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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8267163" data-attributes="member: 29398">Which all sounds good until you stop and realize just how much of the world's best art, music, etc. has been put out by people who had yet to be exposed to any "guidelines" and just did what they did because nobody had told them it couldn't (or shouldn't) be done.Thanks for the explanation.  I never did Pathfinder at all, hence my unfamiliarity with Spheres.Well, the rules somewhat enforce damage limits.  That said, I do have in my games a crit-hit system that can on the odd occasion produce stupendous amounts of damage.  Over the years I can think of maybe five occasions where a weapon attack went off for over 100 points of damage, always from stacking multipliers (e.g. if a sword does double damage vs giants and you roll a triple-damage critical, you add up your damage plus bonuses and then multiply the result by six).Yes, extreme results from the ends of the bell curve can and do happen on occasion.  I'm fine with this.Not sure how-why the players are shackled by any of this.  As for 2 and 3: if the system generally, vaguely, kinda sorta tells me what to expect that's all I want from it; I can worry about the rest myself.  If it told me exactly what to expect things would get boring in a real hurry.Hit points are only as much of an abstraction as you want them to be.  In my case, particularly for most monsters, they're a direct reflection of how tough the thing is (i.e. they're almost all "meat" points) relative to everything else in the setting, including others of its own kind.  It's only when you get to people with adventuring classes (PC, NPC, whoever) that the whole luck-fatigue-nicks bit comes in; and we've dealt with that by use of a body points-fatigue points system.Armour class is simply a numerical way of reflecting how hard something is to hit and can nearly always be directly explained by what the characters see in the fiction.Turning these things into amorphous abstractions such that a creature in the setting has different intrinsic toughness or defenses based only on who-what it is facing violates setting integrity and the setting's internal reality.No, pretending that the game world is and has its own reality is the end goal.  The abstracted numbers just help translate it for us.Unrelated issue, and a problem across all editions.  It's somewhat fixable, but as those fixes aren't all that character-friendly they don't gain much traction when presented.That's not just the ogre's hit point numbers telling you that.  Unless you've got a heavy-duty crit-hit system the game rules for damage by weapon or spell are also telling you that, regardless whether you're using them against an ogre or a rat or your party's annoying Bard.Within the limits of the game rules the players/PCs can do what they like anyway.  I'm not sure what you're getting at here.Because that's what the numbers are for: to numerically describe this individual creature in complete independence of anything else. Just the same as a PC's character sheet: all those numbers on it are there to reflect what that individual creature is and-or is capable of.Nobody.  What you said, though - or at least, how I read it - came across as the lock's challenge being variable such that it would challenge whoever faced it.So you're asking for two sets of numbers for each creature, then: one to define it within the setting and another to define it only with regards to the PCs.  That seems like complete overkill when the first set - the physically-defining set - are already enough.Yes.  They're locked in.Agreed, which is why for characters and other levelled entities some sort of body-fatigue or wound-vitality system is IMO the only way to go.As for a ten-ton lizard getting off the ground, two things: you're dealing with a setting that has an additional type of energy (that being magic) from what we're used to; and if a 747 can get off the ground I've no problem with a dragon! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Sorry, but I build neither my game nor my settings around the PCs to that extent.  Sure the PCs are the focus of play at the table, but the setting is bigger than just them and I'd rather they fit into the setting than have the setting morph itself to fit them.Long experience has taught me that while individual characters can be easy to kill, parties as a whole are shockingly resilient things; and it only takes one survivor to keep the party going.If you're using 3e-4e-5e style d20 initiative with all the modifiers then yes, it's a pain (and also makes high Dex far too advantageous).  We use an unmodified d6 for each attack/action, with ties and simultaniety allowed.I'm assuming situations where those sort of tactics have already been proven as unviable options. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />But yes, flooding out the caves rather than going in and fighting everything is the obvious thing to do if you can...unless there's treasure in there that liquid can damage e.g. artwork, scrolls, books, etc....</blockquote>

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