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Message: <blockquote data-quote="subrosas" data-source="post: 4845048" data-attributes="member: 24241">Why I started this weird argument about dead charactersThe advent of exception based rule design has resulted in people treating the *lack of an exception* interchangeably with actual explicitly stated rules. So an ochre jelly can be knocked prone, since it is not explicitly exempted from being knocked prone. Unlike Tide of Iron, Pressing Strike has no limits based on enemy size, so a halfling barbarian can use it to knock the primordial Mual Tar (gargantuan) around "at will".My point was that lack of an exception should not carry the same weight as a written rule. Perhaps the designers hoped the 4e paradigm of exception based design would allow them to avoid the legalistic 3e Define Everything trap, but in a burst of awe inspiring irony, we have entered bizarro-land where counter-intuitional interpretations of the rules are considered RAW based solely on the fact that the rules DO NOT define precisely how they function. I think that deconstructing the rules in this way leads primarily to confusion and weird (if sometimes funny) conclusions.The designers did not explicitly state that dead characters cannot be healed, so should we believe they can then be healed? If we say yes, then what if the character's hp rises above their negative bloodied total as a result? While no rules are given for what dead characters can (or cannot) do, there are rules for dying characters. And per RAW a character with negative hp over their [negative] bloodied total is clearly dying. Thus one more hp of healing and they would no longer be dying, but per RAW, also be conscious and above zero hit points. Yes, they would still be dead, but since dead isn't defined, we really can't assume what it means for the character. And since they are now conscious, we have lots of rules about neat things they can then do.Alternately, we can accept that the designers were human and that we cannot treat the silences of the rulebooks with the same seriousness as the places where they are explicit. We can then decide that Dead characters behave like dead people in the real world (with the exception that they sometimes come back through defined channels like Raise Dead). Lack of an exception can be seen as a necessary but not in itself sufficient reason to accept a particular conclusion: for instance whether dying characters are also bloodied. Lack of an exception here means that it is likely that the dying character is bloodied, but not conclusive in the same way as if the rule book said something like "once below zero hit points but above their negative bloodied amount a character is both bloodied and dying." Now maybe you find the idea that dying characters are bloodied obvious and common sense - I guarantee that there are many out here who disagree with you. Your or my particular sense of what is logical or realistic do not make lack of an exception the same as RAW.</blockquote>

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