What's the Best Way to Pull Down a Castle Using Minionmancy and Rope?

[unseenmage]

Just like the title says.

And by best I mean lowest level and cheapest so Repeating Magic Trap spam and Epic Spellcasting need not apply.
(Though I suppose seeing the math for those for comparison couldn't hurt.)

Edit:
Which minionmancy is best suited? Can be pulled off the cheapest/earliest?
How many minions would it take? Do we use their drag carry capacity?

What constitutes a castle? (I know PF has straight stats for this at least.)

How much rope would.it take? Would chain be required instead?

How best to anchor our ropes?

Edit Again:
This query is like the XKCD What If (http://what-if.xkcd.com/) webcomic more than anything.

[Vizzerdrix]

Dig under the walls and corners, then burn the tunnel supports.

[unseenmage]

Dig under the walls and corners, then burn the tunnel supports.
That's not what I meant at all, lol.

I mean literally to pull the walls down after attaching lots of rope to them which is manned by many many minions.

[Vizzerdrix]

Are the walls attended? If so then you will have slim to no chance without getting your own units to take controle of a section first.

If you must though, a series of "A" frames linked by ropes could give you more leverage. You will alao want to set anchor points into the wall going down.

For the main structure, enough people doing this on supports and load berring walls should be good enough. You may have to kick in a few walls so your pullers and crews have a straight line to the supports. Bends in your pill pines are no good.

[frogglesmash]

Do the tunnel thing, but use rope to pull the supports down instead of fire.

[Celestia]

Literally impossible. No matter how many people you bring, they will all die long before you pull down a single wall. You will need to take control of the castle first, and once you do, there's no reason to destroy it anymore. Even if you still want to (for whatever reason), there are far better ways. There is a very good reason that this "tactic" was never used in real life: it's stupid.

[unseenmage]

Literally impossible. No matter how many people you bring, they will all die long before you pull down a single wall. You will need to take control of the castle first, and once you do, there's no reason to destroy it anymore. Even if you still want to (for whatever reason), there are far better ways. There is a very good reason that this "tactic" was never used in real life: it's stupid.
Never said it was a tactic, nor that it was smart.

Just curious about mechanically the how.

Thanks for your negative opinion of my post though.


Not sure why folk keep assuming the castle is occupied.
Sometimes you just want to 'tear down the wall' such as it were.

[Celestia]

Never said it was a tactic, nor that it was smart.

Just curious about mechanically the how.

Thanks for your negative opinion of my post though.


Not sure why folk keep assuming the castle is occupied.
Sometimes you just want to 'tear down the wall' such as it were.
As I said, if you have control of the castle, there are far better ways to take down a wall. Castle walls are around 20 feet thick of solid stone. That's not getting torn down by a rope. The best you're going to do is mess up the crenellation a bit.

[unseenmage]

This query is like the XKCD What If (http://what-if.xkcd.com/) webcomic more than anything.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Never said it was a tactic, nor that it was smart.

Just curious about mechanically the how.

Thanks for your negative opinion of my post though.


Not sure why folk keep assuming the castle is occupied.
Sometimes you just want to 'tear down the wall' such as it were.

Get as many of the strongest (X) you can find, anchor the ropes all across the wall, anchor as many pulleys as you can lay hands on to the wall and a line on the ground as far from the wall as it is tall, thread the rope through the pulleys and have your (X) pull with all their might.

Mechanically, call it the mother of all strength checks with a great horkin' heap of aid another and circumstance bonuses for the extra people and pulley systems. (X) can be just about anything you like.

[Eotyrannus]

Okay, so first let's figure out how thick the castle walls are. (Using d20pfsrd because convenience.)

Let's assume that, to break something with a rope, you must first get a rope that has a higher break DC than the wall itself. The best is bloodvine rope, with DC30 to break. A real-life castle has a minimum of about 7ft, but the thickest wall available is hewn stone, which is...

...three feet of stone with a break DC of 50. So, err, that's not going to work even with a wall weaker than that of a castle.

So no, you cannot literally pull down a section of castle wall with rope regardless of how hard you try- the rope would break first, as it has a lower break DC, and changing material is specifically noted to not affect break DC.

And it's not like you can just hit a stone wall with a rope until it breaks, right?

...Right?

How to break a stone wall with one commoner of average strength and a rope

Step 0: Find yourself a castle wall. For our purposes we'll assume it's 4200ft long and 10ft thick (plucked from a quick google on 'medieval castle size' and a convenient rounding of also-plucked-from-google 7ft).

Step 1: Know your foe. Let's treat a 10ft-thick by 5ft-wide by irrelevant height as Large- according to the Damaging Objects rules, this is an object with 1800 hit points, a hardness of 8 and an AC of 1. For convenience, we'll assume it's also immune to critical hits.

Step 2: Know your allies. We'll take Leadership to get our Lv1 Commoner who will follow us to the ends of the earth... or, as it may be, to this wall we want him to destroy. His name is Robby The Ropey because that's adorable.

Step 3: Train him in your ways. Spend 50gp to retrain Robby's feats to Equipment Trick (Rope).

Step 4: Create the ultimate weapon. Since we're level 7, we'll be a wizard with Create Magic Arms and Armour, Exotic Weapon Proficiency (Spiked Chain) and Leadership. It will take 1gp of rope (because convenience), 300gp to make it a Masterwork Rope, and 8000gp to make it a +1 Training Hemp Rope. One this step is done, tie an arbitrary number of knots in it. If you do not do this, you will fail.

Step 5: Robby the Ropey now treats the rope as a 2d4+1 Bludgeoning weapon. He can now damage the wall, at a rate of 1 damage per 96 seconds, or 300 damage per 8-hour working day.

Step 6: Watch the wall crumble before your awesome might. As a 4200ft-long wall has 840 5ft sections, it takes him 4200 days for the wall to crumble- or 11-and-a-half years.

Cost of Time: 4210 days of both your own and another man's life irreparably wasted.
Cost of Gold: 8351 gp.
Cost to Sanity: You've driven poor Robby insane from mind-numbing tedium. You were already crazy for attempting it.
Result: Nothing of value. I hope you're happy.

[Venger]

Never said it was a tactic, nor that it was smart.

Just curious about mechanically the how.

Thanks for your negative opinion of my post though.


Not sure why folk keep assuming the castle is occupied.
Sometimes you just want to 'tear down the wall' such as it were.

Great attitude


This query is like the XKCD What If (http://what-if.xkcd.com/) webcomic more than anything.
if you like xkcd, then you should know by now communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness (https://xkcd.com/169/)

People assume it's occupied because you didn't say it wasn't, and there's no reason you'd want to destroy a castle that didn't have people inside it you wanted to kill. If it's unoccupied, as mentioned, there are easier ways to destroy it.

But to appeal to your interest in vaguely physics-related concepts:

assuming you can be flexible on the nature of "rope" and use one made of osmium

have a hulking hurler minion. have a lasso of colossal or larger size through the use of size magic of your choice alongside things such as sizing weapon, strongarm bracers, etc

lasso the castle. cinch it tight

tie the other end of the lasso to your osmium yoyo

hurl the osmium yoyo into the sun

the castle is uprooted and destroyed

the castle has been destroyed via the use of minions and rope

[unseenmage]

Great attitude
I thought so.



if you like xkcd, then you should know by now communicating badly and then acting smug when you're misunderstood is not cleverness (https://xkcd.com/169/)
Clearly a capitol offense.
Which I've been intentionally guilty of but not since I was like twelve.



People assume it's occupied because you didn't say it wasn't, and there's no reason you'd want to destroy a castle that didn't have people inside it you wanted to kill. If it's unoccupied, as mentioned, there are easier ways to destroy it.

...

On one hand that's fair enough, guess I should have clarified in advance predicting this particular misunderstanding before it happened.

On the other 'because it doesn't say otherwise' is munchkin-fu for intentionally misinterpreting text 'round these parts.

[RoboEmperor]

I've been using an ungodly amount of unseen crafters to craft my animated objects. With extend spell you can really have a ludicrous number of them. Only 2 strength each though but Aid Another has no limit and carry weight increases exponentially instead of linearly with added strength.

[Malroth]

Well if you were to assume that additional fully manned ropes would count as Aiding the first one without changing the ropes break DC.

1st rope would have 1 commoner taking 10, Plus 9 additional commoners aiding him for a total str dc of 28, 2 shy of the 30 needed to break the bloodvine rope.
each additional fully manned rope would add +2 to this check allowing 11 additional ropes of 9 men each to finally reach the dc 50 needed to pull down the wall.

Total cost needed.
2400 gp of rope
24000 gp worth of mirthral grappling hooks


3.24 GP worth of food for the hirelings
10.8 GP worth of daily hireling wages
OR
Leadership score of 23+

vs
280gp spell casting services of a 7th lv cleric to cast a 4th lv spell
3000gp extended service from a medium earth elemntal to excavate the foundation.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Plan B*

Hire or attract a bard as a hireling/ cohort or summon a lillend and have it play a lyre of building with instruction to intentionally over-build the top of the wall in a way that is structurally unsound to make the wall collapse under the new weight.

Right, rope. Tie the lyre to the minion so he won't drop it. (?)

*"B" is for bard :smalltongue:

[frogglesmash]

Take control of some high level casters, get them to PaO sections of the wall into rope.