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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4040008" data-attributes="member: 4937">The two questions are very different.  So different, that they need completely different answers.a) Yes, it really is less offensive than having the fighter die from falling off a horse, because the rules describe a universe where one is at least possible on a bad day, and the other simply never is.  That isn't to say that having the fighter lose a contest in which his only way of losing the contest was to roll 80 consecutive 1's (for instance) is a perfectly reasonable off stage scene for the described universe, but its ever so slightly more reasonable of an off stage scene than the one where the fighter falls off his horse under normal conditions and breaks his neck and dies.So, yes, in my opinion neither such a scene should ever be scripted by a good DM, or if the DM must have such scenes in his game, the DMs game would be improved by changing the rules to match the desired setting. This is not however nearly the same as saying that a 'critical horse-riding accident chart' is mandated.b) IMO, a 'critical horse-riding accident chart' is just bad rulesmithing .  It's the obvious solution to the problem.  It's the first sort of thing you'd come up with if you wanted to formalize the hazard.  But that way lies madness, and the best you can hope for is intentional comedy.  A chart like that does several things wrong.  One, in introduces probably unwelcome specificity into a generally abstract rules set.  No other injuries are specific, why should this one be?  Second, it attempts to solve only a single narrow instance of the general problem with a single specialized table without more general application that bears no resemblence to any of the other resolution systems in the game.  That's pretty typical of 1st edition design where the game is growing organically as DMs imagine and encounter scenarios and problems for the very first time, but we've got more experience now.  We ought to be able to do better, and save the over the top tables for nolstalgic humor games.  Thirdly, the designer doesn't really seem to understand what they want to accomplish.  What I think in the context of this thread what we want to accomplish with our new mechanics is actually pretty simple - we want to alter the universe such that every attack has some possibly remote but still real chance of killing anyone.  The whole 'falling off his horse' thing is just a specific example.  It's not the real problem.  The better solution in my opinion for a D&D game that once to increase the element of risk is to implement unbounded criticals in some fashion.  The simpliest system I can think of would be if you roll a '20' its a critical, and you can make an additional identical attack.  If that roll is also a '20', then you can make a third attack, and so forth.  Then you just tweak the rules such that every physical blow in treated as an attack.  In this fashion, there is a '1 in a million chance' falling off a horse will kill anyone, and we obtain the desired result without the need for a separate subsystem for everything, and without invalidating the rest of D&D's abstract system.This has pretty important narrative effects, in that it is an in game constraint on metagame behavior.  In default D&D, a high level player knows that his character can fall a certain distance without risk of death.  Thus, high level characters ran by players who've learned the system tend to act as if they can't die from falling off a cliff (or off a horse).  They act this way because in point of fact, they live in a universe where they can't die as the result of such events and thier players know that this is so.  A good player might pretend for the purposes of the scene that his character is in some risk if he has some reason to believe that the DM wants a narrative where this is true (in defiance of the explicit rules!), but even this strikes an unintentionally comic note because it has to be feigned.  Any fear is purely affectation, quite possibly in an attempt to get the DM to accept the character's purely metagamed proposition of jumping off a 90' cliff merely because of its tactical value.  But if a player knows that there is some finite risk of death no matter the size of the attack, they'll tend to play thier character more in a way that reflects this fact.  If your desire is stories in which the characters act as if falling off a 90' cliff is quite possibly hazardous, then you are better off adapting the game universe to reflect your goals.PS: Your longer post is extremely interesting, and I want to respond, I just need to actually get something done and I don't have time to do it justice.</blockquote>

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