Players be like
I feel like there might be an issue where the volume of each individual elephant is so much greater than each individual fly that you won’t just be pachybombarding one BBEG, but the entire area, including where the players are standing.
Honestly now that you mention it, yeah, a few hundred elephants growing in the same spot almost instantly would accelerate the outer ones to a very high speed. It’d probably end up being more like a wet, chunky mini-nuke.
This sounds like the peasant rail gun with extra steps.
More like a peasant nuke
With fewer steps even.
For the “do the locusts consent?” question, I’m a fan of an oracle die.
I’ve been paying Cyberpunk RED recently, so I get the player to roll a d10 under their current LUCK stat. If they roll under, then they’re in luck and they get what they want.
For funsies, I’d say that succeeding indicates the locusts are a gestalt entity that is down for anything. In the context of the campaign, the party will encounter a gestalt locust swarm that wants something from the party.
Elephants are huge, not large. However, an entire swarm of horses would have a comparable effect.
@Leate_Wonceslace@lemmy.dbzer0.com uh i got an idea
A modern iteration on a classic. Word of advice, never eat a grape that you know was a hill giant two combat rounds ago.
I don’t really know d&d well, but I just looked up the spell and I think it says you can transform “any number of willing creatures”. So the DM could make an argument about whether insects had the intelligence to even qualify as being able to be “willing” for that.
On the other hand, I am a big fan of Operation Dumbo Drop Multistrike
https://www.dndbeyond.com/spells/1995-animal-shapes
Another problem might be that animal shapes only has a range of 30 ft
30 ft range, requires willing creatures, targets can become large or smaller (elephants are huge)…
Fine fuck horse storm it is
Brown Bear Barrage.
Or Giant Scorpion Tsunami if you want maximum pants-shitting potential.
(I could only find one CR4 large beast, the giant coral snake from Curse of Strahd, but no good spell title came to mind.)
Pachyderm MIRV?
And it’s an 8th level spell, which I think is close to the pinnacle of what a spellcaster can achieve in Dungeons and Dragons.
Depends on the edition. If Epic Magic is in play, 9th level spells are just the beginning. However, it gets stupidly easy to kill yourself by casting something that you really shouldn’t have tried to cast.