NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 4982879" data-attributes="member: 158">Power Word kill could kill a by-the-book Pit Fiend in AD&D - they had 13 hit dice, with average just under 60 hit points. Even the Magic resistance was largely useless, coming out to 30% vs. a level 18 caster. Even an ancient red dragon only had 88 hit points! What's more important, though, is that P.W.K. taking a major opponent out of a fight once they're in the 60 hit point range - which wasn't that hard to knock various creatures into. I tend to discount the power words being useless vs. "fresh" monsters because monsters nor PCs didn't have very many hit points to begin with, so knocking off about 20 or 30 wasn't that hard of a deal - a magic missile and a sword strike, and most monsters in the books were in that 60 to 90 hit point range.In 2E, though, they changed the way Magic resistance worked, which had problems of its own - anything with magic resistance was often much harder than its hit dice would have suggested, since most of those also had magic weapon damage resistances.Harm did at least have a balancing feature in that it took a regular to-hit roll to touch an opponent - something that 3E turned into a touch attack and scared DMs worldwide. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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