Severing troll limbs

[Stormonu]

By usual D&D lore, it is true that trolls are uniquely able to have their limbs severed. It is a trait of the troll. Presumably, because they have no large value in keeping their limbs attached, anyway.

Pretty much the same I was thinking (and great story too).

Hack an arm off a human and he goes in the corner and cries before he bleeds out. That poor sucker is at -1 hit points or worse.

Hack an arm off a troll - eh, he's still got another and it can still scuttle after you. Hack that limb to pieces and he'll just grow another. The troll's just down a handful of hit points, that's why you can do this in-game to a troll.

 

[Manbearcat]

Here is the reason I think it might be controversial:


My question would be: why are only trolls - which are ostensibly very tough - vulnerable to being maimed on a crit. If I crit against a claw/claw monster that does not regenerate or have self-sustaining limbs, can I hack of its claw and therefore reduce its number of attacks? If a monster crits against my PC, am I maimed and in need of a Regeneration spell?

I'm a bit tired so the reasoning escapes me, but this reminds me of 3e's "Swallow" and "Escape from Swallow" rules mechanics. In order to provide the fun, genre-relevant, Gamist convention of being "Swallowed Whole" by sufficiently large creatures, while having this not be a "Save or Die" scenario, they allotted a mechanical oddity that allowed for them to "tip their cap" toward their Simulationist design inclinations (if you don't look to hard and peel back the layers of the onion and expose it for its poor simulation built under the auspices of Gamist intent). You could "cut your way out" of the creature's stomach, gizzard, etc...but you take acid damage and sometimes crushing damage each round. Once you've sufficiently hacked the creature's digestive system to pieces, you can then extricate yourself from the creature. Then, naturally (ok), the gizzard/stomach/digestive tract closes itself automatically through "sphincter-like muscular action" (uh, ok) and the creature doesn't bleed out or pass out through extreme loss of blood pressure.

So then. To review. You can attack a creature externally and its wounds to its soft tissue/etc don't close by way of "sphincter-like muscular action"...BUT, if you hack and hew its digestive tract from the inside, the raw wound will instantaneously evolve "sphincter-like muscular action" and close itself...kind of like regeneration in narrative spirit.

Why? For a fun, Gamist convention that isn't absurdly deadly through automatic SoD binary results...but to allow for this Gamist convention, you have to find a way that is sufficiently robust in explaining the Simulation of the Swallow and Escape from Digestive Tract...but this Simulatory explanation must consider the Gamist implications that it loads into the system - you can't allow PCs to (willfully) get swallowed only to pull an "Alien" and auto-kill the bad guys or incapacitate them so death is imminent.

I don't know. Something about this thread reminds me of that. I can't put my finger on it right now.

 

[F700]

If memory serves, didn't that article say a severed troll arm would have the same attack bonus as the troll? I don't see an arm on the ground being able to hit as well as an arm attached to an 8 foot brute that can swing it around and bob and weave.

I share the view that a crit on a troll represents what would be a killing blow on a non-troll, making the question "why cant I sever somthing else on a crit" null and void.

 

[pemerton]

I'm a bit tired so the reasoning escapes me, but this reminds me of 3e's "Swallow" and "Escape from Swallow" rules mechanics.

<snip>

Something about this thread reminds me of that. I can't put my finger on it right now.

Interesting comparison.

Hack an arm off a human and he goes in the corner and cries before he bleeds out. That poor sucker is at -1 hit points or worse.

Hack an arm off a troll - eh, he's still got another and it can still scuttle after you. Hack that limb to pieces and he'll just grow another. The troll's just down a handful of hit points, that's why you can do this in-game to a troll.

I share the view that a crit on a troll represents what would be a killing blow on a non-troll, making the question "why cant I sever somthing else on a crit" null and void.

So a crit means different things on different targets (and, mechanically, there is no way to do to a troll what you do to a normal creature on a crit).

And hit points means different things on different targets - so a trolls 6+3 HD (I'm working with the classic D&D numbers here) actually represent less meat than an ogre's 4+1 HD, even though the troll is taller and stronger (18/00 for the ogre, 19 for the troll).

And it's much easier to hack the head or arm of a troll than off (say) a bugbear (3-ish HD).

I don't necessarily object to any of this, but it seems a bit funny. If the troll is bigger than an ogre and twice as hard to kill maybe it should be more like 10 HD. Or maybe, at 6 HD, it should be closer in strength and stature to a bugbear.

Can't xp you, but nice story hour, there!

It still sounds dangerously "dissociated", to me, though...

Yes - how did the narrator lose an eye?!:

Aye, I fought The Render once, in me callow youth, when I thought I could take on anything. I'd cracked the defenses of some of the best warriors around, slain some goblins, thought I was slicker than gnome oil, I did! I thought the ol' troll would be easy. Might not even have to kill it, I thought, just wound it, send it running back to whatever crevice it crawled from. Aye, I was a right fool. I led that company to their deaths, and me to this missin' eye.

 

[Balesir]

Yes - how did the narrator lose an eye?!:

Oh, that's easy - he put out his own eye after seeing such gratuitous dissociationism!

 

[Li Shenron]

Sounds cool, but how do you play it?

How many hit points does an arm have? A leg? If you sever and damage them, how many HP does the troll have? If you damage the troll sufficiently, is it possible to sever an arm with no HP that can't attack on its own?

I too was afraid for a minutes that rules would be too complicated to handle this otherwise terrific scenario!

Then I thought... didn't we already have rules for splitting up some ooze? Those could be used as a background.

As a starting point I would consider the following:

- only limbs which attack matter: e.g. if the troll normally has 3 attacks/round (bite + 2 claws) then the head and the arms are the only limbs that actually matter for attacks; each of those 3 limbs "carry over" one attack when separated

- OTOH legs are those who matter most (but not only) for movement; don't make legs attack, but only the body with both legs maintain the full speed, a severed head or arm "crawls" at reduced speed (e.g. half), as does the body with a leg missing

- otherwise treat the severed (attacking) limb as a new separate creature which has all the same characteristics as the original troll with the exception of the following:
a) HP are split up (how many exactly should better be left up to the DM*, as long as the total is unchanged)
b) attacks are split up, i.e. a severed arm or head does 1 attack while the rest of the body (with two arms and no head, or with an arm and head) does 2 attacks
c) movement of each severed part is indipendent albeit with speed reduced as above, but for simplicity all have the same initiative as when they were one
d) spells still affect the troll as one creature (except area damaging spells)

*there really is no need for exact numbers! e.g. if the troll was already down from 80hp to 60hp, who can tell exactly which parts of its body got hurt?

I'm undecided whether regeneration should work separately for each part (simpler to handle but would make the troll more scary when severed) or collectively.

 

[Balesir]

It's a neat idea, and so easy to set up for a "special" troll in 4e (if it were every troll it would get stale, IMO):

- when the troll is bloodied it spawns a minion of the same level (the arm) that has regeneration just as the troll does (i.e. if you don't use fire or acid on it it comes back to life the turn after you kill it).

- the troll can, if adjacent to the arm, use a standard action to reattach the arm and regain one quarter of its hit points - the minion disappears in the process.

Use on an Elite troll - fun for all the family!

 

[D'karr]

5. Assemble into a a whole troll or partial as needed.

So trolls are the Mr. Potato Head of monsters... Interesting.

I guess that troll had packed his "angry eyes"





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