Editing Peasant Railgun (section)

==No Fun Allowed==
Counterarguments telling people they can't do this, and mentions of "but in real life" go here.

If your DM is paying attention and bothered reading the Dungeon Master Guide (right where it says Simultaneous Activity on pg. 24 and Adjudicating the Ready Action on pg. 25-26) they will know that 6 seconds is nowhere near enough to reach the end of the line and if you're not in combat, ready action can't be used. Reading the Player's Handbook (Special Initiative Actions) would also stop the railgun: readied actions happen ''before'' the action that triggered them, and this automatically disqualifies "pass an object to the next person in line" being a legal readied action, much less chaining it infinitely. 

They can also tell you the rules on readying actions dictate none of the peasants are ready to catch the pole, meaning they're going to drop the pole right at the start. Even if they do manage to pass it forward there's one other problem: an improvised thrown weapon has  -4 to-hit, -4 to-hit for using a 2h weapon with 1h, and -2 per range increment, and impossible to throw beyond 50ft.  Even if you had the implied momentum, the final peasant would have trouble hitting a stationary barrel. And ultimately the damage of a thrown weapon isn't related to how far it travels or its speed, so the DM could just rule you invented a fancy way to transport a 1d3 damage stick across the countryside.

If your DM has ever read a physics textbook, or has the physics knowledge of an 8 year old, the projectile would shatter under the strain and [[Grimdark|the recoil would vaporize the peasants]].  [[Gauss|20th-century railguns]] need to be rebuilt after every third shot, and they're made of stronger stuff than 0-level NPCs.

Excusing all of the above objections, and assuming everything that makes this work, you still have the following completely systematic objection: a readied action doesn't let you automatically do something you would be incapable of doing. Once the projectile's velocity reached 80+ miles per hour, the next peasant in line would be incapable of catching it. This would cause the peasant to drop the projectile and all other readied actions to pass the projectile along would be lost. Even if you think the peasant could catch an 80 mph projectile, what about one moving at 200 mph, or 500 mph? Eventually you WILL reach a point where a peasant could not reasonably catch the speeding projectile, and that point is well before mach 1.5

Building on the "a readied action doesn't let you automatically do something you would be incapable of doing" argument, the DM could rule that, since under normal circumstances the peasants would be unable to move the pole more than 10 to 30 feet in six seconds, that's how far the pole travels in one round and the remaining readied actions are wasted.  Building on the idea that the peasants would be unable to catch and pass forward fast-moving projectiles, the DM could call for skill or ability checks from the peasants, with escalating penalties based on how fast the pole is currently moving.  These being peasants, one would fail a check almost immediately and the remaining readied actions would be wasted, with the pole having traveled almost no distance at all.

Also, the DM can rule that it works up to a point. The Peasant Railgun does in fact get the pole to the last peasant... who then makes a standard non-proficient attack with an improvised thrown weapon at a 1st-level commoner's base attack bonus.

Another argument comes from the railgun's selective use of rules logic and real-world logic. The rules don't specify anything about objects gaining momentum as they're passed from one person to the next, and physics don't allow the peasants to pass the object that quickly. By RAW, you have an ordinary throw from an ordinary peasant with extra hassle; by physics, you have an ordinary throw from an ordinary peasant with extra hassle, after waiting an hour for the peasant to receive thrle object. The only way this can work is if rules logic is maintained until just after the throw, then physics notices that the object just moved two miles in six seconds and decides it must have broken the sound barrier.

===Peasant Railgun in Warhammer 40k===

The concept of a Peasant Railgun has always been known to the Tau, who hoard every railgun in the galaxy. However, being the pussies of the 40k galaxy, with such notions as dignity and all that like, they are horrified at the idea. The Imperium, on the other hand, not being such moral joes and having a near inexhaustible supply of citizens to hurl at the enemy, are eyeing the idea with great interest...