Should you be able to cut a beholder's eyestalks off?

[keterys]

13th Age's Beholder actually does have rules for knocking out its eye rays when you roll well. I forget if it was 16+ or 18+ but we took out two of them when we fought one.

 

[RangerWickett]

Is there a reason for enemies to not use this against PCs? I worry that smart enemies would try to hack limbs off at levels well before PCs have access to magic to heal those injuries.

Sure, enemies would try to maim and mangle the PCs. And sure, there should be ways to heal such injuries. At low level, that might mean "Cleric, use a cure spell so the wizard stops bleeding. Rogue, go find his leg. I'll carry him, and hopefully the town priest can reattach it, or maybe he could enchant himself an animated wooden leg."

I'm not saying this stuff should happen often, though. And it would have to be a fairly integrated system, not something casually tacked on.

 

[N'raac]

Sure, enemies would try to maim and mangle the PCs. And sure, there should be ways to heal such injuries. At low level, that might mean "Cleric, use a cure spell so the wizard stops bleeding. Rogue, go find his leg. I'll carry him, and hopefully the town priest can reattach it, or maybe he could enchant himself an animated wooden leg."

I'm not saying this stuff should happen often, though. And it would have to be a fairly integrated system, not something casually tacked on.

Bolded for emphasis - therein lies the problem. If it is an effective tactic, why would the PC's not attempt it often? If it is difficult to impossible, why would they try at all? It seems like it would become much like Bull's Rush, Disarm, Trip, etc. - either the character is constructed around this and does it all the time, or it's never considered because, against opponents where it could make a real difference, the odds of success are too low.

 

[Kinak]

I'm talking about real life. When an actual piece of shrapnel flies at your arm faster than you can perceive it, do you get to choose whether to lose your arm or not? Of course not, and that illustrates why letting the player make that decision in-game is ridiculous.

You've drifted pretty far from the point here. I understand what you're saying, it just doesn't have any relevance to D&D.

We're talking about a game where PCs can dodge beams of light and mitigate (or, in some cases, completely avoid) lightning bolts. Whether you or I can dodge a piece of shrapnel has no bearing on that.

The question has nothing to do with real life. If the PCs in your game are too slow to respond to weapon attacks, absolutely don't use my suggestion. That would be silly.

But if the PCs are fast enough to respond to those attacks, there's no reason they wouldn't also be fast enough to handle called shots in that way. The fact that I can't dodge lightning bolts notwithstanding.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Should you be able to cut a beholder's eyestalks off?


short answer: no

long answer: Maybe, but only if you are willing to forgo Hitpoints an make this an arms race of called shots. I imagine if you could chop an eyes stalk you could chop a hand, and is there anyone that doesn't think "Called shot hand" is way more effective?


I remember back in the early days of 3.0 I was introduced to Deadlands, and it was much more 'realistic' about combat... or atleast that was one of the selling points. I made a gun slinger, and in our second fight decided to 'end' the fight early by making a called shot left knee... I blew the knee off, crippling the man... we quickly decided that was a bit of an issue, the the Marshal (DM for deadlands) ruled he could still shoot me... after all he still had his gun. Made sense, I could get shot in the head, the body, the knee and the arm each for 2 wounds... and be fine really

 

[TarionzCousin]

And, what are those rules, generally?

They aren't too different from what some people have described here: declare a special "combat maneuver," take a penalty to your to-hit roll, and if you succeed, you obtain a desired result.

Mearls spells out a system to calculate the penalty, and gives 13 PC sample maneuvers and 3 monster sample ones.

Below are links to a couple of useful reviews:

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/10/10864.phtml

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?121661-Book-of-Iron-Might

 

[The Human Target]

I'm talking about real life. When an actual piece of shrapnel flies at your arm faster than you can perceive it, do you get to choose whether to lose your arm or not? Of course not, and that illustrates why letting the player make that decision in-game is ridiculous.

Because D&D is such a simulation of reality.

 

[Al'Kelhar]

In general, called shots work at cross purposes to the abstract HP system. If you want hit locations and specific wounds as a regular feature of combat there are systems designed to handle it.

I'm not saying this stuff should happen often, though. And it would have to be a fairly integrated system, not something casually tacked on.

This. May as well have the "armour should provide damage reduction and we need a different system for avoiding hits" and "hit points should be replaced by a wounds/vitality point system" discussions at the same time

The D&D combat system originates in the Chainmail mass-combat system, and was never designed for fine-grained damage resolution. You want something like "I shoot the beholder in its telekinesis eyestalk", you want something other than the D&D combat system. IMO, it's virtually impossible to tack something onto the current system that doesn't end up either (a) replacing the system entirely; or (b) ending up as a rules nightmare.

Various iterations of the D&D rules have tried to incorporate location-specific damage and consequences, usually as optional rules, but IME they've been poorly executed.

Cheers, Al'Kelhar

 

[Stormonu]

In versions with increasing BAB, using called shots would probably be the best way to do this, with increasing penalties to hit for more extreme manuevers. Disarming someone might be a -2 or -4 penalty to hit. Cutting a tendon in the hand might be -6 to hit. Severing the hand might be a -8 penalty. Of course, I think the victim gaining a Fort or Reflex save against the attack would be appropriate; the difficulty might be 10 + penalty to hit (thus the disarm would be DC 12 or 14, cutting the tendon DC 16, and severing the hand DC 18).

In something like Next, where to-hit scales very little but damage tends to scale, it'd probably be better to use damage - maybe 2 points of damage per -1 penalty to hit from above (4 to 8 damage for a disarm, 12 damage to sever a tendon, 16 damage to sever the hand, etc.).

In a way, it does "give nice things to fighters" - in a way, they gain some special attack options that may be on par to some of the effects Wizards and Clerics can pull out with spells like Disintegrate, Finger of Death and other save or die spells. Especially if you can scale it so that the martial character can attempt/have similar chances of success as their spellcasting counterparts (and "times per day" factors into that as well, which may well mean stiffer attack/damage thresholds).

 

[jasper]

If a player wanted to make call shot to cut off a body part I would ask them if they really wanted those rules in the game since monsters would now be able to do that same thing.

Agreed. You want to make mincemeat of the monsters. The monsters will make mincemeat out of you. My group used to used the "good hits and bad misses" chart from Dragon #54(number maybe wrong). Until one night we had two dead pcs, one cripple, and one missing either an eye or arm. So called shots in general for D&D no. With the exception a special monster aka Beholder.