D&D's Dungeon Master's Guide 2024 has finally had enough, passive-aggressively denouncing peasant railroad guns, capitalist artificers and weaponised bags rat

I've just finished putting together my thoughts on the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide 2024. This was one of the most important areas where the system could be improved, and they've done an adequate job with what they've got. One entry made me laugh out loud, though: "Players exploiting the rules."

Now, don't get me wrong. The entire entry is a wise piece of advice. TTRPGs, in general, are less about the rules and more about having fun. The loophole-driven exploits, broken builds, and other ideas that you see floating around the top of forums, are just interesting thought exercises and can be thrown out if the table is not into it.

This entry calls out a number of infamous player shenanigans. Robin Valentine, a TTRPG enthusiast and fellow PC Gamer author, has actually shown some of these in this list of ridiculously broken builds. The infamous peasant-railgun and the vaunted tactic "just have a rat bag on you" are two examples.

The peasant's railgun, for example, uses the "ready" button to send a spear through the hands of 1,000 peasants in a single round. It travels at an absurdly fast speed, in just six seconds. The "bag of rat" uses vermin or chickens to trigger abilities.

The funny part is that while it clearly targets these specific examples, it does it with the airiness of a passive-aggressive tweet from your friend. Here's an entry on "rules don't apply to physics"

"The rules are not meant to describe laws of physics, even in D&D's worlds, let alone in the real world. They are only intended to provide a fun gaming experience." Don't allow players to argue that a bucket-brigade of people can accelerate a sword to light speed if they all use the Ready action to hand the spear to the person next in line. The Ready action is a tool to facilitate heroic action, not to define the physical limits of what can be done in a 6-second round of combat.

This paragraph is sassy. Usually, rulebooks are neutral. "A bucket brigade" is a particularly spicy phrase. Perkins, go! Since I know you love drama, here is the section about the bag of rats: "Some rules only apply during combat or when a character acts in Initiative order." Do not let players attack one another or helpless creatures in order to activate these rules.

It depends on the circumstances, but I personally think it's cool to let players attack each other. The warlock and barbarian exchanging a knowing glance before the former draws the blood from the latter’s abundant sack of hitpoints can be an awesome (and dare i say romantically charged) moment. The "helpless creatures thing" is definitely an attempt to put an end to the bag of rats nonsense. Wizards is not judging every possible edge-case, but this is advice for novice DMs.

I also like the sentence "The Game Is Not an Economy" which says: "The rules of this game are not intended to model a real economy and players who exploit the rules by looking for loopholes in order to generate infinite wealth through spell combinations are exploiting them." We're not going to turn the campaign into a sci fi capitalism simulator just because you found a way to provide infinite energy. Go to the dungeon that I created for you and die as a good soldier.

The rulebook ends this section with the advice: "Outlining these principals can help keep players' exploits in check." If a player is persistently trying to bend the rules of the games, you should have a discussion with them outside the game to ask them to stop. I don't think they will, knowing the type of players that try to do the peasant-railgun thing or create nuclear fissions in Faerun.