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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ahnehnois" data-source="post: 6154617" data-attributes="member: 17106">To a significant extent, yes. One can argue, for example, that a cat shouldn't be able to kill a wizard in one hit. It's a cat. However, a reasonably strong person using a decent weapon most certainly should (though it shouldn't be a likely outcome in most cases).It's particularly bad when you have CdG situations where the attacking character can't kill the helpless defender; those can get ridiculous under the core rules.That's the good part! I don't think any participants in an rpg should be able to "plan for" the damage they will deal or take. Battles that only involve ablating hit points and nonlethal minutiae quickly become rote. Unpredictability is a good thing. "The math" shouldn't be a zero sum game that can be predicted or analyzed to that extent. That's what makes the various instant death effects so nice; they throw a wrench in a dysfunctional system without us having to rewrite the game completely.Whatever value you give will be just as arbitrary as all XP values (or CRs or whatever).Yeah. I throw them in on occasion. Particularly with 3e crit modifiers, even under the core hp rules, a raging, power attacking barbarian with a good weapon can realistically do that at quite high levels, as can a variety of other damage-optimized characters and exceptionally strong monsters. (Though it would be more appropriate to look at dealing PC's hp + 11 in one round rather than one hit; that happens with some regularity for creatures/characters with large numbers of attacks).</blockquote>

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