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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7726699" data-attributes="member: 42582">Being stabbed with a sword or spear can inflict a fair bit of trauma. And many D&D characters are not wearing armour - eg wizards, sorcerers, monks. Many are not wearing metal armour - eg thieves, assassins, druids, some bards.(EDIT: I see that [MENTION=93444]shidaku[/MENTION] covered most of this in a reply upthread of mine. I agree with what shidaku said.)The weird thing about the 3E rules you mention is that the difference, in the real word, between having a 100 kg rock or 1000 kg rock land on your head is probably pretty minimal - both will kill you. Whereas in 3E the first does 1d6, which is quite survivable for most characters, while the later does 10d6, which will be fatal for most ordinary people, yet is also oddly survivable by characters of double-digit levels.That is not an attempt to describe how the world works. It is a largely arbitrary mechanic, which leads to (what you are committed to regarding as) rather absurd outcomes - your argument about rocks vs swords, based on real world considerations, is as sound for a 100 kg rock as a 5 ton rock, yet in 3E the former is not an effective weapon while the latter is.I don't understand this.You are arguing that 4e gets things wrong because it assigns the wrong value/effectiveness to the use of rocks in combat. You seemed to be making that argument by pointing to real-life features of rocks that 4e fails to capture. But now you're saying the 3E model - despite not capturing much (or anything?) that is true of the real world - is nevertheless a good model, simple because of what? Some formal property - that it stipulates a dice per weight per distance rule for rock damage? By that criteria, the rule would be equally excellent if it said "1d6 per lb per 1' of drop" - but obviously that would be a rule even more ridiculous than the 3E one you mention.A good rule will be one which results in entities being killed by boulders at about the right frequency we would expect for some appropriate set of reality + genre informed expectations.Upthread, when I mentioned that D&D characters are larger-than-life types, you objected that they're not, that they're made of "flesh and bone". But now you're saying that they're not like real people at all - ie people who are made of "flesh and bone".If you are positing that for D&D characters, having a 100 kg rock or anvil drop on their head from 10' up is a mere bagatelle - that one needs to up it to 1000 or 5000 kg to really get their attention! - then what sort of "flesh and bone" are you talking about? Flesh of steel and bones of reinforced concrete?</blockquote>

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