Rules for ordinary becoming extraordinary

[Edena_of_Neith]

The olympic record for the dead lift is, what, 600 pounds?
And yet a young woman once lifted the front end of a car off her child (that being over 1,000 pounds.)

You know that if you stay outside all night in the cold without protection, you'll freeze to death.
Yet the Tibetian monks sat outside in sub-zero conditions naked, all night, and they were unharmed.

One might be slow and sluggish, when lifting a glass of pepsi to take a drink from.
However, if one's hand contacted something extremely hot, one would jerk away incredibly quickly.

An awful lot of people are overcome by cancer and other diseases.
There are cases of people who survived and overcame cancer and other diseases, simply because they believed they would, or vowed to fight back (and many, who did this, and died anyways, unfortunately.)

In other words, there are examples of people with average Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution performing feats of strength, speed, and endurance worthy of someone with a 20 in those stats.
What it takes are the right conditions to cause the mind to react and grant extraordinary strength, speed, or endurance, and these are typically life-threatening conditions, conditions common in D&D.

Perhaps we should have rules to cover this?
Perhaps Feats could be obtained to cover this, since in real life some people can attain great bodily control?

If I have a 10 strength (average) and some monster charges up to kill me, I'll not be fighting with ordinary strength. My body will sacrifice everything else for survival, and I'll be fighting with adrenal strength ... more like a strength of 20. Every joint and ligament in my body may be torn afterwards, but I'll still - hopefully - be alive.

Now, how do we enable this for the PC?

 

[Quartz]

Are you familiar with the Hero System concept of Pushing?

You know what? The Barbarian's Rage class feature models this quite nicely. But it should be NPC only - PCs should be presumed to be like the Tibetan monks and be trained to use their bodies to their limits.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

Also in real life there are extreme, life threatening circumstances where people freeze in terror, piss their pants, run in fear (though much faster than they otherwise would) etcetera.
These I would argue, are much more common than what you've listed.
D&D doesn't model these well either except when fighting monsters with the frightful pressence ability.

 

[llamatron2000]

.....isn't this the purpose of rolling a d20? God knows it's a huge randomizer at the lower end.