Re: mechanics of surprise

On Wed, 7 Mar 2007, Will in New Haven wrote:
> I think characters should often, perhaps usually, know who can kill
> them in one blow and who can't. A campaign where such foes are
> indistinguishable from many others who cannot is, in my opinion,
> flawed.

One thing that causes a problem in D&D 3e is that a full-round attack is 
much more effective than a single attack, and maybe that's why some 
people's game descriptions seem to be much higher fatality than what I've 
seen both running and playing in D&D 3.5.

My group fought a lot of running attacks and such that allowing full-round

attacks weren't the norm.  In fact, the two one-round kill PC fatalities 
in my game both consisted of a spell-casting type getting too close to a 
monster so it could take a 5-foot step and do a full-round attack on them.

Most of the other times, the players did a pretty good job of avoiding 
full-round attacks unless they could take them.

John Morrow