Yeah, it's bullshit. DR does this a lot better, since you still can't hurt the big monster with normal weapons used by normal humans, but weapons used by high level characters still work. A near-legendary hero still can beat down the dragon, it doesn't have to go "well, we're fucked since no-one here has a +3 weapon".
The idea behind it is that beings that require +3 were completely supernatural in nature. Natural things were irrelevant to them, and they had to be fought on their own "plane" essentially. Modern weapons counted as +1 or +2 due to their greater quality, but even those couldn't harm things that divorced from normal reality.
And again, I point out how many mythical heroes went to town on monsters, even supernatural ones, with nothing more than their fists. Heracles strangled the Nemean Lion, an actual divine monster, invulnerable to weapons, with his bare hands. Beowulf did basically the same to Grndel, who was also immune to weapons. An actual high level character should be able to take monsters with nothing more than a club and win.
So a Demigod with absurd supernatural strength managed to harm a being immune to mundane weapons?
Don't cherrypick, Beowulf was in there too, and he's not a divine anything, merely a great warrior.
Which is why I didn't mention him, I was specifically asking about the Heracles example.
The trick there - especially with things like DR - is to make sure that if the monster has a way to avoid damage they have fewer hitpoints than other monsters.
True. I do like that 3.5 kept the DR in the 5-15 range. Some of the DRs in 3.0 were ridiculously high when you consider that an Abrams tank or a Star Destroyer only has DR 20. I just wish they'd kept the "magic trumps silver and cold iron" aspect from 3.0 so that if you a magic weapon you were covered. Or requiring combos, like "good and silver/cold iron" for fiends. A holy sword should be sufficient. Silver for lycanthropes and cold iron for fae makes sense, but neither particularly makes sense for fiends. It's just there to make PCs spend extra money to fill out the golf bag.
Not only did Beowulf kill Grendel and Grendel's mom with sheer badassery, but the dragon that killed Beowulf was killed by a dude with a non-magical sword. And speaking of dragons, in the book version of The Hobbit, Smaug was killed by a normal bow and arrow, and I believe the dragon in Children of Turin was killed by a normal spear as well.
Yes, and "extraordinary" attacks bypassed the immunities. Early firearms counted as +1, modern ones as +2. Catapults and other siege weapons hurt dragons just fine. The point was that +1 immunity meant "no amount of peasants with sticks are enough", +2 meant "siege engines or magic please" and +3 or 4 meant "this thing is basically a demigod, so either use magic, drop a mountain on it, or nuke it"
Peasants with sticks are unlikely to do more than 5 damage with a hit, pretty much can't do more than 10 damage, and couldn't possibly do more than 15 even on a critical hit, so they would be useless against anything with 3.5E-type DR anyway.
I really don't like that. Modern firearms start at "more lethal than any medieval crossbow" with pistols. Even medieval firearms had far greater capacity to just ignore armor than crossbows, represented in Pathfinder by targeting Touch AC. And they did not explode in the user's hand on a regular basis. The low reliability of early firearms was not shooting reliably. The powder moderately frequently failed to ignite and their accuracy was abysmal. Failures were not damaging to the weapon because there was a century or two of cannons to work out that issue.
20d6 is the damage for a 1MT nuke just so that you are aware. It just has higher radius than any non-epic spell and allows no save.
Then whoever wrote that sourcebook is an idiot. A megaton nuke is hotter than the sun.
And so Sunburst. Which also caps at 20d6. And the same damage as being in Magma.Then whoever wrote that sourcebook is an idiot. A megaton nuke is hotter than the sun.
Magma is only 700-1300 degrees Celsius. A nuke is millions of degrees. Long past the point at which rock would vaporize, rather than merely melt.
And the nuke does unavoidable, unsavable damage that bypasses all immunities and resistances. I think that they are pretty much saying that if it's got more than 120hp, it can survive a 1mt nuke.
There's a 2e spell that literally hurls bolts of solar plasma at people, and it deals less than 20d6 at 20th level casting. Besides which, you should probably understand that star level heat is NOT considered to be that big of an obstacle to overcome in d&d. Red dragons literally swim in stars.
Again, I reiterate: whoever wrote that sourcebook was an idiot, and the damage scale it implies is contradicted by other, better written sources.
And it's presumably not enough plasma to carry the energy of a megaton or even a kiloton of TNT. If it were, the heat would create overpressure in the air and create a blast wave that would destroy the caster as well.
The starwars d20 had hilariously inflated damage numbers for weapons and absurdly low ones for force powers though. I mean seriously, palpatine was only doing 3d6 damage a round. Compared to a 6d8 for a lightsaber
So, like the movies, where lightsabers are OHKO and force lightning isn't?
While I agree that D20 Modern is crap, it's not even consistent with other D20 Modern sources. By D20 Modern rules, it only takes 9 pounds of C4 to do 20d6 damage, not 2,200,000,000 pounds.
I'm talking about Saga Edition, not the earlier, crap editions.
Fire Immunity means Immunity, there, and the harm of stars really is mostly heat, when you ignore radiation. Which probably falls under a special form of Electricity damage, because it's the ionizing that's the problem. Which means a Red/Blue Dragon would probably be utterly safe from everything nasty about stars.
Modern firearms DO count as +2s for bypassing, at least back in 2e. Tank weapons and nukes are treated more like spells than weapons, so you'd need immunity to fire and to piercing for a tank shell. Nothing gets to reduce damage from nukes. Basically, a clay golem in 2e would shrug off the tank shell, but that's because all the shrapnel just rips holes that reseal, the initial shell passes right through, and the heat is irrelevant.
I'd already edited that typo where I put millions instead of billions. Although by definition, they use metric tons, which are 1,000 kg (about 2,200 pounds). And C4 is 1.456 times as powerful as an equivalent weight of TNT (91% RDX, which has an RE factor of 1.6), but I decided to handwave that for the sake of keeping the math quick and simple. Point is, it's off by about eight orders of magnitude, so whoever thought a nuke should do 20d6 was an idiot.
I think the heavy crossbow is 1d10. And yes, it had good penetration against medieval armor. But firearms are on a whole other level in that regard. Medieval armor is entirely useless against even a moderate handgun round, except maybe a hollow-point.
The base D20 system, being made specifically for D&D, was pretty shit at handling guns. It's one of the reasons I consider D20 Modern unplayable. Star Wars Saga Edition solved this to a degree by letting people add level bonuses to damage and having feats to do extra dice of damage due to careful aim or double-tapping or burst-firing, which let guns (and weapons in general) do enough damage to stay relevant.
Agreed. Other RPGs like Shadowrun have an armor-penetration stat for weapons for that exact reason. (Some antivehicle weapons in Saga Edition ignored 10 points of DR due to a similar line of thinking. Others had x2 damage multipliers, but took penalties against human-sized targets so people wouldn't abuse them against non-vehicle targets.)
