Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6261569" data-attributes="member: 17106">Well, if he jumps a hundred times and his average is 25 feet, I'd say his bonus is around +15. Level is a more sophisticated story, but I imagine this character is well aware that he's significantly better than when he started.It's not a given that characters in a fantasy world even know what a "foot" is since standardized measurements are a fairly modern concept. More practically, I think the character would simply have a good idea of how far he can jump, and a sense of how that's changed over time. If his Jump modifier started at +0 and is now +10, he's probably aware that all his training has resulted in him roughly doubling his average jump distance. If he's staring at a chasm that would require him to roll a 10 to clear based on his modifier, he probably knows he has roughly a 50% chance of making it cleanly.Well, if I was really sadistic, I'd stab it using a very small weapon until it died (presumably restraining it very well). Then I'd get another hundred horses and repeat. I'd quickly get a pretty good idea of how many hits a horse can take. Thus "hit points".As twisted as that is, it isn't all that different from actual animal research. LD50 for drugs is basically determined by doing this to rats. Determining the hit points of a person is probably not going to happen ethically, but again, if you're running d20 Modern that's probably part of what Josef Mengele and Shiro Ishii were doing. In a fantasy setting, I wouldn't put it past some really evil necromancer to experiment on people to find out how tough they are.Taking out the experiment part, if I was someone who was around horses in combat a lot, I'd be paying attention to how long it took them to die. Could I give you an exact number of hit points? Probably not. But I'd have a rough idea of how much damage most horses seem to be able to handle. I'd probably be aware that it's roughly three times as tough as a decent sized dog, or that it's half as tough as my friend Ragnar the barbarian who scares the crap out of the commoners.Did I claim that? I don't recall doing so and it doesn't seem all that pertinent. But isn't that the whole point? What happens "on-screen" as it were is basically determined by the DM; the rules are more useful in allowing us to understand how the world works in general, most of which has nothing to do with the players or their actions. The d20 system is what your characters are doing when you're not playing them. It's what their ancestors were doing. It's what mermaids are doing under the waves.I suppose you could say immersion comes from the sense of knowing that the cleric you see for your healing spells has a pretty good idea of how much damage you have just by looking at you and how much his spells will cure from experience. The cleric surely is aware that his cure light wounds will heal a commoner from the brink of death, but will barely produce any noticeable effect on the wounds of a seasoned warrior. If he doesn't know these things, then that's going to beg some questions. He probably wouldn't know the exact numbers, but then a lot of what we do cognitively is about doing complex math that we aren't consciously aware of.</blockquote>

Verification