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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Felon" data-source="post: 425959" data-attributes="member: 8158">To suggest that only characters of 1st-level can be considered minor seems a bit silly. And it's a good deal sillier to point at any given fictional character that's ever been killed by a single attack and glibly say "Oh, he was obviously just 1st-level". The term "minor" is relative, not absolute--particularly so in d20. Characters at any level will be fighting cannon-fodder goons who, as Nigel Powers puts it, don't even have name tags. To a 10th-level character a group of 4th and 5th-level flunkies can easily be considered minor opponents, yet each one can stop .44 slugs with his face, even the 10th-level character's slugs. And they won't even be fazed. If it's some sort of "heroic" factor insulating these thugs from an instantaneous, ignominious death, then why is a character with much more experience and a far superior affinity with deux-ex-machina incapable of overcoming that factor and killing them with a single bullet between the eyes? Because the heroic factor in d20 is represented by hit points, and of course that's purely defensive, which is yet another difference between hit points and other systems' "hero points" (action points, willpower, etc.). So again, not "the same thing".I can and do consider what you call "power-scaling" to be a viable but flawed feature that has managed to withstand the test of time without undergoing some much-needed fine-tuning. I want my 15th-level character to be a badass crack-shot  that can walk away from a gunfight having left behind a row of corpses with a single hole in each of their foreheads. But here's the funny thing: thanks to good ol' power-scaling, the chances that my gunslinger can do this actually decreases as he gains levels. When he's 1st-level, he can one-shot bad guys left and right (until he gets one-shotted anyway). When he's 20th-level, he won't be squaring off against those 1st-level characters that drop off like flies unless he actively goes trolling for them. The nameless chaff the GM tosses at him will be chaff built-to-scale. Minor bit players, but with sufficient hit points to ensure that my gunslinger, even with his various little feats, will have to empty his revolver just to take out one of them. Well, you do a good job interpolating that fight scene with d20 mechanics, I'll give you that...but you have passed over a heck of a lot of the comments I made in my post, and that includes statements that deflate what you're describing here. Boramir is clearly not fighting at 100% capacity up until the moment he drops. His attacks become clumsy and desperate. He's gravely injured, with numerous organs punctured, and barely capable of standing. much less making 30ft moves between attacks. In fact, it's pretty easy to see that he's mortally-wounded well before that third shaft drops him. If Lurtz hadn't gotten that final shot off, Boramir wasn't gong to simply get up, arrows still protruding from his torso, and stroll away from the battlefield with a dozen hit points shouting "Cleric! Get your butt over here! And where are those hobbits? Someone keep an eye on them while they're looting the bodies!". And that, my friend, is how it would happen in D&D.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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