Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="bramadan" data-source="post: 4218603" data-attributes="member: 1064">Fighting through being stabbed or successfully hit by a mace or being slashed by a saber is at best a rare exception. Claiming that most of those will, unless deflected by armor or dogged (both of which are separate mechanics in DnD) incapacitate any even remotely human-like creature is by no means ludicrous, it is common sense.There are *cases* of humans taking wounds and functioning - but those are exceptions - notable and in some instances heroic exceptions. If you ask any martial arts instructor, or for that matter a cop: expected reaction to being severely injured - with a knife, bullet or a heavy blunt object is incapacitation. Most exceptions that we hear about are actually consequence of the very modern high-velocity weapons, but even with those in greatest majority of cases if you get hit with a lethal weapon you are almost certainly down.reasons they fail casual realism test is that HP system is not particularly realistic. There are recorded instances of people falling from extreme heights and suffering little or no injury, but most often - falling results in injury that is at least temporarily incapacitating, much as most often being stabbed with a knife results in injury that is at least temporarily incapacitating.That is question of taste. I do not think that DnD would particularly benefit from the "incapacitation table" on which to roll when an NPC drops to 0HP, but it is easy thing to add if you think it would. Previous edition rules were at least as ambiguous as to what happens to 0HP opponents so you can not claim this is something particular to the 4th.You can not have it both ways, either something is potentially lethal or it is not. If people are upset about the world in which bee-sting or a fist blow can be incapacitating then it makes sense to assume that in their campaign those things will not be incapacitating. For the purposes of this text I assume the healthy, strong individuals - not the elderly who fill in the "died from the fall in the shower" statistics. Burly guy (Orc) can exchange fist blows for a while but will go down very fast if guns or knifes are pulled out. And yes, I have been both hit with fist and stabbed with a knife... difference is *significant*, even with the stab being very deliberately "non-lethal".I grant that there are exceptions - but fact is that one hit by a lethal weapon will take most people out of the fight most of the time. Disagreeing with that fact is not a question of mental state - it is a question of a basic ignorance as to how weapons (and human physiology) work. There are probably even thousands of such recorded incidents, but they come out of the pool of millions of instances where people were incapacitated after suffering a blunt or penetrating trauma. Those incidents are *recorded* exactly due to their exceptional nature.Entire fighting styles are predicated on the idea that one hit will incapacitate trained opponent, most sword fighting techniques, from small-sword to kendo, make no sense if you do not expect your opponent to drop on a hit. Most policing techniques (pre-tasers) also do not make sense if you assume that. It is just within bad movies and RP-games that people trade blow after blow in a combat. I understand that it is good game mechanics because it reduces swingyness etc... (and I actually do not mind it too much within a game) but HP mechanic is not the one on which you should be making the verisimilitude stand.</blockquote>

Verification