NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="maddman75" data-source="post: 488682" data-attributes="member: 2673">You don't seem to properly understand hit points (the reason the 13th level fighter can take a dozen crossbow bolts and just keep going).He has the skill based on his experience in combat to turn serious blows into less serious ones.  That is, when the crossbows fire, he twists a bit, steps to the side, and the bolt that was heading for his heart hits his shoulder.  The one headed for his throat grazes his ear.  This is instinctual and happens even when he is suprised.If he is helpless and a weapon is thrust directly in his chest, that is what we call a coup de grace.Imagine that everyone only gets the HP they have at first level.  Then they get a damage reduction (something commonly bandied about by "gritty" game fans) that reduces all his damage by a certain percentage.  Our thirteenth level fighter is so good he reduces his damage to 1/10 the original value.  So even a critical hit for 20 only does 2 points to this veteran.This is mathematically equal to a character having 100 hit points (chosen to keep the math easy <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=":)" /> ) only you don't have to do long division every time you get hit.For the question at hand, I'm of the opinion that viability of the character is most important.  Everyone should have something that they are really good at.  This depends on the campaign.  In a H&S dungeon crawl, the influence focused bard is going to feel pretty useless.  In an urban political campaign, the barbarian with the greataxe is going to feel pretty ineffectual.</blockquote>

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