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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7726573" data-attributes="member: 42582">For me, this illustrates the point I've been making upthread, to [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION], [MENTION=94143]Shasarak[/MENTION] and [MENTION=3400]billd91[/MENTION].In a genuinely grim & gritty RPG, ambushing someone with a sword, or a crossbow, should be (more-or-less) as dangerous as dropping a rock on them. It's purely an artefact of D&D's mechanics, which rates a sword at d8 or d10 but leaves the rating of a boulder to the GM, that results in a fighter being unable to kill someone in a weapon ambush but able- at least at the tables of those GMs mentioned - to kill someone with a boulder ambush.Which once again relates back to [MENTION=2656]Aenghus[/MENTION]'s point, that the effectiveness of the boulder vs the sword turns primarily on end-running around the damage rules. It's entirely an artefact of mechanics, not of "narrative first". In a "narrative first" game involving people of "flesh and bone" (to quote [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]), an ambush with a sword or bow should be capable of lethality. (And in games like RuneQuest, Rolemaster, Burning Wheel, etc - ie with broadly simulationist action resolution mechanics - it is.)But D&D chooses to subordinate lethality and grittiness to heroics, via the hit point mechanic. That design choice having been made, why should boulders - of all things - be exempt from it?</blockquote>