The "That's Unrealistic!" Retort Compendium

[Dannyalcatraz]

However, if your opponent is so huge that you can't even reach it's face and simply the weight alone can kill you, it gets more complicated.

Then you go for hamstrings & gonads...and if you thought ahead (and aren't planning on eating your foe), you're using poison.

If you REALLY know your target, you may even maximize your odds of success by finding out if a particular toxin will be more effective. Consider my maternal aunt- one bee sting and she's on her way to the hospital.

(And, FWIW, that's a size differential greater than Halflings & Giants.)

 

[DumbPaladin]

Never once did reporting bullying help me out, and in some of the most egregious cases, it was carried out right in front of a teacher and still nothing was done.

/threadjack

It definitely depends on where you live (big city vs. small city, blue state vs. red state) and how you do it. I got my bully thrown off my bus (so he now had to find another way to school), put into intensive counseling with the school shrink, and removed from the only class I shared with him. Oh, and his mother had to leave work to come deal with it, and she was incredibly pissed off.

So I think I pretty much kicked his ass without ever laying a finger on him.

But, on with the cool videos of people shooting 5 arrows in one D&D round.

 

[AllisterH]

*Technically*...in 3e, small humanoids could NOT sneak attack size Large or bigger creatures...

Taken from the d20 SRD under the Sneak attack via the Rogue description

"The rogue must be able to see the target well enough to pick out a vital spot and must be able to reach such a spot. A rogue cannot sneak attack while striking a creature with concealment or striking the limbs of a creature whose vitals are beyond reach."

Now...how many people actually PLAYED by that rule...(PF actually has the same rules as well....)

 

[Saeviomagy]

However, if your opponent is so huge that you can't even reach it's face and simply the weight alone can kill you, it gets more complicated.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2ZW0EvMzSM]YouTube - Lions attack elephant - Planet Earth - BBC[/ame]

Lions hunt an elephant.

Length of a lion claw? Up to ~5 inches. Teeth are a mere 2 inches.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Despite having spines, bones, joints, and sometimes organs, the undead do not typically have true weak spots. Their forms are not held together or animated by muscle & sinew, but magic. You could dip some undead in acid, destroying all their flesh and it wouldn't slow them down; some would even have it reappear. Their organs- if they have any- are essentially non-functional, so stabbing them makes no difference. Even the legendary heart of the vampire is not so much a vital organ as the anchor of some kind of unholy magic- it is disupted not from any old stab, but only by a blow delivered by a wooden stake. In some legends, the wood had to be of a specific kind, typically ash, hawthorn or oak. That's not a vital organ, that's disrupting magic.

The problem here is that you've just made undead literally unkillable. You can't ever do damage to them because they'll never be dead. They'll just always come back.

I'm going to jump to the assumption that most people do not play with un-killable undead ;p

Constructs vary a bit too, but like undead, most have no true vital spots. With the exception of the flesh variety, golems have no joints to strike- they are constructed as non-articulated statuary. Their limbs bend only and entirely through magic. They have no skeleton, no musculature, no organs.

A thousand engineers just cried.

Everything has a "spine." If it stands on its own, it has a main support structure.

Clockwork critters may actually have vital spots- they do at least have joints- but beyond that, they are probably built with many redundancies. Then there's still that animated by magic issue. Is the magic merely a power source that substitutes for the hand and winding key? Or is the frame of the clockwork being akin to the body of an undead creature, the physical manifestation and receptacle for powerful magics which must disrupted before physical attacks have any meaningful effect?

Again, you're either hitting the golem problem where it nonetheless has a support system, or the undead problem where it's literally unkillable.

 

[Jon_Dahl]

YouTube - Lions attack elephant - Planet Earth - BBC

Lions hunt an elephant.

Length of a lion claw? Up to ~5 inches. Teeth are a mere 2 inches.

Well I was more like thinking 1 vs. 1-combat or giant vs. humanoid-combat where both combatants are aware of each other as you can see from my video. If you want to take in account multiple opponents, quadrupeds and other physical qualities, things change dramatically.

My point was really to point out that halfling and humans don't just stand around and have a fencing match with giants. If you want to add poison, animals, surprise element, panicking, multiple creatures or something like this, I have no comment except that it all depends really on the circumstances.

 

[turnip]

Lions hunt an elephant.

Length of a lion claw? Up to ~5 inches. Teeth are a mere 2 inches.

To be fair, this is pretty unusual behavior. As far as I know, this only occurs with the Savuti lions of Botswana. A full 2/3 of elephants killed were juveniles aged 4-15, which makes them weaned (and thus not under the direct protection of their mother) but not yet fully grown, and all kills were made at night.
Furthermore, an adult lion weighs on average 124 kg for a female and 188 kg for a male, and has substantially greater musculature than a human. The elephants were first brought to their knees by weighing them down, and tiring them, then dispatched when they were down (ha...similar to a 4e coup de grâce).

Not exactly a good argument for a halfling vs. a giant or dinosaur or something. Hell, remember in The Land Before Time when they put out Sharptooth's eye? He just got more pissed.

Joubert, D. 2006. Hunting behaviour of lions (Panthera leo) on elephants (Loxodonta africana) in the Chobe National Park, Botswana. African Journal of Evolution 44:279-281.

Power, J., S. Compion. 2009. Lion predation on elephants in the Savuti, Chobe National Park, Botswana. African Zoology 44:36-44.

 

[billd91]

*Technically*...in 3e, small humanoids could NOT sneak attack size Large or bigger creatures...

Taken from the d20 SRD under the Sneak attack via the Rogue description

"The rogue must be able to see the target well enough to pick out a vital spot and must be able to reach such a spot. A rogue cannot sneak attack while striking a creature with concealment or striking the limbs of a creature whose vitals are beyond reach."

Now...how many people actually PLAYED by that rule...(PF actually has the same rules as well....)

*Technically* it doesn't say that small creatures can't sneak attack large creatures at all, just that some kind of vital must be within reach. Most large creatures aren't necessarily tall. Quadrupeds still have a lot of vitals at small reach even though they are large (or even huge). And considering vital arteries are in the limbs of most creatures (femoral arteries, for example), that hardly puts vitals out of reach.

 

[Aberzanzorax]

Which "realism" we talking about here?

For different RPGs I have different standards of "realism".

For D&D, I imagine any fantasy or historical adventure movie as well as martial arts movies. If it can happen for "real" in those movies, it can in my game.

For Chthulu, for the investigators anyway, I'm thinking movies more like detective movies or noir.


And what about when the players aren't human? How do you judge the upper limits of, say, elf or halfling abilities? After all, the most dextrous human is less dextrous than the most dextrous elf.

I judge games of Vampire using, you guessed it, vampire movies.



Because what we're comparing is not what characters can do versus the real world and physics. What we're comparing is what characters can do in one entertainment medium to other entertainment media.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The problem here is that you've just made undead literally unkillable. You can't ever do damage to them because they'll never be dead. They'll just always come back.

I'm going to jump to the assumption that most people do not play with un-killable undead ;p

No, not unkillable- except things like vampires or liches- just that there is no one spot more important to the undead's survival than any other spot, so there is no damage bonus to hitting them here or there. You just keep hitting them until they stop moving.

A thousand engineers just cried.

Everything has a "spine." If it stands on its own, it has a main support structure.

Every real living thing has a spine, yes. Solid undifferntiated pieces of matter have centers of mass which some people compare to a spine.

You can't backstab a column of stone. If you apply enough force to exceed it's ability to resist shear, it will snap in half. But this is done by applying massive amounts of force to it over time...not by chipping at it. If you're chipping away at the column, it doesn't matter where you strike- as long as you strike the same spot, you'll make it through at the same rate you would anywhere else on the column.

And that is what most golems are- undifferentiated, solid matter- animated by magic. They are not articulated like action figures; they have no joints; they have no internal frame, just solid matter. They are animated statues. The same magic that animates them also keeps their jointless bodies from disintegrating due to structural fatigue.

Again, you're either hitting the golem problem where it nonetheless has a support system, or the undead problem where it's literally unkillable.

No, you just keep swinging until it stops coming for you.