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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4033566" data-attributes="member: 47776">You find existing rules that model something similar to the effect you're looking for.  More importantly, you should note when you try to do something the game system is not designed to do.You want a character to die from falling off a horse? He's not high-level.  You want a character to Call a high-HD outsider? He is high level.  You want a character that takes feats that require you to be high level to take? He's high level.Strangely enough, both not falling from a horse without some bastard Disintegrating it out from under you and surviving when someone does so and you happen to be rounding the corner over a 200-foot drop are both tasks requiring high-level knighting.  If this character can survive the 200-foot drop a million times (assuming he's healed each time), why should we assume that he might break his neck on the millionth-and-first, from 10 feet?There is a difference between supplementing the rules, and ignoring them.  There are not explicit rules for long-distance climbing; inferring some from the way short-distance climbing works is a good idea.  This is the kind of thing that DM's should do.  Hurrah.This is completely different than inferring something contradicted by the rules in other cases.    There exist rules for falling from horses, or calling up powerful outsiders and losing control of them; the events proposed do not refine the existing rules, but ignore them, in both spirit and letter.Well, yes.  You've been pretty free with terms of art in the D&D rule-set.  Note that an item's price, in D&D, is an absolute and inherent property of the item, totally independent of what any individual might be willing to pay for it.  This property affects how much XP you must spend to make an item, how much you get back when an artificer claims the item's essence, and so forth.  Changing these around is a big deal, because price in D&D works differently than in reality.Ever tried to run a narrative in which one player assumed entirely different genre conventions than everyone else, and due to no actual standards in reality, no one could prove their point?  (Hint: look at any alignment thread, ever.)The rules exist to provide a common framework between all present, so that it's understood that the world works a certain way, and that when the world does not work this way, it's a big deal and meaningful of something.OK.  Assume that you have an enraged midget (or myself) in your games.  We have discussed with you your changes to the rules, found them to be ass, and have decided to ignore them and assume that the high-level fighter was actually a low-level wizard's apprentice and that the wizard's apprentice was actually a high-level caster in disguise.  We reject, in and out of game, your assertion that ignoring the rules in this case makes the game better.  What now?*shrugs* That depends.  Can our characters kill the blackguard on his nightmare mount by causing him to fall similarly?  If random chance can position the high-level knight to die in a means that bypasses his hit points, can our wizard do the same with a telekinesis spell?If the answer is "Yes, you can; here are a detailed suite of rules for what conditions naturally produce risk of catastrophic falls, and here is the absolute upper limit on the damage from said falls.", then bliss and hurrah; you have extrapolated the existing rules to a new and interesting place, and there will be candy and flowers for all.  If not, however, and the reason the NPC happened to fall and break his neck was that you as DM wanted it to happen and didn't care enough to make it happen in a manner consistent with the game world as written, then yes, I'd get the distinct impression that when reality contradicted the DM's plan for events, reality would lose, and I would have no reason to assume that this applied to me any more than it would any NPC, when it came to crunch time.So now we have Heisen-NPCs, who have a chance of their wave-form collapsing into an alternate reality state when not observed by a PC?Well...OK, we can run with this.  I suppose that as a character in such a universe, I'd get a 24-7 form of remote viewing on anyone I cared about, to prevent them from accidentally tripping and dying.In the game world, it can be experimentally confirmed that certain forms of injury are not life-threatening to some people, because those people are just that badass.  If you do not want this to be the case, gut the HP system and make new rules more in line with what you want.  (The damage save from M&Mm or True20 is one such excellent alternative.) But don't try to claim that something is realistic when every other facet of the game world being simulated says it isn't.  ...Yeah, I'm going to go with the cogent and consise reply from up-thread: nuh-uh.  If he's a 15th level cleric, he's a 15th level cleric all the time.  That's not to say he can't die from a stab wound; if he is helpless and the prostitute performs a CdG, and he fails a Fort save that ranges from DC 12 to DC 20 or so (call her a full-bodied prostitute), then he can die.  But if he is not either forcibly restrained or otherwise totally incapable of responding, then if he's a 15th-level cleric, than he can't die from a single stab wound.See, that's the most annoying thing about your assertions.  It is possible, within the constraint of the rules, to produce the situations you want.  However, rather than accept the necessary subtleties to make your scenarios work (such as the cleric was asleep when he was knifed), you just assert stuff.  And asserting something contrary to expected knowledge of the universe without case is just plain bad storytelling, be it in a game or in a narrative."He's dead? Oh, well.  Let's just rip the knowledge out of the living brain of the apprentice, then.  Free fighter feats for all!"Yeah.  Wrap rules around it and see what happens.Look, you can honestly decide that "Hey, the fighter feat tree is neat, but kind of restrictive.  I think I'll include a way to increase your effective fighter level, and a method to grant other characters a boost to effective fighter level, then watch as my players discover this, learn it, and the monk founds the Glorious Hero Fighting School, that blends the best of the monk and fighter talent trees.That would be good DMing.  It's not the breaking the rules that's a problem; it's the ignoring what the rules mean.  Rules mean that things happening in contravention to them require explanation.</blockquote>

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