Player wants to carry one of these around

>player wants to carry one of these around

Don't see a problem if they've got the strength for it.

I'd be more concerned with their size. If they're a giant then sure, have a big-ass ballista as your crossbow.

If the character is a little girl though you better have a high animu tolerance.

Let them deal with the logistics of carrying it, but more importantly let them use it when given a chance.

They've got portable houses because of magic. An instant fortification or artillery emplacement isn't too out of the ordinary. Just enchant the relevant piece of siege equipment with a shrinking spell and give it the ability to toggle between big and small as needed.

Or just mount the thing to a cart or wagon.

If little girls can lift stuf as big as that in your setting and you dislike anime I think you chose the wrong setting.

This looks like a medium ballista, so this would take you far over your max encumbrance (we use a good OSR system, not pound-by-pound). You'll want one of the wheeled versions, and siege equipment moves much slower than adventurers do. You'll need to find space for the ammunition too.

Even so, it'll be slow going unless you can get a crew of artillerists to load and operate it. Somewhere to the tune of "10 rounds to load and aim, 1 round to fire". If you have a total of four operators, that goes down to 5 rounds reload. But when you do successfully fire it and pass your attack roll, it's 3d6 to each creature in a 200ft line.

But yeah, you can totally get one.
>inb4 player sulking because he can't carry heavy siege equipment on his shoulder while moving at full speed and firing it every single round

You'd probably want a light repeating ballista, which would only take up almost all of your encumbrance, is meant for use against creatures, does 1d10, and is slightly less of a bitch to reload (still requires artillerists though). I'd have make you set it down before firing too.

My last character could probably use that (he could lift around 2 tons easily without penalties or anything), but barbs in 5e are focused on melee str weapons so I don't thing it would be that useful for me.

Shrink it, use it as a regular crossbow.
At a certain command word, the arrows grow to their original size.

Not to be "no fun allowed", but I'd recommend maintaining the law of conservation of momentum when it comes to projectiles changing their mass mid-flight, if nothing else than for game balance reasons.

Been there done that, dude wound up buying a sack of infinite heavy quarrels for it.
Dude in question was 9'4", 840 lbs and could regularly lift five tons without breaking a sweat.
He also wound up sniping dragons with it.

if the idiot is strong enough to carry and fire it without breaking his arms, then fine.

my group made one of these built and designed using rare and powerful materials by some of the best craftsmen artisans and smiths in the northern realms hopefully it will kill the dragons of the north

what, that's all? half of my party dual wields those things, get good scrub

It seems based on the idea of the flintlock cannonball, but that suffers the same problem.

Ideally, you'd have the projectiles able to be enchanted themselves, but it's costly and hard to find the right materials even with the money put into it. So instead of a super destructive weapon, you have a few deadly shots on a modified normal weapon. They'd function more like underslung grenade launchers, rockets, or hand grenades for players, a few hard-hitting and destructive shots but not much beyond that.

If the game can handle a few explosive shots every once and awhile, it's fine to let them have it, but just limited as very powerful spells might be.

Lifting something and using it effectively as a weapon are completely different things. I could pick up a 35 pound dumbbell in one hand, but I couldn't swing it at you in a fight and expect it to do much other than make me look like an idiot. I'd probably have a very hard time trying to point it at anything either.

There are good reasons why most weapons IRL have been relatively light. Even the heaviest spears and crossbows have been 18 pounds.

If I were ruling it, I'd probably say that a character could effectively wield objects up to 5% of his encumbrance limit, or 10% for something closely resembling a weapon, while anything greater would be either unusable or impose a heavy penalty.

I once had a character that insisted on bringing a pair of catapults everywhere. Proper little siege train. Useless, frankly, so I never picked up the habit again. There are easier ways to launch the bard for scouting trips.

>tfw wanted to be an artificer type who, instead of murderhoboing for extra equipment, invented the concept of RISes and would just put more and more accessories on my basic equipment (I wanted a bow but would have been open to other ranged weapons)

GM vetoed it because he said I'd lag behind the rest of the party if I tried, because putting +1s on things is more expensive and harder to do than just getting the better thing

10% of 2 tons is 200 kg, and I don't think that ballista weighs more than that.

>I'd probably say that a character could effectively wield objects up to 5% of his encumbrance limit
That user said that he could lift 2 tons easily, without penalites or anything, so I don't think 2 tons are even his encumbrance limit.

>user's PC could use it
That's fine by me. I just like having a consistent rule to determine what can and cannot be lifted, or at least a rule-of-thumb. It gives the players a little more confidence in what they can do, and gives them chances to surprise me.

>hey GM you said I can use anything within 10% of my encumbrance limit if it looks like a weapon, right?
>...right
>how much does that ballista weigh?
>[one rule lookup later]
>[user's super buff giant barbarian running around with a ballista]
>notevenmad.jpg

What anime?

>Tenser's Floating Disk
>Rope Trick
Problem solved, you could even use the rope to create a couple pulleys to auto-load it.