Do ranged attacks break the hit point mechanic?

[Olive]

if firearms are giving you problems in d20M, you could always lower the Massive Damage Threshold. but then everything gets more dangerous.

Or you could just have the massive damage threshold lower for ranged attacks than for melee ones.

Why is the idea of being grazed by an arrow so hard to imagine anyway? I once met a girl who had been shot in the neck almost but an assult rifle. She had a big scar, but the bullet ahd just grazed her. it's possible for things to almost hit after all.

 

[Emerald]

If there's a problem with D&D it's more that it's _impossible_ to kill the hero with the crossbow bolt, not that it probably won't kill him.

I agree with this statement. I remember my first D&D game and I was a rogue and we were infiltrating a guard tower. One guard got away to sound the alarm and I ran to the window and fired a shot at the guard that was running away. (My thought being "I will bring him down so he can't sound the alarm") Unfortunatly even with a critical one shot could not do enough damage to kill him.

 

[d4]

Why is the idea of being grazed by an arrow so hard to imagine anyway? I once met a girl who had been shot in the neck almost but an assult rifle. She had a big scar, but the bullet ahd just grazed her. it's possible for things to almost hit after all.

for another anecdotal story, George Orwell recounts in Homage to Catalonia how during the Spanish Civil War he got shot in the neck. not only did he survive, but he even managed to recover the use of his voice.

One of [the doctors] told me with an air of authority that the bullet had missed the artery by 'about a millimetre'... No one I met at this time--doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients--failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

 

[Darklone]

Well, full plate, large shield and DEX 13 gives AC 21 - 1st level warriors might _still_ only hit on a 20! I find that 'low fantasy' settings actually require tougher mooks as well as less magic-heavy heroes - ie veteran guards need to be 5th level warriors rather than 1st, to threaten even a magic-less Fighter PC.

Right. As for the scaling of weapon damage: They already increased it. In 3rd for the first time I saw dudes and dudettes with Xbows.

As for the low magic campaigns: Yes, my mooks range to level 6, officers to level 9. Without more than one occasional magic item here and there (usually potions). And I love to drown my PCs in mooks.

It's a good idead to decrease their CR by two or three then.

The hitpoints: There are various houserules floating around that use wound points and stuff... IIRC all damage is treated as subdual damage till you reach the negs, then it's wound damage, critical hits are wounds at once and you are dead at -(con) wounds. Spontaneous healing in that case is not allowed.

 

[Endur]

Boot Hill was a decent system. In every gun fight, your character could fear for his life.

Of course, the big difference between the Mooks and the PCs in boot hill tended to be accuracy and speed on the draw. In a fair fight, the PCs tended to draw first and hit first. Even if the PCs didn't kill the target (and most shots weren't fatal), their hit was probably enough to completely ruin the bad guy's chance of successfully shooting the PC.

Then in round 2, they shoot the NPC again (if he's still trying to fight), and then the NPC is dead.

If I remember right, Boot Hill didn't use hp per level. Instead, your constitution was pretty much all you had. So low level and high level characters had basically the same hit points. Difference was accuracy, bravery, and speed on the draw.

 

[s/LaSH]

In the campaign that I run, you can realistically expect to see heroes with six arrows in their chest, their plate mail torn to ribbons by monsters that do that sort of thing, and have the heroes still fighting bravely.

I put it down to positive energy saturation. Y'see, by the time you've leveled a little, you've probably been healed a lot by clerics; or if you haven't, you're pumping magic through your body or having someone else do it nearby. And there's a mystical buildup. Basically, your body has become used to positive energy, and figured out how to generate it (or retain it from the surroundings) on a cellular level. So when you get a sword through the neck, your body goes, "Ooh, better spend a little PE and make the flesh tougher, or reroute some veins around the impact site, or...". So instead of decapitation, you take 6 of 80hp damage, the sword barely breaks the skin, and you don't bleed to death. And arrows and bullets practically bounce off, or lodge in subcutaneous fat, or impact on magical bone which absorbs most of the impact.

At the same time, positive energy is required in larger and larger amounts to actually heal wounds rather than reduce them, because your body's become more adept at distributing the energy away from those wounds. Which is why you have spells that heal a bajillion times more damage than normal humans could ever take - they're not for normal humans. They're for adventurers.

Now, a key part of this argument is the fact that PCs become larger than life, magical beings that can do the utterly impossible. But how many of them are going to be human even in the beginning? I shouldn't think that'd matter much.

Other'n that, I'd go VP/WP if I didn't want to stick to traditional D&D.