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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4092410" data-attributes="member: 47776">Only insomuch as you assume that the 'real' reality is that high-level characters can die of lucky stabs in a D&D world.It is true that all people can die of a single unlucky blow in reality.  That doesn't mean that a system that models high-level characters is unrealistic; it simply means that our reality doesn't contain high-level characters to model against.  In the world of D&D (or, to be more precise, in the world that the rules of D&D model), it is actually impossible (luck or no) for a high-level character to die from poor luck (luck being defined here as random chance and not the effects of a +50 luck bonus to damage).  This is how the world-as-modeled works.  If you want it to be actually true that you can kill anyone with a single lucky blow, then the world D&D makes is not for you.  If you want a world where you can (basically) kill most people with a single lucky blow, but some people are so heroically badass that it is physically impossible for this to happen without counteracting force of badass making the blow more dire.Again, this is a situation that does not conform to our world.  Given that D&D does not represent our world, or even our world plus a few fringes cases of magic, but an entirely different world that happens to approximate ours in most cases but can be reliably pushed into territory that our world does not cover, with equally-reliable results in these cases, this is not a problem.It does not make sense for a system that modeled reality that dragons can fly, or can breed with the incarnations of moral and ethical forces.  D&D does not model reality.Now, that being said, you can run with the same arguments in 4E.  In this universe, skill isn't skill as we understand it; it's another ability to bend the laws of the universe.  The fact that you've trained endlessly to trip someone doesn't mean that you actually know how to trip someone; it means that, like the wizard who can conjure an entangling tentacle from the ground, you have a chance to violate the laws of reality in such a way that your foe ends up on the ground.The fact that D&D models tripping like this is not exactly unbelievable, but it is lame.  Heroic characters should be able to do at least what we in our unheroic capacity can attempt; rules that let them try and fail are much, much better than rules that don't let them try at all.It's interesting that you mention the commoner-vs-housecat argument.  I'd call this part and parcel of the same thing that makes trip as an encounter unpalatable; we all know that if it comes down to it, we can kill a damn housecat and not risk dying in the process.  This representation of ordinary people as not being able to do something that we know ordinary people can do rankles, and produces either handwaving or hilarious results ("Goblins are coming! Lock up the children, and release Flopsy and Muffins!")  I'd argue that any game system that takes something that should be ordinary and within the capacity of an untrained human and turns it into a special, trained-only skill or gift risks running into this same phenomena.</blockquote>

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