Archmage wrote:
This is not going to be a popular opinion around here. I actually think you're arguing in good faith, Doctor Loggins, so let me attempt to explain.
The Den consensus (if such a thing can be said to exist) is that mechanics must create the desired flavor of the game, not the reverse. The key is that by and large this is a forum about game design. The game's rules are the physical laws of your game universe. They may not and probably do not emulate real life perfectly.
Consider the 4e rules for starvation and thirst.
1) After three days without water, you must make an Endurance check (DC 20) that gets progressively harder if you make the check (+5 per day). It's not clear whether that resets to DC 20 when you fail a check. Let's assume it doesn't.
2) The penalty for failing a check is loss of a healing surge. You cannot regain this healing surge until you get water. If you have no surges, you take damage equal to your level.
Therefore:
3) A 1st level party with access to surgeless healing (a single cleric who knows the cure light wounds power works) can go indefinitely without water. They run out of surges and then take 1 HP damage per day. The cleric can use the daily power to restore a surge's worth of HP to an ally without a surge needing to be spent (or for the target to have any surges at all). By cycling through the party, the cleric's divine blessings sustain the party without food or water forever. Sure, they have no healing surges and may not survive combat, but that's not important--they don't need food or water to live, which is a sign that the rules are massively fucked up as written!
If you want to run a setting where food and water are scarce resources and the PCs are supposed to care about them (Dark Sun)...you really can't. Not unless you change the rules. Your PCs can realistically survive drinking fresh water once a month and still have surges on hand to do combat.
If these are the rules, stating that starvation and thirst pose a danger to PCs is flavor text, which is fine on its own, but the fact is that it's lying flavor text. And Denners cannot stand flavor text that lies. If the flavor text says black lotus poison is one of the deadliest poisons ever concocted but a dose deals 5 poison damage per round (save ends) we will be pissed.
Sometimes rules produce an "unrealistic" result. If you want a realistic result, you have to change the rules (and acknowledge that you are doing so). Or, you have to accept that the laws of physics in the D&D universe are clearly not the same as the real world. HPs are supposed to be an abstraction, but high-level characters in D&D can survive 200-foot falls! There's certainly acrobatic skill involved in reducing how much you're injured by a fall, but you can't chalk up the fact to survive 20d6 falling damage to "the ability to roll with the punches" or whatever. You either have to accept that there are people in D&D who really can fall 200 feet and walk away with minor bruises because they are just that tough or you have to write a house rule that makes falling more lethal. Those are your two options.
Writing flavor text that doesn't make sense if the rules are followed to their logical conclusion is bad design. If the flavor text describes one outcome to an action, and the rules describe another, the rules win--and the fact that you can change them does not negate this fact.
So, yes, if Grarg the Goblin Lord is an adversary the PCs have faced in combat and they know he's bigger and tougher than any one of them, it is going to be very confusing when an assassin's arrow miraculously kills him in a single shot--especially if the PCs fight the assassin later and his ranged attacks only deal 1d8+1 damage. You can handwave things, but handwaving things to produce a result that is entirely different from what would've happened if the game's rules were actually being followed is generally considered totally unacceptable around here.
Well, first of all, every hit point those first level characters lose is important to them. Secondly, I don't think it matters how long it would actually take for starvation/thirst to kill someone as a) that assumes no encounters and b) a game where you wander in the desert and die of thirst is the most boring game. Any DM who runs a game which consists of "we look for water" "you don't find any until you die" is a shit DM. It's meant to be a way to show that being thirsty hurts you, not to accurately model the length of time it would take for it to kill you.
As for the single arrow killing the king: there are several scenarios which make the goblin king unlikely to die, but these aren't the only ones which exist, and if you're running combat between two NPCs handwaving is a much more expedient way to handle it. It can be interesting, but not if it actually gets rolled out.
