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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Joshua Randall" data-source="post: 9577197" data-attributes="member: 7737">Commentary:What are we here for, a tail spike or a quill? Those are not the same thing.And manticores don’t have quills. I sadly no longer own my 1e AD&D Monster Manual (more's the pity), but I'm assuming the creature didn't fundamentally change by 2e, where it's described with "a leonine torso and legs, batlike wings, a man's head, a tail tipped with iron spikes, and an appetite for human flesh." See? No quills.The manticore's special attack reiterates that it fires tail spikes, not quills.---We contemplate if the Magic Missile that we prepared for just such an emergency will be enough to handle the manticore.The manticore has 6+3 HD (hit dice). AD&D HD are 8-sided, so this is a HP spread of 9 to 51 hit points, with an average of 30 HP.Magic Missile does 1d4+1 damage per missile (average 2.5+1=3.5) and the magic-user gains an additional missile at every odd numbered level of experience.To kill an average 30 HP manticore, Carr would need to strike it with about 8.5 average Magic Missiles, rounded up to 9 because you can't hit with half a Magic Missile. (Duh!) That means Carr would need to be 17th level (9 magic missiles) to kill an average manticore with average Magic Missile.Or if we assume the most favorable possible Magic Missile damage, Carr would need exactly 6 of them to kill an average manticore, meaning he'd need to be 11th level.Or if we assume that the manticore rolled really poorly on its hit dice, it could have only 9 HP, and then Carr would need only 3 average Magic Missiles, meaning he'd need to be 5th level.Or if we assume that the manticore rolled really well on its hit dice, it could have the maximum 51 HP, and then Carr would need 14.6 average Magic Missiles, rounded up to 15, which means Carr would need to be 29th level.Or if we assume a manticore with only 9 HP, but Carr rolls only 2 damage on all Magic Missiles, then… you get the idea.So what level is Carr? Presumably not 29th. We do have some other clues as to Carr's level, namely the spells he has prepared for this adventure, but I will hold off on showing those until a more sensible part of the story. At which point I will revisit his expected Magic-Missile-versus-Manticore outcomes because that type of pedantry is highly entertaining.Bottom line: it's possible that a sufficiently high level Carr could kill a sufficiently average manticore with Magic Missiles. But given all the other spells available to a magic-user by that level, why the heck would Carr prepare a 1st-level spell?! Why would he prepare a random damage spell at all, which may or may not leave the manticore mortally-wounded-but-just-alive-enough-for-the-tail-spike-to-count, when he could have prepared an incapacitation spell that would be better suited for this situation?Oh, right: WIS 3.</blockquote>

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