Again, if you think that 200' fall are lethal, you must make your game inherently coherent and make acid, fire, poison, giant's club hits and so on lethal too.
I do and will when the situation supports it. Sipping an unknown potion to find that it's poison - spit it out and take HP damage. Chugging the entire vial, even upon realizing it's poison. Sorry chum.
Getting hit with a giant's club in the midst of chaotic combat - HP damage due to the many extraneous factors. Hit by a giant's club while completely helpless and nothing threatening or distracting the giant - smoosh.
How many rounds should this "regular person" resist?
No real idea, but maybe a minute or two, so 10-20 rounds. Fire is by no means a quick killer, and it's the smoke that usually does you in.
How many of them have taken hundreds of lethal hits and survived?
By claiming the hit is lethal by default means they don't survive. I can't speak for anything specific, as I could probably spend hours finding stories of horrific attacks and accidents where the victim should all rights be stone-cold dead but manage to survive. Likewise, I'm sure there are stories of people taking what would hardly amount to being a bruise and ending up dying. The body is an amazing engine sometime, but it does have amazingly fragile weak points too.
Does this mean that PCs never suffer a good hit?
What about their opponent's critical hits?
To me, critical hits are the good hits, and they usually hurt quite a lot, if not outright incapacitate/kill.
I'm not advocating a completely realistic system, I realize that D&D and most role-playing in general is on a heroic footing, and the PCs are the protagonists (usually). 4E seems to emulate most action movie heroes, and I'm totally cool with that, I like the feel and the fun that engenders.
Because it's common sense, and by rights, PCs should be akin to real people and think like them? Even if you are of epic stature, a PC should still know that they are a meaty bag of mostly water that will likely burst on impact after a 200' fall.
Here, let me put things into context. To me, D&D plays a lot like the movie Die Hard. McClane is a fairly experienced cop, so has a few levels under his belt. He's confident, brash, and willing to take on a mob of terrorists with automatic weapons on his own with nothing but a pistol. He gets into a lot of fights, taking a lot of hits and damage (as evidenced by multiple bleeding wounds), but still keeps going. So, we have HP and healing surges in action.
At one point, he's barefoot and looking at broken glass on the floor. He doesn't just shrug and walk across it, knowing that it's only a few HP damage. There is general concern, but it's either that or be killed (despite it being only a couple of machine guns firing at him, which a player would think "Ah, I can take that").
And at one point he's on the roof, looking down, and rather than jumping down, he takes precautions, because in a real person's head, the fall should be by all rights lethal. He's not even confident that the hose will save him in any way, but it's better than that modern day fireball coming at him (which as a 4E PC, he would likely be able to survive).
So even in an over-the-top action movie, where the hero takes an incredible amount of punishment, we still have him thinking 'realistically' about potential hazards. This is how it should be in game, but because we as players know the rules and damage potentials, we often act in ways that would make no sense to the people living in the actual game world. If the game presented lethal concepts in the core rules, it would lead to players thinking more realistically.
In real life no one would ever face a Trex, but in D&D a high level character can easily defeat it alone, and would know it.
Right, because we don't have T-Rexs. But people have faced down wild predators before, even actively gone out to hunt them. I would 100% bet you that if we still had T-Rexs around, there would be people hunting them (a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless).
The reason a high level PC knows they can defeat a T-Rex alone is because the player understands how the game works, has an understanding of levels and escalating defenses and damage potentials. In the game reality, the PC should have a knowledge of their abilities and skills, but even a lower level T-Rex should still be a concern, even if the PC grits their teeth and faces down the challenge.
If a high level PC get threatened by a dozen country bandits armed with crossbows he would never acquiesce to their demands, because he would know that he can single handendly defeat all of them in a bunch of rounds.
Which, like Elf Witch, is one of the things I really don't like about level based games. It ends up encouraging such meta-game considerations. And because of this, it starts begging the question as to why there are even armies kept. Going just by stats, you're right, a high level character would annihilate an army of level 1 recruits, even if they number in the thousands. If that's the game you like, please enjoy. To me, that's all but incomprehensible.
And indeed, I did adjudicat a situation like this. Back in 2E, with a Paladin in plate armour facing off against a den of kobolds. By the rules, the kobolds couldn't hit the paladin, but they had numbers, and at one point had the paladin overrun and pulled down by a swarm of them. Sure, he killed some, but I played the scene as it seemed realistic to me.
And how do you handle this scenario in game?
But what if the boulder's thrower hits with a critical hit, and the PCs failed his spot/listen/perception/whatever check?
The only real way the game offers to handle such things is by GM fiat. If a character's to die, then they flat out die. But that's rather unenjoyable. So, we go with the natural hazard, and the boulder falls, and we see how hard people are hit by it. All covered by 4E hazard to hit rolls, damage rolls, and the abstractness of HP.
I would actually be inclined to assign injuries, though the game gives no real rules on how to handle such. But a critical hit does not mean it's a lethal hit. So the character takes max damage, and maybe they managed to react at the last second to roll some with the hit to not get pasted.
I can't see how acid, fire, and so many other things could differentiate the damage between a wall and a barbarian.
Not to mention that luck isn't something related to living beings.
Acid, fire, etc. don't differentiate at all. It's that the Barbarian can react to the situation. An Alien spits at the wall with acid, the wall sits there and takes it, and only the potency of the acid matters. An Alien spits at a Barbarian, who manages to duck in time and only take some splash damage to his shoulder.
And certainly, luck doesn't only apply to PCs. It's only that in stories and games, the heroes usually have rather a bit more of it than say a wall in house #3.
24/7?
24/7?
You live in a wonderful world.
I think you're going a bit overboard with the 24/7. No adventuring party can keep on going without rest or breaks. If you're meaning 'ready at a moment's notice', then yes, even in the real world. Fire Fighters and Police respond 24/7. Military soldiers respond 24/7. Sure, they're not facing dragons and T-Rexs, because they are not part of our current modern world. But they respond to the threats and hazards that are there.
And no, I wouldn't say it's a perfectly wonderful world, seeing as we need the above. But it is good to think that there are people willing to put themselves in harms way for the sake of others, much like Adventurers do in D&D.
