Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 5598263" data-attributes="member: 29398">Unfortunately, Bard's Black Arrow is not the best example to use here to point out how D+D can't model something using hit points, because the Arrow is something D+D can model perfectly while potentially ignoring hit points entirely.It's an Arrow of Dragon Slaying.  Shoot a Dragon with it (at +5 to hit, BTW) and the Dragon takes a boatload of damage (say, d6 + 5 tripled) and if that doesn't kill it (or force it to crash-land which will probably kill it) it has to save or die instantly anyway.  Smaug failed his save.The other example, that of Eowyn and Merry bringing down the Witch King, has always been to me a shining example of why the game needs two aspects: critical hits to which any creature or opponent is vulnerable, and little enough difference between low levels and high that a low-level Hobbit *can* pose a threat to a BBEG.  Any game I ever play absolutely has to have this - that a little guy with a lucky strike at least has a chance of bringing down or seriously hurting a big guy, no matter who it is.I think 3e really blew it on both of these: the Witch King is undead and thus not crit-able by 3e RAW, and there's way too much separation between low level and high for Merry - or Eowyn, for that matter - to pose him any kind of threat at all.  I'm not sure how 4e works for things like this.  It does, however, work in 1e; or can easily be made to.Lan-"the Eowyn-Merry-Witch King battle is one of the reasons I got into this game in the first place"-efan</blockquote>

Verification