Lava ? Hell, from a quick browse of the SRD, being *set on fire *causes… 1d6 damage per round. With an easy-ish reflex save to stop it altogether, every round.
I’m just saying, in D&D land napalm in the morning smells like minor inconvenience at best :).
Good question. It looks like the effect changes somewhat in that panel, too - he’s got streamers of what looks like steam coming off of him that’s not in any of the other panels.
Unless for example, you have a 4e Epic power that let’s you instantly come back when you die once per day.
A couple of years ago we were playing such a game, having a battle at the top of a 200’ tall tower. The Tank fell off. Hit the ground. Stood back up, figured out that he couldn’t get back to the fight before it would be over, and instead went to the local tavern for a beer.
Speaking of cinematic reality, credit to Burlew for having Belkar actually take damage from being thrown through a window.
Which, as we all know, is contractually obligated to be cheese dip. Don’t anger Groo.
Elan wouldn’t, though, because he really does operate on cinematic reality.
The Oots forum seems to think that Belkar could either live or die in terms of his HP and the damage he has sustained. The narrative favors survival of course, prophesy notwithstanding.
One poster speculated that the pain inflicted by the amulet implies that he needs to make a save every round and he stumbled when he missed one of his rolls.
A save vs what though? The gnome who sold it said that it was just a standard Protection from Evil and nothing in that spell’s effect would cause that to happen.
Frankly, there’s no in-game rule saying that it should even cause discomfort (except maybe to a summoned creature since the spell actively repulses those) and it’d make reasonable sense for even an evil cleric to cast it upon himself before fighting a vampire, assuming his deity allows it.
Then you shouldn’t run D&D games. A level 20 Barbarian can survive a fall at terminal velocity onto rock for the same reason a level 20 Wizard can cast Meteor Swarm. Screwing over players who choose to play physically superhuman characters and not just explicitly magical characters on the basis that they should be no more capable than ordinary people is just obnoxious.
Jophiel: I see in strip 969 that the amulet caused Belkar intense pain when activated. (Also featured were the yellow supersayan field as well as the white streamers.) D&D has pain rules, doesn’t it?
Yeees. For a given value of “has rules”. Which is to say there’s a pain-causing *spell *that does a thing (namely -4 to most rolls on account of mind-rending agony), and the DM can improvise from there :).
I’ve been running a campaign every Sunday for more than five years, and I haven’t had any complaints yet. Everyone at my table knows the rules I’m playing with, and none of them object to them. If they did, I wouldn’t use them.
Wait, what? 
ETA: Oops, I see Miller has thought better of it and now I appear to be putting words into his mouth. :smack:
Yeah, I thought better of it, but thanks for leaving the quote up there for everyone to see anyway.
Sorry. I’ve been glad of a second thought or two in my time and if I’d noticed you were still well within the edit window I might have been kinder just to afford you the same courtesy.
Incidentally, [Sheldon Cooper]is it possible that your thanks are insincere?[/Sheldon Cooper]
Well, since it’s up there now, Grumman, I apologize for the insult. It wasn’t appropriate for the thread, or for my position as a moderator.
Despite my hair-trigger reaction to Miller’s profanity, I’m actually with him on the falling-damage thing. Heroic-fantasy stories don’t usually allow the likes of Conan or any other warrior type, even those who routinely come off better in a fight with an insane demigod, to just look over the edge of a precipice and say “Eh. I’ll walk away from this” before stepping into a terminal-velocity plummet.
Admittedly there was one point during The One Tree where some character or other was looking down from a city wall at a battle taking place on the ground below, and I instinctively found myself thinking that they could just jump down there and pile in because they ought to be able to take about 6d6 damage and shrug it off. But drama works better if you figure that most humans can’t pull off that kind of stunt, and even in an RPG a lot of character types will - or ought to - splat if they try to jump that far. (IIRC Castellan Lebbick tries something of the sort towards the close of The Mirror of Her Dreams, but he lands badly injured and isn’t badass enough to survive the combat.)
As mentioned, certain spells may say that they cause pain and apply a negative penalty as a result. But Protection from Evil isn’t one of them. Saying that the amulet causes discomfort as a story device is one thing, using it as a reason for in-game penalties is a lot different.
Mind you, I ask only for the meta-game of puzzling out the game mechanics used in OotS, not to imply that Burlew needs to get fired for that blunder 
You may be interested in Lava and Brimstone: A Comprehensive Guide to Lava, Magma, and Superheated Rock (note: pdf). It’s an award-winning supplement written by some friends of mine, that truly explains how to handle lava in d20 systems, as well as containing an appendix that modifies their lava rules for over a dozen over RPG systems. It’s probably the best gaming supplement I’ve ever read–and best of all, it’s free.
Aw, hell. I know I said it gave cross-system rules for over a dozen systems, but that was my poor memory. It really only gives rules for D20 and World of Darkness. I think maybe they were considering a supplement to explain how to use their lava rules in GURPS, Shadowrun, Dread, etc.