OK, so let’s say you are reading an action/adventure novel, or watching an action/adventure movie. (No this is not related to my still-not-yet-finished novel….)
Let’s say that the protagonist is a special services guy who specializes in hand-to-hand combat, with a particular focus on light blades, such as knives, daggers or short swords. As part of this specialization he is trained to throw knives and daggers with accuracy up to fifty feet. (A historical example would probably be Jim Bowie, of the Bowie knife fame). Besides his training in combat, he is also trained in sleight-of-hand, cut-pursing and pick-pocketing.
Now, this guy is in deep cover in a foreign land where he speaks the language fluently and fits in with the locals in every meaningful way (meaning clothing, habits, idioms, etc.) As part of his assignment he is supposed to meet with a local person who is involved with the local mob. Unfortunately he discovers that the association his contact has with the mob is that his contact is basically a gladiatorial slave in an underground arena combat where the combatants sometimes fight to the death.
Entering the arena he spots his contact involved in a 2×2 combat with two dagger-wielding twins. His contact’s partner is a stout sword and shield wielding dude, and the contact himself is wielding a large mace.
Not realizing that he would encounter such a situation, the hero has not brought any weapons with him. As he watches, his contact’s partner is cut down as the twins work a marvelous feint to pull the contact out of position where both twins converge on the unfortunate victim. Now the two twins are circling the hero’s contact, who has already been wounded himself, although he’s also cracked a few of one of the twins ribs with his mace.
The hero realizes that his entire mission will fail if the contact is killed, and the twins have murder in their eyes. The fight is happening on his side of the arena, maybe 50 feet or so away from him, and ten feet below (he is in the arena stands). The lights in the stands are low so the focus can be on the gladiators. Most of the audience is drunk with either alcohol or bloodlust or both. Near our hero is a particularly loud bunch of partisans rooting for the hero’s contact, obviously drunk. Some of them have knives on their belts. Realizing that he has to save the contact’s life, but without revealing himself, the hero decides to risk everything by taking action.
Now here is the question. How plausible is the following set of events?
- The hero pulls a dark hood over his head, hiding his features.
- The hero stumbles drunkenly into the group of drunken fans, knocking two of them into several others, causing three to fall to the ground with beer, pretzels and peanuts flying everywhere.
- As they fall to the ground, pretending to try to catch one, the hero snags the largest, most balanced looking knife from his belt.
- Ducking quickly aside as the scrum turns into an angry profanity laced barroom brawl, the hero moves away from the brawl and ducks behind a supporting pillar holding the roof of the arena.
- As security forces rush towards the brawl, he takes a quick glance to be sure nobody is watching him.
- Feeling that all eyes are either on the combat in the arena, or else are on the brawl now 15 feet to his right, he quickly throws the knife at the closest twin, who is at that moment engaged in mortal combat with his contact. This is the uninjured twin, of course.
- The knife is thrown with force and accuracy, striking the twin just under the arm as his contact swings a haymaker with his mace. The resulting combination of knife and mace kill the twin, leaving the contact now with a much more survivable fight.
- As the knife is thrown, without even waiting to see if it hits, the hero swiftly, but nonchalantly, moves down the stairs towards the exit.
OK, so assuming the contact can now defeat the remaining twin in 1 on 1 combat, is it realistic that the hero could have done these things and exited the building before being caught?
23 users commented in " Plausibility check… "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackA lot of plausible has to do with the setting of the world I’m reading. I’m willing to suspend more disbelief if the author establishes the fantastical as the mundane early on. Of course, that can get tiresome too, so I think it has a lot more to do with how clever the author can write it than with the circumstances themselves. Truth is, almost all fantasy requires heavy doses of Deus Ex Machina to get characters from A to Z.
My main problem with the set of circumstances you describe isn’t that the hero could toss the knife and escape, but why do people in the colesium have arms and yet our hero neglected to bring his own? If it’s common to walk around armed, why wouldn’t he?
Otherwise, I think one could descibe “confusion in the stands and on the field” to mask the hero’s actions. To increase plausibility, I would have the hero make escape plans upon entering the arena – as part of his SOP for such encounters. So, when the badness goes down, he’s already got a forshadowed out.
OK, so in the actual scenario, the hero does have weapons. In fact he has really cool and powerful weapons. But I didn’t think that was really central to the plausibility. His problem is that his weapons are TOO good, and if he uses one of his (many) own knives, it will be immediately apparent to whoever finds the knife, that this was no ordinary knife. In fact it is plausible that the resources of the mob could even track down the knife and identify the source, which could even blow his cover.
Unfortunately the circumstances of this were such that the hero didn’t have much opportunity to plot out an exit strategy, he’s going to have to wing that.
Oh, and the setting is a fantasy one, there are no guns in the setting.
Sounds good to me.
Since, once the tale is told, it did happen, it mustacoulda happened.
If I were writing it, he’d be caught. I’d assume that the local mob had lookouts. I’d assume that once anything fishy started going down, they’d immediately start looking into it.
If I were reading it, I would accept an explanation for escape. It is occurred a couple of chapters deep in the book, I’d need it established that this character was capable of miraculous feats. If this scenario is meant to establish that he’s capable of miraculous feats, there probably needs to be some kind of internal dialogue going on that deals with “relying on training and luck …” or something. We are talking about fantasy. These guys tend to do fantastical stuff. I forgive a lot.
However, if it’s a D&D scenario, make a saving roll.
It is occurred a couple of chapters = If it occurs a couple of chapters
OK, so full disclosure here. This is a role-playing scenario in a D&D campaign I am playing. The “hero” here is my half-orc ranger who specializes in light blades. He has routinely performed acts of much greater difficulty on many occasions.
In this case we are between sessions and between campaigns. Our DM is allowing us to do some backstory exposition for our characters as we are moving from one completed quest to a new quest. Basically we just defeated a God, stole her flying boat and are about to go to the moon to fight her followers there. But we had to go back to the city to report back on our success and to reprovision ourselves.
Part of my character’s backstory is that he and his family were captured by slavers when he was a child and sold into slavery. They were split up and my character ended up working for a blacksmith. Eventually he secretly built a weapon from the shards of metal laying around the blacksmith shop and after learning how to pick locks and pick pockets, he used his makeshift weapon to kill the blacksmith and escape from the slaver camp.
After a few years of adventuring and making some cash, he hired a seer to see if he could locate his missing family. The seer essentially told him to go to the arena and he’d find his sister, who was a slave for a local drow elf noble.
In the meantime my character purchased a bunch of magic daggers. But they are special magic daggers that had to be comissioned to do what he wants. It’s not likely there are any other similar magic daggers in the city. Daggers were allowed inside the arena, but bows and crossbows weren’t so the only ranged weapon he has are magic daggers.
He expected to find his sister serving the drow nobles while they watched the match. He was surprised to discover that his sister was one of the combatants.
Basically the DM told me all of this a few days ago and asked me “what does your character do?” If my character uses one of his own daggers it is absolutely certain he will be exposed. Nobody in the city except him knows that this is his sister.
We use online secure dice to roll our actions when we are doing this email sort of role playing. I sent the above description to my DM last night along with my rolls for key events. As it happens my character rolled the max possible (called a ‘critical hit’) for the pick pocket and for the attack roll on the twin.
I haven’t heard back from the DM, and I was just wondering what people thought about the plausibility of the events.
Did you roll for the escape too? IMO, with D&D, if you make your rolls it’s up to the DM to explain how it happened.
Within the D&D world I think the above is exactly the kind of stuff that can happen. I’ve had DMs who were assholes about that stuff though. I mean, they were handicapped by rules too, so if you rolled it out – and they’d make you roll out EVERYTHING – they’d be pissed, but they’d figure out how to make it work. Other DMs were fine with it as long as fate was with you. I’m the kind of guy who likes to use dice rolls as little as possible, but if someone presented me with the above scenario I’d make them roll for the enounter with the thugs (whether or not you successfully knock them over in the first place), the pickpocket, the evasion, the attack, and the escape. Seems like a lot to break it down like that, but the success of this scenario relies on a lot of little things happening successfully.
Well….
For a story in which characters are going TO THE MOON….
I’d say it’s all perfectly plausible.
:p
I am going with completely implausible, even with the fantastic elements. Unless there is a “good luck charm”, which would work. And even make it amusing.
But without that, no. It just doesn’t happen. There is too much going on.
Cullen, at a D&D table, I’d make the player roll as you described above. Email role playing is usually less formal, especially for backstory purposes. In fact this DM has taken similar events and just narrated out the results, even deciding actions my own character has taken, usually actions I would not have done with my character myself.
The only response I got from the DM was a terse “roll the attack” message. I rolled the pickpocket just in case he decided he needed that too. My character has a magic item that allows him to roll three d20s per day and store the results, and then swap out one roll per encounter if he likes. One of those three was a 20. So he actually rolled a “4″ on the attack, but used his magic item to swap it out for the “20″ which is a critical hit. The pickpocket was a straight “20″. We use a secure dice rolling server that is designed for email role playing and is intended to make it impossible to cheat on a die roll, so the rolls should not be challenged by the DM.
Part of this is a test on my part. I have been getting signals that the DM does not like my character. I suspect that he may have wanted to create a no-win scenario for me. But I’m not sure. I pretty much set this up to see how he would respond, considering this to be a pretty reasonable reaction to the situation and giving the sister a realistic chance to survive, while not putting my character in jail or at the mercy of the mob.
I’m basically going to decide whether to keep playing in this campaign based on how the DM responds. (Update: or at least decide if I need to have a long heart-to-heart with the DM. Basically I’m the “new guy” in a group that has gamed together for several years, and it has not been easy getting into the group dynamic.)
Is the 4e group with Wes?
Yep. That’s the one. Wes plays a dragonborn barbarian.
My guess is that you’re too clever for them
Honestly, most DMs I’ve met are either extremely accommodating and receptive to new ideas or very much the opposite. I tend to meet more of the latter. Those in the unreceptive camp tend to be intimidated by people who out-clever their scenarios.
I guess the tell is going to be how he responds to your actions.
One thing that comes up is that my ranger not only does the most consistent damage, but also has the most burst damage potential. That’s supposed to be the barbarian’s forte. In one fight in our last session, we had a boss of about 400 hit points and the barbarian connected with a critical hit on a charge with his best daily power, delivering something like 85 hit points of damage. He used his once per encounter “action point” to do another attack and did another 30 damage, for a total of about 125 in two attacks. Wes leaped out of his chair with a “That’s what I’m talking about!” exclamation and started delivering high fives. My ranger was next up.
Rangers don’t hit all that hard, but what they have is the ability to hit a lot. Plus they have the ability to deliver effects that make their subsequent attacks in a round more damaging. Using my own action point allowed me to attack the boss five times in one round. Because I’ve optimized the character to HIT things (as opposed to doing massive damage PER hit), I hit with all five rolls. I didn’t even use my most powerful attacks, I used those that built up multiple damage bonuses as he went along. At the end of the round he had done 129 damage to the same boss. Without any critical hits.
That didn’t set well with the whole group, although our cleric was happy about it.
Actually, because my character was hitting so frequently, I actually reduced his strength by two points between our last session so that the DM doesn’t have to start boosting the monster’s AC which would impact the rest of the team’s ability to hit. Basically I took that hit and increased his ability to maneuver and increased his will saves, which was his biggest weakness. He should be more comparable with the rest of the group this Sunday.
It is a character you brought to their campaign or something you created with them?
Is is … geez. The lortab is hitting me hard today.
He was created with the DM. There’s nothing special about him. In 4e you use a tool called the “Character Builder” and it enforces rather strict rules to determine a “legal” character vs. a “house-ruled” character. A “legal” character is one that would be allowed in RPGA tournaments, usually considered the strictest enforcement of game balance.
My ranger has no unique or special magic items that are not available to any other character in the campaign. He uses a spiked chain, which is generally derided as a “sub-optimal” choice (all the character optimization builds for ranger use dual-wielding bastard swords or optimized Greatbows, depending on whether the build is melee or ranged). He is a dual-build ranged/melee build, which again is derided as “sub-optimal” since you do more damage as either purely ranged or purely melee.
I built him to be fun to play, not to be optimized for damage. I could build a ranger that would do a LOT more damage if I wanted to.
However, within the confines of that sub-optimal build, I have been very careful to pick specific powers, feats and magic items that synergize as well as I can make them. The spiked chain training feat allows a character to treat the spiked chain as a light blade. This is actually designed for rogues to be able to use a double weapon if they want, since rogue builds have many light-blade feats and powers, originally designed to be used with daggers. But some of those feats are available to any class, and so taking them allows me to gain some advantages to hit that most rangers can’t take because they are specialized in heavy blades (to optimize bastard swords). The end result is that my ranger has a slight edge in actual ability to hit an enemy when compared to other “optimized” rangers.
Plus I took every feat and power I could that increase damage on a per-hit basis, allowing my ability to hit more frequently to stack more damage.
But just looking at my character nobody would think there is anything really special about him. He looks rather boring actually. It’s how they work together that gives him the ability to shine.
BUT, up until now he has been significantly more effective in melee than with ranged attacks. When we hit level 11 I decided to balance his ranged and melee attacks more directly. So I concentrated my paragon path choices and my new and changed feats on making him more balanced between ranged and melee, so now his melee attacks are a bit less effective, but his ranged attacks are much more so. This was both so that the barbarian could become the melee monster he’s supposed to be, and to allow my ranger to become our artillery when that’s necessary. I’m actually looking forward to playing this Sunday because I intend to do as much ranged damage as possible, letting the barbarian and fighter take all the melee glory.
Did you ever play the D&D Forgotten Realms games that were released for the Commodore 64 (and other platforms, I’m sure). There was Hillsfar, Curse of the Azure Bonds and one that preceded both of those but I can’t remember the name and am too lazy to Google right now. Anyway, a friend and I hacked the games and bumped out characters up to 25 stats across the board. Not a big deal on Hillsfar (which was more video game like), but the other two games really benefitted from you being virtually invincible.
Anyway, I started playing a couple of those characters with a friend and, of course, he hated it. Straight-up cheating. He found a way to kill one off and made one a god and said, “OK, he’s an NPC now. You can never play any character like this again.”
Truth be told, they weren’t all that fun to play.
Now, my Kensai from the Oriental Adventures expansion …
Heh, I’ve only played the Baldur’s Gate and Never Winter Nights versions of D&D on computer, and that was on the Mac and PC both.
I used to enjoy maxing out stats. There was a cheat sheet published for Diablo, if I recall, that allowed you to boost your stats, and I did, but found it boring.
I actually had an online debate on the Wizards boards recently about D&D 3.5 and how cheesy it had become. At some point your character is no longer an “adventurer” and is more of a “demigod.”
I admit that I suffer from a sort of cognitive dissonance on the subject of optimizing characters, even within the rules, much less cheating to gain an advantage. I’m a pretty obvious geek and as such, I tend to go to surprising lengths to figure out how to outfit and advance my characters. As JSullens and mtnlurker will tell you, since both of them have been DMs of characters of mine, I can get somewhat obsessed with maximizing my characters’ potential. However, I truly do enjoy the challenge of overcoming difficult challenges, so I don’t want my characters to be overpowered. Except that I do. It’s almost like a strategy/tactics discussion, except it’s more a concept/execution discussion. CONCEPTUALLY I like to have flawed characters, so when I create a unique race, for example, I always make sure the race has significant impactful weaknesses. My 6th level 3.5e elf/dryad druid, for example, has a weakness to fire and takes constitution damage if she is indoors or underground for any length of time. But she has significant strengths too, such as an ability to walk through a forest canopy as if she is on level ground. It so happens that in her chosen profession she is far more likely to find her weaknesses engaged than her strengths, but that’s just the way the cookie crumbles.
But when it comes to execution, I do everything I possibly can to maximize her abilities. I look for every possibly combination of spells and abilities that will create the most effective results. I scour spell books and create excel spreadsheets comparing attack bonuses, armor class, spell penetration, etc. based on a variety of items, skills, feats and spells.
So on one hand I’m very much a power gamer looking for every advantage possible, but at the same time I like to be able to say “I did that with THIS!”.
Hard to explain…
Here’s an example of the sort of thing that gets me all jazzed up in these games…
In Baldur’s gate there is one point where you have to talk to a dragon. You can do this at a pretty low level, something like level 7 or so. The dragon is just supremely overpowered and you’re only supposed to talk to the dragon to learn something.
But I wanted to kill the dragon. So I went in there with my low level party and attacked it. Nice thing about computer games is the “save” button.
Got killed.
Reorganized and went back in. Got killed again. Had my spellcasters memorize every possible buff and cast every possible debuff on the dragon and summoned a menagerie of monsters to fight. The screen updates slowed to a crawl… and it was a tough fight that looked for a while like I’d pull it out, but then it breathed on my party. Lost again.
OK, so now this was going to require some thought… So I sat down with the rule book, and with the game and I scoured every spell available for ANY possible way of defeating the dragon.
And voila, there it was… The answer to the problem was simple and I went back in and killed the dragon without taking a hit point of damage.
How did I do it? Well, I realized that there were spells that had been designed to buff your characters that could be used to debuff the dragon. The main problem in fighting the dragon was that he had a magic resistance of like 90%, so I could only hurt him with physical attacks, but his armor class was so high, and he had so many hit points that it was impossible to kill him with such low level characters.
But there’s this spell that you can only cast on “friendly” characters called “Spell Resistance” which gives your character low level spell resistance, something like 10 or 20% spell resistance. But right there in the description it said “Sets the target’s spell resistance to 10%, even if it is higher“. Whoah… So since the dragon was supposed to talk to you, you had a talisman that turned the dragon “friendly” just long enough to answer the question you needed answered. Actually I think the dragon gave you something you needed. Anyway, while the dragon was friendly, I wondered, could you cast a buff spell on him?
Turns out you could. So I went in and “buffed” the dragon, taking his 90% spell resistance down to 10% spell resistance, and then I immediately cast “petrify” on him. Turned him to stone. Bang! some ungodly amount of experience for the party. But there’s more. The “buff” spell “stone to flesh” restores a petrified character to life, but with only 1 hit point!. So, I arrayed all of my forces, summoned loads of monsters and hit the dragon with “stone to flesh”. Of course it wasn’t friendly anymore, but now it only had one hit point.
I killed it TWICE without taking a hit point of damage. BANG! another massive amount of experience. And guess what? the item we needed was on its dead body.
That’s the sort of thing I love doing…
Charles: Just saw your comment.
Remember, I put this in the context of a cinematic movie, or action/adventure novel. Sure it’s implausible in real life, but that wasn’t the context of the question. Is this any more implausible than, say, Arnold Schwarzanegger killing an invisible alien predator with a stick?
Or Sylvester Stallone taking out an entire Vietnamese prisoner of war camp with a hand-held machine gun?
Or Aragorn and Legalos single-handedly holding off a force of dozens of Orcs?
Context…
OK, the DM ruled that the scenario played out mostly as I had described. The sole difference is that he indicated that my character’s attempts at stealth were not entirely successful. However, no alarm was raised. So I guess he’s got a hook for some side quest now… which is what I was actually hoping for.
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