start over, but there's a good chance that player will just resume their attempts to break the game because breaking the game is what's fun to them. If that's not fun for you, you need to either reach a compromise with this player (which they have suggested is impossible), or you need to not play D&D together. That doesn't mean you're not friends or you don't like each other, it just means you disagree about this one hobby. That's something adult friends do all the time.
who said that the technology had to exist? I could just create my own.
You did in the original post... I mean, the totally real DM (who is a completely different person than you) did when he posted "if you know how to make it irl". If the technology doesn't exist, then you don't know how to make it irl.
And, btw, the previous scenarios were me being nice.
Another option would be for the mists to surround your character and you end up in a Domain of Dread. There you won't have the resources. You won't have any means of escape. Even souls can't escape a Domain of Dread. Nobody can enter or leave without the permission of the mysterious Dark Powers entities that control the Domains of Dread.
There's only been two beings who ever escaped a Domain of Dread. One was Lord Soth who simply sat down and did not move for over a century. The Dark Powers got bored and let him go. Your character can't do that. Infinite Time Stop doesn't help you there.
Heat seeking missiles and nukes are extreme military secrets and anyone working on them is sworn to secrecy possibly your player knows the basics but most definitely not the whole process and getting uranium’s 256 in dnd time would be near impossible
Your the DM. Sounds like you let something into your game that worked out worse than expected. Welcome to the club! Now fix it. Players that use their fun to ruin the fun for the group either need to stop, or go. No need to get harsh or personal about it. If your the DM keep the game fun for you and your players. I have a player in my current party who just loves to min/max and bring crazy stuff into the game. All good. Enemies do the same and for some reason always use such shenanigans against that player and if necessary the rest of the party. Make that player a liability to the party and more than likely your players will resolve the problem for you. If its bad, boot em.
Somehow this guy can make up nukes but it takes some nations of people 60 years or more since the first one was set off.
But somehow he knows all the secrets.
How do you purify Uranium and then extract the heavy part from the light? And why do you need heavy water to do all this? What explosives do you use for the compression? What are four things they always leave out of the process in the movies and on line?
It's really simple. Enforce the rule. Your player is taking advantage of both of you not really thinking about this. At what level does a D&D PC have at their disposal the resources of a IRL superpower and its military industrial complex, because that's the real "resource" required to build a nuke, or heat seeking missile or a fighter jet (also, antimatter bombs are in fact, not a thing). If they insist they are in fact the leader of such a superpower or Lockheed Martin, apologize and excuse the character from the game, because they likely have significant lobbying to do, or policy to set to secure funding for producing such resources, etc. You know, a world to run. Such a "big deal" in the world clearly doesn't have time to go adventuring while pretending they're a parody of Elon Musk's inaccurate self image. Resources to make something is far more than a "how stuff is made" YouTube and the existence of raw materials. If they really want to simulate the production of a modern country's arsenal, maybe they're off playing Civ or something.
Did you tell them to prove to you that they have all the knowledge they claim they have? It isn’t a simple matter of reading papers. They have to know a mind-boggling array of sciences, engineering, architecture, finance, non-western economics, and more. In the real world, it takes a large group of specialists.
Even if they knew how, how would the PC get the materials?
Knowing how something works doesn't mean they have the skills to produce the product. I know to start a fire with sticks but I've never tried it and don't know if I'd succeed. I know how to forge armor, but I doubt I have the skill to actually do it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
So I have this rule in D&D where if you know how to make it irl then you can make it in the game provided you have the right resources. Well one day my player comes up to me and asks “can I build a nuke?” To which I remind them of my rule, then they inform me that they not only know every step of making a nuke but also every step on how to make an antimatter bomb, heat seeking missiles, as well as fighter jets. I then asked how they planned on getting the resources to which they reminded me that I had mentioned that this world had the same resource layout as the real world. They are now wreaking havoc on my campaign, what should I do?
You need to adapt that rule a bit to "If you know how to make it in real life AND IT IS APPROPRIATE TO A MEDIEVAL SETTING, then you can make it in the game provided you have the right resources.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
From the players responses I feel like the best way would be to say. “No, you can’t do that, end of story.” And if they continue say goodbye to them and that they’re not in the campaign anymore.
It sounds like he’s trying to ruin the campaign, don’t let people like that ruin the fun for everybody else.
Also he knows how to make a nuke but does he know the technology and devices required to make a nuke. How will he even get the resources required for the nuke and everything else.
Somehow this guy can make up nukes but it takes some nations of people 60 years or more since the first one was set off.
But somehow he knows all the secrets.
How do you purify Uranium and then extract the heavy part from the light? And why do you need heavy water to do all this? What explosives do you use for the compression? What are four things they always leave out of the process in the movies and on line?
This! If it was that easy to make a nuke with today’s technology then every country in the world would have one. But they don’t because it’s not a simple process.
And the player is obviously a troll or a “main character syndrome” jerk (if this thread is actually real, which I doubt) so kick them from the group or end the campaign immediately. That’s what you should do.
So I have this rule in D&D where if you know how to make it irl then you can make it in the game provided you have the right resources. Well one day my player comes up to me and asks “can I build a nuke?” To which I remind them of my rule, then they inform me that they not only know every step of making a nuke but also every step on how to make an antimatter bomb, heat seeking missiles, as well as fighter jets. I then asked how they planned on getting the resources to which they reminded me that I had mentioned that this world had the same resource layout as the real world. They are now wreaking havoc on my campaign, what should I do?
One thing that it looks like nobody's mentioned so far: yes you *may* be able to acquire the same resources that exist in our world to build a fighter just and sufficient fissable material for a nuke, but imagine the time, effort, and industry required to amass such resources.
Watch Oppenheimer and see how long it takes them to scrape together enough uranium from like 3 different mines across the whole world for one test. Now imagine doing that in a pre-industrial world with hand-tools.
In order to get the resources, you first have to discover half of them, convince enough people they're worth digging up, establish multiple mining operations across a whole continent most likely, and then process and refine the raw materials (that will involve a great deal of equipment you will also have to invent), and the mountains of gold you'd need to pay all the workers, buy the equipment, and construct all the facilities.
Even if your players wanna do ALL this and have all the gold to do it, you're talking about an undertaking that will take up years and years of in-game time and will consume the entirety of the campaign. No time for adventuring, no time for story, no time for party members, etc.
Basically, if that's the game they wanna play, it's not really gonna work for the table as a whole.
One thing that it looks like nobody's mentioned so far: yes you *may* be able to acquire the same resources that exist in our world to build a fighter just and sufficient fissable material for a nuke, but imagine the time, effort, and industry required to amass such resources.
Watch Oppenheimer and see how long it takes them to scrape together enough uranium from like 3 different mines across the whole world for one test. Now imagine doing that in a pre-industrial world with hand-tools.
In order to get the resources, you first have to discover half of them, convince enough people they're worth digging up, establish multiple mining operations across a whole continent most likely, and then process and refine the raw materials (that will involve a great deal of equipment you will also have to invent), and the mountains of gold you'd need to pay all the workers, buy the equipment, and construct all the facilities.
Even if your players wanna do ALL this and have all the gold to do it, you're talking about an undertaking that will take up years and years of in-game time and will consume the entirety of the campaign. No time for adventuring, no time for story, no time for party members, etc.
Basically, if that's the game they wanna play, it's not really gonna work for the table as a whole.
Yeah, that's what I was discussing yesterday when I wrote
At what level does a D&D PC have at their disposal the resources of a IRL superpower and its military industrial complex, because that's the real "resource" required to build a nuke, or heat seeking missile or a fighter jet (also, antimatter bombs are in fact, not a thing). If they insist they are in fact the leader of such a superpower or Lockheed Martin, apologize and excuse the character from the game, because they likely have significant lobbying to do, or policy to set to secure funding for producing such resources, etc.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Almost all technology is a lot more complex than people think. Their is usually one major breakthrough that gets publicized but all the minor stuff gets ignored.
Your players think they know how to make a nuclear bomb? OK, prove it. How do they find the pitchblende? How do they purify it? How do they centrifuge it?
You got all that? Great! Now are you going for Little boy or Fat man? Little boy, ok, then. You got your 141 lbs of purified and enriched uranium. How much did that cost you? 20,000 gp? OK. Good LIttle boy was a 'gun' design, that used nitrocellulose. Time to start researching how to make nitrocellulose. Cellulose is reasonably cheap, but you are gonna have to pay up for the purest form of it. More pure than anything available in your D&D world - so how exactly do you purify your cotton? Then you need your nitric acid and sulfuric acid. Both of those have to be pure enough as well. Need a really good alchemical check to do that. What, you are not an alchemist?
OK, what ratio of Nitric to sulfuric acid are you using? Ok. then, deal with that, also takes time. Who, it's been a year since you started this project and have succesfully invented modern gunpowder which the alchemist is selling left and right, but we can finally get back to making your nuclear bomb.
How long is your gun barrel going to be for the uraninum bullet? This bomb should be small enough to carry, right? OK, what are you using for the barrel? Great idea, but the price of those metals have skyrocked - everyone is using them for this new weapon called a rifle. We finally get back to our lab to keep working on the nuke, but we have to up our fortress defenses, as their is a rather nasty gunpowder revolution overthrowing the king going on.
Well that gunpowder we made works fine for guns, but to get the reliable speeds we want for our bomb we also need to invent nitroglycerine (really dangerous stuff, likely to blow you up by mistake), petroleum jelly and carbamite. Lucky for us the carbamite is a byproduct of burning gunpowder and is like EVERYWHERE now. But with all those ingredients you can make the cordite powder that is a fast, reliable explosive.
How much of the U235 are you putting in the catch ring and how much in the bullet? Whoops, you touched the U235, now got radiation sickness, time to pay for a healing. What shape is the bullet? What shape is the catch ring? Oh, you only made one ring? You need nine such rings. Great.
Oh, you test this thing and it does not explode? The bullet went right through the catch rings? You forgot the tungsten carbide backstop. So, how do you make a tungsten carbide backstop? Going to use adamantine? OK, I can see that. No big deal. Except adamantine does not reflect nuetrons, so the bomb still won't work. OK, lets figure out how to find the raw materials to make actual tungsten carbide.
...Polonium-berillium initators...
...what do you mean no safety features? OK, after hiring an entire new set of workers, doubling their pay...
... of course you can hunt down the thieves that stole half your uraninum supply to poison those rebels but it will take...
.... you have finally finished your nuclear weapon after 40 years, all you have to do is figure out how to get back home to your own plane. You don't know how the necromancers armed with ak47s managed to send your entire fortress here, but you vow REVENGE!
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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Here's the deal; the problem isn't actually your house rule, although that's definitely not doing you any favors. The problem is that your player isn't interested in engaging in the shared fiction. The rules alone aren't what keeps any given D&D group on the same page, they just structure the experience. That structure has to be supported by a foundational level of buy-in, and that's what you don't have.
You can reset the campaign to zero and try to start over, but there's a good chance that player will just resume their attempts to break the game because breaking the game is what's fun to them. If that's not fun for you, you need to either reach a compromise with this player (which they have suggested is impossible), or you need to not play D&D together. That doesn't mean you're not friends or you don't like each other, it just means you disagree about this one hobby. That's something adult friends do all the time.
You did in the original post... I mean, the totally real DM (who is a completely different person than you) did when he posted "if you know how to make it irl". If the technology doesn't exist, then you don't know how to make it irl."Unlimited Time Stop".... hilarious!!
And, btw, the previous scenarios were me being nice.
Another option would be for the mists to surround your character and you end up in a Domain of Dread. There you won't have the resources. You won't have any means of escape. Even souls can't escape a Domain of Dread. Nobody can enter or leave without the permission of the mysterious Dark Powers entities that control the Domains of Dread.
There's only been two beings who ever escaped a Domain of Dread. One was Lord Soth who simply sat down and did not move for over a century. The Dark Powers got bored and let him go. Your character can't do that. Infinite Time Stop doesn't help you there.
You can ask him if you want.
I'm not kidding, he genuinely has an NPC that can just stop time indefinitely.
Nah he’s the real player he just was in the room when I posted it on the forum and somehow found it
Heat seeking missiles and nukes are extreme military secrets and anyone working on them is sworn to secrecy possibly your player knows the basics but most definitely not the whole process and getting uranium’s 256 in dnd time would be near impossible
That's what I posted. You're a totally real DM and you're a completely different person than he is.
Your the DM. Sounds like you let something into your game that worked out worse than expected. Welcome to the club! Now fix it. Players that use their fun to ruin the fun for the group either need to stop, or go. No need to get harsh or personal about it. If your the DM keep the game fun for you and your players. I have a player in my current party who just loves to min/max and bring crazy stuff into the game. All good. Enemies do the same and for some reason always use such shenanigans against that player and if necessary the rest of the party. Make that player a liability to the party and more than likely your players will resolve the problem for you. If its bad, boot em.
Somehow this guy can make up nukes but it takes some nations of people 60 years or more since the first one was set off.
But somehow he knows all the secrets.
How do you purify Uranium and then extract the heavy part from the light? And why do you need heavy water to do all this? What explosives do you use for the compression? What are four things they always leave out of the process in the movies and on line?
It's really simple. Enforce the rule. Your player is taking advantage of both of you not really thinking about this. At what level does a D&D PC have at their disposal the resources of a IRL superpower and its military industrial complex, because that's the real "resource" required to build a nuke, or heat seeking missile or a fighter jet (also, antimatter bombs are in fact, not a thing). If they insist they are in fact the leader of such a superpower or Lockheed Martin, apologize and excuse the character from the game, because they likely have significant lobbying to do, or policy to set to secure funding for producing such resources, etc. You know, a world to run. Such a "big deal" in the world clearly doesn't have time to go adventuring while pretending they're a parody of Elon Musk's inaccurate self image. Resources to make something is far more than a "how stuff is made" YouTube and the existence of raw materials. If they really want to simulate the production of a modern country's arsenal, maybe they're off playing Civ or something.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Did you tell them to prove to you that they have all the knowledge they claim they have? It isn’t a simple matter of reading papers. They have to know a mind-boggling array of sciences, engineering, architecture, finance, non-western economics, and more. In the real world, it takes a large group of specialists.
Even if they knew how, how would the PC get the materials?
Knowing how something works doesn't mean they have the skills to produce the product. I know to start a fire with sticks but I've never tried it and don't know if I'd succeed. I know how to forge armor, but I doubt I have the skill to actually do it.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
You need to adapt that rule a bit to "If you know how to make it in real life AND IT IS APPROPRIATE TO A MEDIEVAL SETTING, then you can make it in the game provided you have the right resources.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
From the players responses I feel like the best way would be to say. “No, you can’t do that, end of story.” And if they continue say goodbye to them and that they’re not in the campaign anymore.
It sounds like he’s trying to ruin the campaign, don’t let people like that ruin the fun for everybody else.
Characters (Links!):
Faelin Nighthollow - 7th Sojourn
Also he knows how to make a nuke but does he know the technology and devices required to make a nuke. How will he even get the resources required for the nuke and everything else.
Characters (Links!):
Faelin Nighthollow - 7th Sojourn
This! If it was that easy to make a nuke with today’s technology then every country in the world would have one. But they don’t because it’s not a simple process.
And the player is obviously a troll or a “main character syndrome” jerk (if this thread is actually real, which I doubt) so kick them from the group or end the campaign immediately. That’s what you should do.
EZD6 by DM Scotty
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/397599/EZD6-Core-Rulebook?
One thing that it looks like nobody's mentioned so far: yes you *may* be able to acquire the same resources that exist in our world to build a fighter just and sufficient fissable material for a nuke, but imagine the time, effort, and industry required to amass such resources.
Watch Oppenheimer and see how long it takes them to scrape together enough uranium from like 3 different mines across the whole world for one test. Now imagine doing that in a pre-industrial world with hand-tools.
In order to get the resources, you first have to discover half of them, convince enough people they're worth digging up, establish multiple mining operations across a whole continent most likely, and then process and refine the raw materials (that will involve a great deal of equipment you will also have to invent), and the mountains of gold you'd need to pay all the workers, buy the equipment, and construct all the facilities.
Even if your players wanna do ALL this and have all the gold to do it, you're talking about an undertaking that will take up years and years of in-game time and will consume the entirety of the campaign. No time for adventuring, no time for story, no time for party members, etc.
Basically, if that's the game they wanna play, it's not really gonna work for the table as a whole.
The DM could also just say the character is a little crazy and only thinks they are doing these things.
Sorry if the word crazy upsets anyone but its a non clinical word that pretty closely explains the players actions.
Yeah, that's what I was discussing yesterday when I wrote
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Almost all technology is a lot more complex than people think. Their is usually one major breakthrough that gets publicized but all the minor stuff gets ignored.
Your players think they know how to make a nuclear bomb? OK, prove it. How do they find the pitchblende? How do they purify it? How do they centrifuge it?
You got all that? Great! Now are you going for Little boy or Fat man? Little boy, ok, then. You got your 141 lbs of purified and enriched uranium. How much did that cost you? 20,000 gp? OK. Good LIttle boy was a 'gun' design, that used nitrocellulose. Time to start researching how to make nitrocellulose. Cellulose is reasonably cheap, but you are gonna have to pay up for the purest form of it. More pure than anything available in your D&D world - so how exactly do you purify your cotton? Then you need your nitric acid and sulfuric acid. Both of those have to be pure enough as well. Need a really good alchemical check to do that. What, you are not an alchemist?
OK, what ratio of Nitric to sulfuric acid are you using? Ok. then, deal with that, also takes time. Who, it's been a year since you started this project and have succesfully invented modern gunpowder which the alchemist is selling left and right, but we can finally get back to making your nuclear bomb.
How long is your gun barrel going to be for the uraninum bullet? This bomb should be small enough to carry, right? OK, what are you using for the barrel? Great idea, but the price of those metals have skyrocked - everyone is using them for this new weapon called a rifle. We finally get back to our lab to keep working on the nuke, but we have to up our fortress defenses, as their is a rather nasty gunpowder revolution overthrowing the king going on.
Well that gunpowder we made works fine for guns, but to get the reliable speeds we want for our bomb we also need to invent nitroglycerine (really dangerous stuff, likely to blow you up by mistake), petroleum jelly and carbamite. Lucky for us the carbamite is a byproduct of burning gunpowder and is like EVERYWHERE now. But with all those ingredients you can make the cordite powder that is a fast, reliable explosive.
How much of the U235 are you putting in the catch ring and how much in the bullet? Whoops, you touched the U235, now got radiation sickness, time to pay for a healing. What shape is the bullet? What shape is the catch ring? Oh, you only made one ring? You need nine such rings. Great.
Oh, you test this thing and it does not explode? The bullet went right through the catch rings? You forgot the tungsten carbide backstop. So, how do you make a tungsten carbide backstop? Going to use adamantine? OK, I can see that. No big deal. Except adamantine does not reflect nuetrons, so the bomb still won't work. OK, lets figure out how to find the raw materials to make actual tungsten carbide.
...Polonium-berillium initators...
...what do you mean no safety features? OK, after hiring an entire new set of workers, doubling their pay...
... of course you can hunt down the thieves that stole half your uraninum supply to poison those rebels but it will take...
.... you have finally finished your nuclear weapon after 40 years, all you have to do is figure out how to get back home to your own plane. You don't know how the necromancers armed with ak47s managed to send your entire fortress here, but you vow REVENGE!