Taking Rules to Their Illogical Extremes

[The Crimson Binome]

The way I look at it, what’s the expectation you’d have of a person falling off an 80 foot cliff? Not in a game or even in the real world. Let’s say you’re reading a novel and it happens.

According to narrative convention, falls are very rarely lethal, unless the story is almost over. If someone goes over a cliff, then it's a virtual guarantee that they'll show up again later on, especially considering the difficulty of going down to make sure they're actually dead. That's exactly what I'd expect to happen in one of those new-age story-telling games, like Dresden Files.

But D&D isn't a story-telling game. It's a traditional RPG. The rules of the game reflect the reality of the game world. Making an appeal to narrative convention would be tantamount to meta-gaming. We're supposed to believe that this could really happen.

So I would consider a fall from 80 feet to be very lethal, generally speaking. I wouldn't consider it to be more lethal than getting stabbed with a sword, or shot with an arrow, or being set on fire, though. All of those things are very deadly. While it makes perfect sense that some random person would probably die from that fall, the fact that I've observed this specific individual withstand superhuman levels of injury in the past means that they aren't some random person. Based on everything I know about this individual, it would be very unusual if they had survived so much, only to be laid low by a mundane fall; which is exactly what the rules of the game tell us.

We already know that the world in discussion differs from our own world in several ways. Even if you restrict yourself to human fighters, a level 3 human fighter is already capable of shrugging off multiple arrow hits without slowing down. It's kind of an unusual premise for a narrative, but that's the cost of admission if you want to play. That's the minimum level to which disbelief must be suspended, if we're going to use this rules. And once we've paid that cost, it doesn't cost anything more to accept surviving a fall from 80 feet.

 

[Tom B1]

In Mutants and Masterminds that's the Bathroom Mentalist. It effectively lets your character participate while taking a shower, or using other facilities.

cough Professor X with his machine cough

Before they fixed it, I liked 'teleport, usable on others, at range* or desolidifcation, always on - talk about a great recce character.

In the space ship wargame Red Chicken Rising (the only wargame to start with a shower scene), they had ships with ranged weapons, defenses, mobility and boarding parties/torpedoes. That was fine if you played with pre-made designs. The costing scheme reasoned that shields and ranged weapons were high value and BPs and mobility less so (BPs not much because of the need to get really close).

Except... with no guns or shields (or minimal shields) and a fair bit of mobility and max count of BPs, you could actually go from out of range to on top of an enemy ship to deploy an overwhelming boarding action that the defender (who paid for expensive guns and shields) couldn't withstand. It was the paper-scissors-nuclear warhead contest.

In 3.5E, had a Xeph soul-knife with some feats that made him faster and I could 'run the walls' so I could usually go up and over the meat-shield line of our enemies to strike at the softer casters. I may have multi-classed into Monk for some of the speed.

 

[Tom B1]

Many games have maximum human speeds in excess of the 10.6m/s of Usain Bolt at peak.

And others have movement rates that are so glacial that the 'combat move' looks a lot like a very S-L-O-W meander...

 

[Tom B1]

So I would consider a fall from 80 feet to be very lethal, generally speaking. I wouldn't consider it to be more lethal than getting stabbed with a sword, or shot with an arrow, or being set on fire, though. All of those things are very deadly. While it makes perfect sense that some random person would probably die from that fall, the fact that I've observed this specific individual withstand superhuman levels of injury in the past means that they aren't some random person. Based on everything I know about this individual, it would be very unusual if they had survived so much, only to be laid low by a mundane fall; which is exactly what the rules of the game tell us.

In some variants which had rules for broken bones, burns, etc. the side effects of traumatic damage were more scary to players than the possibility of actually dying.

Another rules-allowed but chaos inflicting:
Halfling fighter/thief riding a war dog wielding a Wand of Viscid Globs (Gorilla glue at range!)

We had a Champions character that would debark our VTOL as he turned on density increase. He'd punch several meters into the asphalt below... and the city started sending him bills. there's always a way to trim in ridiculousness.

Of course, he also bought "FTL, only works outside of atmosphere* but didn't fly and had no life support. When asked, his pro-athlete public persona came into play... "Why did you buy that?" "Lance fast!". FTL... yah, that counts!

 

[DrunkonDuty]

cough Professor X with his machine cough

Before they fixed it, I liked 'teleport, usable on others, at range* or desolidifcation, always on - talk about a great recce character.

Prof X is broken.

Desol was always one of those powers that was open to stupid. There was a villain in the Mutant File who had Desolidification and Invisibility that she could keep going indefinitely. But no real attack powers, so she was more just infuriating than dangerous.

 

[Beleriphon]

In 3.5E, had a Xeph soul-knife with some feats that made him faster and I could 'run the walls' so I could usually go up and over the meat-shield line of our enemies to strike at the softer casters. I may have multi-classed into Monk for some of the speed.

M&M laughs at the Xeph and sees your movement rate with 4000 feet per move action. Completely doable at PL10, which is the default start. Normally don't need to be that fast, but they whatever works. It is only just over 900 miles per hour. With extra effort that can go to the next step up, 8000 fee per move or about 1800 miles per hour.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In some variants which had rules for broken bones, burns, etc. the side effects of traumatic damage were more scary to players than the possibility of actually dying.

That's going to be the case in any setting where being stabbed (within six seconds of bleeding out) can be fixed by any old healer, and death can be reversed by someone with only slightly more experience, but a missing finger requires archmage-level magic. Sometimes it's easier to kill yourself and come back than it is to fix an ailment, in which case doing so is the logical and in-character response to that condition. (As compared to real life, where death is the worst thing that can happen to you, and losing a finger isn't nearly as bad as being stabbed nearly to death.)

There's also a meta-game issue, where it feels like the player is being punished by having to play a broken character, when they would be allowed to bring in a healthy new character if the first character had actually died. You can solve that by requiring any new character to enter the game at a lower level (or whatever) than the old character, but the disparity has to be pretty significant for the player to actually appreciate being broken rather than dying entirely, and that can feel like a no-win situation.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

(Double Post)

 

[Bohandas]

I recall hrearing about something called a the "Locate City Bomb" which abuses the fact that the locate city spell expresses its enormous range as an area, plus some metamagic feats which - among other things - knock creatures back to the edge of a spell's area dealing damage proportional to how far they are knocked back, to turn the locate city spell into the equivalent of a high-yield neutron bomb
EDIT:
Ok, here's a version

 

[Tom B1]

Prof X is broken.

Desol was always one of those powers that was open to stupid. There was a villain in the Mutant File who had Desolidification and Invisibility that she could keep going indefinitely. But no real attack powers, so she was more just infuriating than dangerous.

True, not directly dangerous, but if a baddy can always be watching your team's strategy sessions and plans and relaying stuff to the other bad actors, that can pretty much make every encounter ambush city and also ensure encounters they wish to avoid are avoided.

It is a powerful weapon in a campaign setting, even if it can't directly harm anyone. Just the things this sort of character can discover and disclose could be devastating. "Oh, and by the way, I happen to know today's code for the Football...."