plenty of conan stories have him taking heavy blows from foes, and getting up, but clearly show that so much as a nick from a giant snake will kill him (i recall one where the venom dripped on his skin and burned). I do not think conan stories translate very well into hp though, and like I said before, much of this depends on how you view HP (and while you and pemertons HP analysis is entirely valid as an opinion, it is not shared by everyone....i would say most people assume a certain amount of physcial damage from any given succesful attack). These things do break down under scrutiny, but that is the nature of abstractions.
I would classify "the venom dripped on his skin and burned" as a D&D hit with a successful save - he skillfully avoided the main damage, got burned by the venom and used up a bit of that skill/luck of avoiding the snake. Or is it your contention that the PC's only hope of surviving that snake battle, over several rounds of combat, is to always be missed? It seems unlikely for a serious threat of a monster to be that incapable of striking a heavily armored PC, much less a lughty armored (or loincloth clad) barbarian.
They can be, but are not necessarily. If we were talking about an area where a Medusa has never been and where no one has traveled much, and one shows up, the DC to identify it should be pretty high. However, that is not generally going to be the case.
If there is a medusa around the area, how have the people in the area survived this long? They're pretty dangerous to a town full of commoners, I believe.
I do not see anything in the RAW that requires us to treat creatures that are real within the D&D world as being more obscure than their legends are in the real world.
I see the Knowledge Skill rules for creature identification, and the fact that the average peasant is not typically assumed to have 6 - 12 years of education not focused on their role in society.
Ask him what a giraffe is. Does he know that it has a long neck? Does he know that a jellyfish can sting you? Probably yes, even if he lives in the Midwest. People knew these things before the internet. A basilisk is very likely on the same level in a world that has them.
Ask a 17th century American Indian about giraffes and jellyfish. I saw giraffes in the zoo - do you think there are zoos full of medusae and basilisks in the D&D world? Long before the internet, we had public libraries and encyclopediae, which were made possible by the advent of the printing press. I don't envision the typical D&D world being that educated, or that modern. It's easy to forget that literacy could not simply be assumed, even going back a hundred years in North America. It's so beyond us that Barbarians in D&D need to know how to read to satisfy our modern sensibilities.
There is, however, every reason that any D&D character who had ever lived near a or been to volcano or extraplanar portal leading to the inner planes would know what one is. Character knowledge is likely to be greater than player knowledge regarding D&D-isms.
Which leaves the question of how common volcanos and extraplanar portals are. If magmin (and salamanders, fire elementals, etc.) are just wandering around, I speculate any human(oid) settlement would be long since wiped out.
Indeed. Perhaps the better answer would have been a general guideline on monster rarity, and MM specifics as to the DC to identify a creature, and what facts are gained at each success level. But that's a lot more work, so we take a shorthand assumption. Much like we don't sever luck, skill, that 'sixth sense' and sheer physical toughness, nor do we separate dodging from shields and armor. We make simplifying assumptions.
For example, are we to believe that if an elder red dragon appears in the distance, a bunch of townsfolk will have no idea what it is, let alone that it breathes fire and is evil? That seems unlikely.
This highlights another problem with the Knowledge conceit - if only it were a younger dragon, the DC would be lower and he would be easier to identify! That said, from that distance, they see a large winged shape, and likely cannot differentiate colour. Do they wait to see whether it might be a Gold or Red Dragon? That dragons are color-coded for our convenience is every bit as much a conceit as the Knowledge DC's.
Peasants are generally not the chief disseminators of knowledge. All it takes is one adventurer stopping at the local inn with his stories of monsters far and wide for many of them to become common knowledge.
Well, clearly if some half-drunk vagrant at the inn said it, it MUST be true!
And what is your explanation of what happens when a players asks the single question: "What is that thing?". Are we required to ignore the first rule? There is nothing that says that the question cannot relate to monsters or that the second use supersedes the first. I would say this is a simple case of using whichever rules is more favorable or makes more sense.
It is quite similar to that player asking to use his Knowledge: Arcana to determine a potion's effects by taste. Identifying magic items has a specific rule. So does identifying creatures. "What is that thing?" is an attempt to identify a creature, not "a question in your field". If "that thing" is a 6 HD medusa, a roll of 16 is required, which makes the question a bit more than a basic question (of DC 15). The only issue I take with that is that the medusa should not be more difficult to identify solely because it has taken two Fighter levels and gained 2 HD.
The rules don't say that. They say that a DC 10 Knowledge check can be made untrained, and that one can answer a really easy question with such a check, and that trained characters can answer other questions at higher DCs. Depending on context, the existence of a monster living nearby with a powerful ability can easily be a DC 10 Knowledge (Local) or Gather Info check. The existence of a really powerful monster or common race of monsters not nearby could easily fall under another Knowledge, such as Geography or Planes. Legends could fall under History or bardic knowledge. The rules, as written, promise that if you make the DC 10 + CR check you will get identity and useful information, but there is absolutely nothing in the rules that says that a player cannot identify a pertinent threat without using the DC 10 + CR rule.
There is nothing in the rules that says you cannot identify a potion by taste either. However, I believe most of us assume the presence of a rule for identifying a potion should be taken to indicate that this is how identification of potions works in game. Cite a rule that suggests your position is correct and I am happy to look at it. The absence of a rule that says you cannot use a dozen other ways to identify a monster does not indicate that those approaches are part of the rules, rather than your own house rules.
Well, closer observation. If the statues look like they are terrified and running away or fighting, that kind of suggests that, in a world with petrification magic, they were. Again, it's very easy to rationalize this kind of thing as being a DC 10 or 15 untrained Int or Wis check (which, given a four-character party of non-imbeciles, is pretty easy for at least one to make), let alone Knowledge (Arcana).
I think I would deliberately have animated statues carved to look like people terrified and running away or fighting, so they can surprise you from behind while you look for the petrification monster...
The bottom line is that given a rational DM, most PCs will have some idea of what their opponents are and what the capabilities of said opponents are most of the time, because PCs are not stupid. Using a selective and narrow reading of the rules to suggest that DMs can deprive players the use of that knowledge is just spiteful.
This posits a world simply teeming with monsters. How do all those low level commoners survive in such an environment?
Because on one hand, a death spiral in D&D would suck a lot of the fun out of the game and on the other hand, the PC's impaired state is already abstracted into his lower hit points. He's no longer able to dodge forever. If he's down to his last 3 hit points, the venomous creature's bite may actually kill him outright (or put him into unconsciousness territory and dying - which is the same if he doesn't have any buddies to help him out).
But he remains just as likely to save as he was at 100 hp, when clearly any hit was a mere scratch, deftly evaded. While I don't want a death spiral, its desirability, or lack of same, is a matter of preference, and not an objective determination. The likelihood of the physical trauma killing him has changed due to lower hp, but the likelihood of a solid bite injecting a lethal toxin has not changed at all - espite the fact that our Hero is no longer so spry and able to evade those lethal fangs.
