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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5228862" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm experiencing some of that myself with my own house rules.  While I think I've avoided some of the grosser number inflation of late 3.5 and 4e, my own solutions have exaggerated the old 'hunter and deer' problem.The hunter and deer problem is the lesser known twin of 'farmer and housecat'.  The farmer and the housecat problem is the well known problem that, if daggers are dangerous to a commoner, then the farmer's own housecat is a serious threat not just to the rats but to the farmer himself.  The 'farmer and housecat' problem has to do with the low granularity of traditional D&D.  It's very hard to simulate attacks doing less than 1 damage, and if starting characters have close to 1 hit point, then how many hit points should a wasp have?My own rules largely fix the 'farmer and housecat' problem by increasing the granularity of the game at low levels.  Simply put, the farmer gets a bonus to his hit points on account of his size, that is much larger than the housecat's bonus from a smaller size.  Also, the farmer does not consider the housecat's size fine claws to be deadly weapons.  The cat can easily dispatch a mouse with a pounce, but must make a lucky attack to do damage to such a large creature.  All well and good.But the other problem that D&D has always had is, if an arrow does 1d6 damage and a typical beast has 1d8 or even 2d8 hit points, how does a common hunter manage to bag game when the expectation is that an arrow will not on average kill its target?  Now, I know a bit about real life bow hunting, so I know that outside of pointblank range you don't actually expect an arrow to kill an adult deer immediately, but you do expect that such a creature struck well has at least a good chance of bleeding to death.   But, if we resolve the farmer and the house cat problem, we quickly find that the previously minor problem of hunter and deer becomes a major one.   Now, the hunter cannot slay a deer at all (even if just by bleeding it to death) without a better than average critical hit.Some of you of a non-simulationist bent may be thinking, "Who cares?  NPC's and PC's don't use the same rules.  Just hand wave the appropriate results in these cases!"   And that's fine as far as it goes, but the point of describing these problems isn't that you are expecting to run alot of 'house cat vs. commoner combats' or simulations of a hunter gather economy.   The point is that the scenario highlights an issue that does in fact impact the PC's.  In the case of 'housecat vs. commoner', the issue is that low level PC's under stock rules are scarsely less fragile than the commoner and so subject to death from the same sort of minor foes.   In the case of 'hunter vs. deer', the problem is that any ablative defense which protects the PCs from random death also has the effect of making combats longer without necessarily increasing the interest thereof.I'm personally not sure what to do.  I've solved a huge number of problems. My current house rules are making for some of the easiest DMing I've ever had - the balance is great, the threat of death is there but random deaths are so far nonexistant, the combat is epic and flavorful even at 1st level, and it yet doesn't seem to drag that much - but I can't help but worry abit about the fact that it takes on average 3 arrows to bring a goblin down (and even then, he's not dead, just staggering, bleeding out, a probably unconscious).  Don't ask about zombies.  I could up the damage dealt by weapons, but that would seem to undermine the successes thus far.  I could put NPC's on different rules than PC's, but I remember from my 1e days that that being one of the biggest headaches.  I'm currently just shrugging my shoulders and accepting that no rule set is perfect.</blockquote>

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