So i was reading a manga that I can tell was very heavily based on table-top RPG's when an very interesting scenario came up and i wonder exactly how many DM's would let this be a thing?
In the story they team is fighting something that looks very much like a beholder, except it fought using magic negation and heat rays (no clue how beholder's actually fight, only started the game recently). Now the tactic they used is that they cast something that made it go to sleep, then one of the characters took a bunch of wheat flour and spread it all over the air in the room, they then summoned a disposable creature and left it in the room, left the room, shot the monster with an arrow to wake it up and then sealed the room, they beholder-like monster saw the summoned creature, attacked it but because the room was full of the wheat flour that attack triggered a dust explosion which insta-killed the monster.
now i know obviously something make-shifted like this wouldn't one-shot a beholder and there are a ton of variables that have to be taken into consideration like how much wheat-flour was used, how small the room is, how humid/moist the room is, etc. but say as a DM your players tried something like this, how would play it out? would you let the dust explosion happen? if so how would the damage it does look like? i'm just a bit curious.
In reality flour is very explosive, when in dust form. Mills have historically have very makeshift roofs, so when they do explode the roof comes off and damages as little of the structure as possible.
I have no idea how to adjudicate how many dice of damage to apply. As with any explosion the amount of combustable material as well with how contained the area is. See the Chunky Salsa Rule.
I'd probably short hand it to a fireball or Rule of Cool they find the the beholding dying from the wounds when they reenter the area.
I will always reward ingenuity, it may not always be the reward the players were expecting, but I will reward it none-the-less.
I had a player take a sleeping potion and use it as a suppository in one fight. Now it may not be the most realistic approach, but hey...it was a fantastic idea considering the situation they were in...The critter fell asleep, they party still couldn't kill it (damage immunities and all), but it ended the fight.
I'd probably short hand it to a fireball or Rule of Cool they find the the beholding dying from the wounds when they reenter the area.
Maybe even 2 fireballs if you wanted to be generous and let them have the potential kill. I am more of a mind to use the "dying from wounds" approach though, it gives the scene a bit more impact imo.
I would put a dust explosion with the amount of flour used in that manga on par with a consumable like an upgraded alchemist fire, or a burning hands spell. I would not allow it to have comparable damage to a fireball. The sheer amount of combustible dust needed to do any significant amount of damage, let alone in such an open room to dispel the amount of pressure from the explosion? Dust explosions are terrible because of flying shrapnel and concussive force, not the flames, much like a grenade. Pressure won't make it easier to ignite the dust, but it makes the explosion stronger and deadlier. Just slamming closed room and dust together is a bit iffy if the actual closed room has secondary exits / air flow and is rather large. I mean, hells. The room they set the dust explosion off had a freaking mirror that was undamaged. If a dust explosion is enough to tear a gazer apart, then it should shatter a good portion of the room. Its not a shaped blast.
I would also require knowledge checks first. No using real world science without going through the DM first. If a DM doesn't like firearms or gunpowder explosions, and this is really close to that...
well that's why i said there are so many factors that could make this not work. I agree that maybe some kind of check could be made here but i have 2 rebuttals to your argument.
1) yes the mirror didn't shatter, but it's also a magical mirror, when their priest touched it her fingers even went through the thing, so i imagine that the mirror doesn't really have anything there to shatter in the first place
2) i don't know if i would qualify this too much as real world science, i mean yea it is based on the real world, but even before science was a huge thing humans have worked with flour for centuries, i'd imagine something like "keep flour in a contained space and don't light a fire while in there" would become a general knowledge thing, the guy in the manga even said he learned it from a coal miner whose knowledge comes more from "i learned this from experience" than "i learned this because scientists did tests and research on the effects of flour and combustion" or whatever.
i agree though that even i thought "i highly doubt that one small sack of flour would produce that big of an explosion" when i read the manga, but i'm more interested in the possibility of this happening in a game, like how many DM's for example could use this as a trap for their players where a room is just full of "some kind of dust" and using magical lighting like dancing lights in that room is ok, but bring a torch and suddenly you're constantly rolling to see if the dust suddenly catches to make the room kabloom.
or again maybe every person in the party carries a sack of flour (because yknow, you do that when you explore dungeons lol) and they come across a room full of tiny mob creatures, someone casts sleep and puts them to sleep, players then scatter a bunch of the flour in the air, leave the room, and then toss in a candle before closing the door, hell if you want we can add an extra measure and pour oil on the ground.
lol i wash just watching this anime Sean. i'm very interested and am tempting to make this as a cheap alternative to gun powder.
Doesn't work well for projectiles, the dust has to be combustible and distributed through the air in a cloud like form. If you're interested, check out mythbusters experiments with coffee creamer.
Mill fires and explosions were well known from the time that large flour mills were built. Conditions do have to be right to get a large explosion, a bag of flour is not an instant low tech hand grenade.
This is the sort of thing I would allow a clever character with the right background to try. They would need some in character reason to know about how flammable flour is. Connection to a baker or miller would certainly do it, alchemy might as well. An elvish ranger who never left the forests would have no reason to be aware of this though.
As for adjudicating the effects, fire damage seems appropriate. fireball for a large amount of flour dust in a large room, like a mill explosion. For a smaller room and a bag of flour, maybe Burning Hands.
To create a significant explosion requires a huge amount of dust in the air. A single bag of flour is unlikely to have any effect at all. Rule of cool I would allow it to add a small amount of damage, like oil (flask)
Had this come up in my last session. Tabaxi Cleric ran in and out with the flour sack open, Fighter nat 1'd throwing alchemist fire and dropped it on his foot, Tabaxi scooped up a bit of it off his boot and shot the arrow into the oncoming goblin horde. Lost my notes where i figured it at 6d4 and accidentally told him 4d6. Tabaxi rolled 20. None of the 12 goblins had higher than 7hp. only one made dex save dc15 for half. All 12 Goblins went Fwoosh! Party rolled to search them for treasure and rolled super low. Any coin burned up in the explosion. Party could have cared less about the treasure as they were still whooping and crowing over their victory! Great first half of the game.
PS discovered my notes after the fact fact and told the party I was keeping the scene as played due to rule of cool but next time they pull that stunt it'll be with the proper damage roll. Can't wait to see them try that with a troll! (evil DM laugh)
Coal dust, sugar dust, flour, even sawdust are all explosive if well distributed in the air. About the only dust not explosive is chalk dust. As to the amount you need that is another story. Really large explosions call for hundreds of pounds of dust but something like a fireball might only take 10 pounds in that 20’ r area. Somehow I don’t see characters running around often with 10 pound bags of dust. But a gust of wind spell over a pile of coal dust and then ignited might create a very dangerous explosion or line of fire.
I'd be willing to let PCs rig something like this up as a trap in a predetermined location, but it would take several minutes at least. It's not practical to try doing it in the middle of a fight.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Had this come up in my last session. Tabaxi Cleric ran in and out with the flour sack open, Fighter nat 1'd throwing alchemist fire and dropped it on his foot, Tabaxi scooped up a bit of it off his boot and shot the arrow into the oncoming goblin horde. Lost my notes where i figured it at 6d4 and accidentally told him 4d6. Tabaxi rolled 20. None of the 12 goblins had higher than 7hp. only one made dex save dc15 for half. All 12 Goblins went Fwoosh! Party rolled to search them for treasure and rolled super low. Any coin burned up in the explosion. Party could have cared less about the treasure as they were still whooping and crowing over their victory! Great first half of the game.
PS discovered my notes after the fact fact and told the party I was keeping the scene as played due to rule of cool but next time they pull that stunt it'll be with the proper damage roll. Can't wait to see them try that with a troll! (evil DM laugh)
Running in and out with a sack of flour open will make a line of flour on the ground with a little in the air. Getting enough in the air to create the sustained reaction necessary for a dust explosion would be nearly impossible during combat without magical assistance. It's a different matter if the party has significant time to set things up or the environment already contains the necessary dust.
When flour is clumped together it barely burns. The flour needs to be suspended in the air in order to have the surface area for the reaction to be fast enough to cause it to explode.
My cleric keeps a bag of flower with him. I’ve used it in the following ways:
1) to quickly write out a message, kind of like an etch-a-sketch.
2) to detect drafts in an area to find a hidden passage.
3) scattered in a doorway to see anyone entered a room
Holes in the sack and the fact that Tabaxi have a special effect called feline agility that gives a burst of speed for one round and the fact that he covered 120ft in 6 seconds In an enclosed area I surmised enough dust to be in the area to set off. If anyone else had dashed in, it wouldn't have worked. It was the Tabaxi's speed that convinced me to allow it. Everything was set up prior to combat. They weren't in initiative because the goblins hadn't reached them but they knew the goblins were coming.
How I can think of using a Flour + Fire (yes, I'm running a light cleric) would be a similiar to rigging up a flash bang, (a 1x1x1 metal cube baked into a ceramic sphere with a finger size hole to touch othe cube. Cast "light" or etc and then toss it against a hard surface to break the sphere.
Having something that can be a makeshift flour delivery system that can cause dust to form (like a sphere full of flour exploding on impact) thrown during 1st movement, RAW should see it as object interaction, and is in the same category is changing weapon mid fight. If you move while you do it you do not use an action or a bonus action, so having it accessible:
- quick retrieve
- movement + launch at enemy
- while at the same time casting some sort of fire damage spell or even a cantrip?)
I'm going to try this in my next session, to see if I can crank up my fire damage spells for would could cost less for 2cp (1 lb of flour) and 2sp for an untrained hireling/2gp for trained hireling.
So i was reading a manga that I can tell was very heavily based on table-top RPG's when an very interesting scenario came up and i wonder exactly how many DM's would let this be a thing?
In the story they team is fighting something that looks very much like a beholder, except it fought using magic negation and heat rays (no clue how beholder's actually fight, only started the game recently). Now the tactic they used is that they cast something that made it go to sleep, then one of the characters took a bunch of wheat flour and spread it all over the air in the room, they then summoned a disposable creature and left it in the room, left the room, shot the monster with an arrow to wake it up and then sealed the room, they beholder-like monster saw the summoned creature, attacked it but because the room was full of the wheat flour that attack triggered a dust explosion which insta-killed the monster.
now i know obviously something make-shifted like this wouldn't one-shot a beholder and there are a ton of variables that have to be taken into consideration like how much wheat-flour was used, how small the room is, how humid/moist the room is, etc. but say as a DM your players tried something like this, how would play it out? would you let the dust explosion happen? if so how would the damage it does look like? i'm just a bit curious.
If the party manages to incapacitate / put to sleep the only enemy for a significant amount of time, then you might as well allow whatever silly hyjinx they come up with to insta-kill the enemy because they could just as easily tie it up / lock it in a broom cupboard / whatever to remove it as a hostile. Their "real" victory was to make the enemy helpless for an extended period of time, the rest is just flash.
Agreed. Taking out a beholder is no easy task - AC 18, 180 HP, anti magic cone, 9 different eye rays, fly/hover and more. Even using a L9 sleep spell to knock it out you would first have to bring it down to less than half its HP. As for the combustible powder bomb, to make it really worthwhile it needs to be really large and that is the problem- any bomb big enough to do more than 1-2 d6 damage is too big to throw or lug around - easier to bring a scroll of fireball and more effective. You would need to spread the powder widely, keep it suspended and then ignite it so a gust of wind spell and a produce flame spell linked to the breaking open of the container holding the powder (maybe with a magic mouth activating the spells?).
In medieval times, sappers would dig a tunnel under a castle wall and then suspend a table top for the ceiling by ropes. Then they would load the table up with loose flour and when the dust settled they would light candles under the ropes and run like hell. When the candles burned through the ropes the table would fall and the flour would go poof and get ignited by the candles. The explosion would frequently be strong enough to collapse a section of the castle wall. But it took a lot of flour.
Trap your target inside a room with the explosive dust thick on the floor. Insert an angry air elemental to really stir up that dust then either let the trapped creatures own open flame ignite the dust or toss in an open flame.
When the dust/air mixture reaches the explosive level it will ignite even if the flame is already in the room.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
So i was reading a manga that I can tell was very heavily based on table-top RPG's when an very interesting scenario came up and i wonder exactly how many DM's would let this be a thing?
In the story they team is fighting something that looks very much like a beholder, except it fought using magic negation and heat rays (no clue how beholder's actually fight, only started the game recently). Now the tactic they used is that they cast something that made it go to sleep, then one of the characters took a bunch of wheat flour and spread it all over the air in the room, they then summoned a disposable creature and left it in the room, left the room, shot the monster with an arrow to wake it up and then sealed the room, they beholder-like monster saw the summoned creature, attacked it but because the room was full of the wheat flour that attack triggered a dust explosion which insta-killed the monster.
now i know obviously something make-shifted like this wouldn't one-shot a beholder and there are a ton of variables that have to be taken into consideration like how much wheat-flour was used, how small the room is, how humid/moist the room is, etc. but say as a DM your players tried something like this, how would play it out? would you let the dust explosion happen? if so how would the damage it does look like? i'm just a bit curious.
for those interested here's the manga and the chapter.
http://fanfox.net/manga/goblin_slayer/v01/c026/2.html
In reality flour is very explosive, when in dust form.
Mills have historically have very makeshift roofs, so when they do explode the roof comes off and damages as little of the structure as possible.
This is an episode of Mr. Wizard's World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8t5iTunRkO4 explaining it.
Here is a youtube video of a corn bin collapsing, which then bursts into flames: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHaOpdEKr78
I have no idea how to adjudicate how many dice of damage to apply. As with any explosion the amount of combustable material as well with how contained the area is. See the Chunky Salsa Rule.
I'd probably short hand it to a fireball or Rule of Cool they find the the beholding dying from the wounds when they reenter the area.
I will always reward ingenuity, it may not always be the reward the players were expecting, but I will reward it none-the-less.
I had a player take a sleeping potion and use it as a suppository in one fight. Now it may not be the most realistic approach, but hey...it was a fantastic idea considering the situation they were in...The critter fell asleep, they party still couldn't kill it (damage immunities and all), but it ended the fight.
Maybe even 2 fireballs if you wanted to be generous and let them have the potential kill. I am more of a mind to use the "dying from wounds" approach though, it gives the scene a bit more impact imo.
I would put a dust explosion with the amount of flour used in that manga on par with a consumable like an upgraded alchemist fire, or a burning hands spell. I would not allow it to have comparable damage to a fireball. The sheer amount of combustible dust needed to do any significant amount of damage, let alone in such an open room to dispel the amount of pressure from the explosion? Dust explosions are terrible because of flying shrapnel and concussive force, not the flames, much like a grenade. Pressure won't make it easier to ignite the dust, but it makes the explosion stronger and deadlier. Just slamming closed room and dust together is a bit iffy if the actual closed room has secondary exits / air flow and is rather large. I mean, hells. The room they set the dust explosion off had a freaking mirror that was undamaged. If a dust explosion is enough to tear a gazer apart, then it should shatter a good portion of the room. Its not a shaped blast.
I would also require knowledge checks first. No using real world science without going through the DM first. If a DM doesn't like firearms or gunpowder explosions, and this is really close to that...
well that's why i said there are so many factors that could make this not work. I agree that maybe some kind of check could be made here but i have 2 rebuttals to your argument.
1) yes the mirror didn't shatter, but it's also a magical mirror, when their priest touched it her fingers even went through the thing, so i imagine that the mirror doesn't really have anything there to shatter in the first place
2) i don't know if i would qualify this too much as real world science, i mean yea it is based on the real world, but even before science was a huge thing humans have worked with flour for centuries, i'd imagine something like "keep flour in a contained space and don't light a fire while in there" would become a general knowledge thing, the guy in the manga even said he learned it from a coal miner whose knowledge comes more from "i learned this from experience" than "i learned this because scientists did tests and research on the effects of flour and combustion" or whatever.
i agree though that even i thought "i highly doubt that one small sack of flour would produce that big of an explosion" when i read the manga, but i'm more interested in the possibility of this happening in a game, like how many DM's for example could use this as a trap for their players where a room is just full of "some kind of dust" and using magical lighting like dancing lights in that room is ok, but bring a torch and suddenly you're constantly rolling to see if the dust suddenly catches to make the room kabloom.
or again maybe every person in the party carries a sack of flour (because yknow, you do that when you explore dungeons lol) and they come across a room full of tiny mob creatures, someone casts sleep and puts them to sleep, players then scatter a bunch of the flour in the air, leave the room, and then toss in a candle before closing the door, hell if you want we can add an extra measure and pour oil on the ground.
lol i wash just watching this anime Sean. i'm very interested and am tempting to make this as a cheap alternative to gun powder.
Doesn't work well for projectiles, the dust has to be combustible and distributed through the air in a cloud like form. If you're interested, check out mythbusters experiments with coffee creamer.
Mill fires and explosions were well known from the time that large flour mills were built. Conditions do have to be right to get a large explosion, a bag of flour is not an instant low tech hand grenade.
This is the sort of thing I would allow a clever character with the right background to try. They would need some in character reason to know about how flammable flour is. Connection to a baker or miller would certainly do it, alchemy might as well. An elvish ranger who never left the forests would have no reason to be aware of this though.
As for adjudicating the effects, fire damage seems appropriate. fireball for a large amount of flour dust in a large room, like a mill explosion. For a smaller room and a bag of flour, maybe Burning Hands.
To create a significant explosion requires a huge amount of dust in the air. A single bag of flour is unlikely to have any effect at all. Rule of cool I would allow it to add a small amount of damage, like oil (flask)
Had this come up in my last session. Tabaxi Cleric ran in and out with the flour sack open, Fighter nat 1'd throwing alchemist fire and dropped it on his foot, Tabaxi scooped up a bit of it off his boot and shot the arrow into the oncoming goblin horde. Lost my notes where i figured it at 6d4 and accidentally told him 4d6. Tabaxi rolled 20. None of the 12 goblins had higher than 7hp. only one made dex save dc15 for half. All 12 Goblins went Fwoosh! Party rolled to search them for treasure and rolled super low. Any coin burned up in the explosion. Party could have cared less about the treasure as they were still whooping and crowing over their victory! Great first half of the game.
PS discovered my notes after the fact fact and told the party I was keeping the scene as played due to rule of cool but next time they pull that stunt it'll be with the proper damage roll. Can't wait to see them try that with a troll! (evil DM laugh)
Coal dust, sugar dust, flour, even sawdust are all explosive if well distributed in the air. About the only dust not explosive is chalk dust. As to the amount you need that is another story. Really large explosions call for hundreds of pounds of dust but something like a fireball might only take 10 pounds in that 20’ r area. Somehow I don’t see characters running around often with 10 pound bags of dust. But a gust of wind spell over a pile of coal dust and then ignited might create a very dangerous explosion or line of fire.
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
I'd be willing to let PCs rig something like this up as a trap in a predetermined location, but it would take several minutes at least. It's not practical to try doing it in the middle of a fight.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Running in and out with a sack of flour open will make a line of flour on the ground with a little in the air. Getting enough in the air to create the sustained reaction necessary for a dust explosion would be nearly impossible during combat without magical assistance. It's a different matter if the party has significant time to set things up or the environment already contains the necessary dust.
When flour is clumped together it barely burns. The flour needs to be suspended in the air in order to have the surface area for the reaction to be fast enough to cause it to explode.
My cleric keeps a bag of flower with him. I’ve used it in the following ways:
1) to quickly write out a message, kind of like an etch-a-sketch.
2) to detect drafts in an area to find a hidden passage.
3) scattered in a doorway to see anyone entered a room
4)I will set a dust fire trap.
5) Pancakes
Holes in the sack and the fact that Tabaxi have a special effect called feline agility that gives a burst of speed for one round and the fact that he covered 120ft in 6 seconds In an enclosed area I surmised enough dust to be in the area to set off. If anyone else had dashed in, it wouldn't have worked. It was the Tabaxi's speed that convinced me to allow it. Everything was set up prior to combat. They weren't in initiative because the goblins hadn't reached them but they knew the goblins were coming.
How I can think of using a Flour + Fire (yes, I'm running a light cleric) would be a similiar to rigging up a flash bang, (a 1x1x1 metal cube baked into a ceramic sphere with a finger size hole to touch othe cube. Cast "light" or etc and then toss it against a hard surface to break the sphere.
Having something that can be a makeshift flour delivery system that can cause dust to form (like a sphere full of flour exploding on impact) thrown during 1st movement, RAW should see it as object interaction, and is in the same category is changing weapon mid fight. If you move while you do it you do not use an action or a bonus action, so having it accessible:
- quick retrieve
- movement + launch at enemy
- while at the same time casting some sort of fire damage spell or even a cantrip?)
I'm going to try this in my next session, to see if I can crank up my fire damage spells for would could cost less for 2cp (1 lb of flour) and 2sp for an untrained hireling/2gp for trained hireling.
Tools for easy reference
Rollable JOSN Generator for Rollable Tags (Credit to: MidniteOil21)
If the party manages to incapacitate / put to sleep the only enemy for a significant amount of time, then you might as well allow whatever silly hyjinx they come up with to insta-kill the enemy because they could just as easily tie it up / lock it in a broom cupboard / whatever to remove it as a hostile. Their "real" victory was to make the enemy helpless for an extended period of time, the rest is just flash.
Agreed. Taking out a beholder is no easy task - AC 18, 180 HP, anti magic cone, 9 different eye rays, fly/hover and more. Even using a L9 sleep spell to knock it out you would first have to bring it down to less than half its HP.
As for the combustible powder bomb, to make it really worthwhile it needs to be really large and that is the problem- any bomb big enough to do more than 1-2 d6 damage is too big to throw or lug around - easier to bring a scroll of fireball and more effective. You would need to spread the powder widely, keep it suspended and then ignite it so a gust of wind spell and a produce flame spell linked to the breaking open of the container holding the powder (maybe with a magic mouth activating the spells?).
Wisea$$ DM and Player since 1979.
In medieval times, sappers would dig a tunnel under a castle wall and then suspend a table top for the ceiling by ropes. Then they would load the table up with loose flour and when the dust settled they would light candles under the ropes and run like hell. When the candles burned through the ropes the table would fall and the flour would go poof and get ignited by the candles. The explosion would frequently be strong enough to collapse a section of the castle wall. But it took a lot of flour.
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB, & You
DDB CONTENT TROUBLESHOOTING
Trap your target inside a room with the explosive dust thick on the floor. Insert an angry air elemental to really stir up that dust then either let the trapped creatures own open flame ignite the dust or toss in an open flame.
When the dust/air mixture reaches the explosive level it will ignite even if the flame is already in the room.