D&D 5E (2024) Is 5E better because of Crawford and Perkins leaving?

[Maxperson]

To make this work a single stab from a dagger needs to be able to kill a 20th level PC and it needs to be able to kill them in a statistically significant fashion.

If it can't kill you then there is no logical reason to fear it.

Yep. And if your 20th level PC stands there and lets someone stab him, he will probably die.

IRL I am not terribly afraid of being stung by a yellow jacket and that is probably comparable to what a 20th level PC probably feels from someone shoving a dagger into his chest. Do it 50 times or so in a minute and I might just die from being stung, just like that 20th level PC might just die from 50 stab wounds.

This is false, since hit points =/= meat. It would only be true if hit points were entirely meat and skill, luck, etc. played no part in them. Instead, the overwhelming majority of hit points are not meat, which is why you barely get anything more than scratched until you reach 0 hit points, and you don't even get touched by the attacks until 50% hit points.

Also hit points are an abstraction and your thematic description of what hit points represent (luck, skill, blessings) is fine, but it is one of many possible thematic explanations.

Not according to 5e RAW. 5.5e does not contradict that.

I could just as easily say hit points are due to thicker skin and more robust or even multiple organs offering combat redundancy and that "explanation" is every bit as valid as yours.

Not according to 5e RAW.

 

[Lanefan]

To make this work a single stab from a dagger needs to be able to kill a 20th level PC and it needs to be able to kill them in a statistically significant fashion.

To make it work, certain attacks need to be able to bypass hit points and go direct to some other effect. Example: slitting the throat of a defenseless humanoid-ish target with a sharp implement should kill it outright even if the target's otherwise at full hit points, regardless of how many hit points "full" might be.

IRL I am not terribly afraid of being stung by a yellow jacket and that is probably comparable to what a 20th level PC probably feels from someone shoving a dagger into his chest.

Where a yellowjacket stinging me probably means a trip to the hospital; not from physical damage but from an effect (severe allergy) that bypasses any hit points I might have at the time.

 

[CreamCloud0]

To make it work, certain attacks need to be able to bypass hit points and go direct to some other effect. Example: slitting the throat of a defenseless humanoid-ish target with a sharp implement should kill it outright even if the target's otherwise at full hit points, regardless of how many hit points "full" might be.

Where a yellowjacket stinging me probably means a trip to the hospital; not from physical damage but from an effect (severe allergy) that bypasses any hit points I might have at the time.

i feel like all characters, PC or NPC ought to start out with like, 12~HP and that should be the baseline for truly 'defence bypassing' attacks, enough to take one hit from most any basic weapon once(without additional modifier damage) but enough to fall to two to three or a crit, maybe you get +1 HP to that undefended pool for each level up but it's never going to be as huge a safety net as your regular HP.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

MUD's where the first MMO's, Everquest started development in 1996, Runescape, and the first ever graphical MMO Neverwinter Nights...which was literally D&D online from 1991-1997

You were hardly the first one to come up with the basic idea of MMO's lol.

Again, that was my POINT. I was trying to illustrate that it wasn't so sophisticated a concept that there was no way that they could have thought of it. I was NOT patting myself on the back for being clever.

Zeesh, you've all been a tough crowd here.

I thought it was a pretty basic concept: D&D had everything it needed (both TSR and WotC) to be huge in the Video Game world (though I would argue other media as well). Many things that were shockingly successful were directly inspired by D&D.

It obviously didn't happen that way, and I simply suggest that it could have if D&D had been more correctly managed.

I'm more than done defending that idea.