A dagger does d4 damage. A dagger is not a small knife, it's like 8 inches of blade. Compared to that, a human bite should be like a d2 on the high side.
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The stronger muscles of a human body is the one of their jaw. A bite can do serious damage. And when you dagger will cut or stab, your bite will ripe away skin and flesh.
Plus, human bites can carry a lot of bacteria and whatnot, so arguably some of that damage should be poison or necrosis damage.
Yeah, like a week later...
You sound like someone who hasn't been bit.
Honestly it's all an abstraction anyway but I absolutely would not bring my chompers to a knife fight.
The thing with human mouths, though, is that they're gross. A dagger will fuck you up, but a mouth may hurt at the time, and then later it's ✨BACTERIA TIME✨. I think maybe they can get a little bonus for that.
+1 toxic damage.
How much is a bite attack from a dog or a wolf? A human bite would be at most half the bite of a dog.
meanwhile monks are out here dropping d10 dragontail kicks to the chest
OP didn't wash their mouth out at any point before the hospital? Red flag and mouth right there.
Also, if the story is true, that's a fucking terrible nurse (and person) for not reporting it - dude could be in a domestic abuse situation getting stitches and she's just like "yeah whatever"
Or she thought it was a sex thing
That is 100% what she thought. I have no doubt about it. There are far too many people that come in that accidentally fell on a 12 inch girthy vegetable.
Million to one shot doc, million to one!
They did get engaged, maybe this is the cover story.
Would’ve been better if they said he had to get a rabies vaccine.
The chances of getting rabies is extremely small, but the second you say that will result in them immediately vaccinating you for the sake of safety as that window can close fairly quickly. And if you change your story they typically don’t care because people scared of vaccines change their story all the time.
Yeah, it's deranged. You didn't spit out or wipe your mouth? You have another human's meat and blood in your mouth and you just casually went with them to hospital like you're wearing lipstick?
I'm not buying it.
And the nurse laughed, and the doctor laughed, and the gurney laughed.
the medical equipment laughed, none of us passed the wisdom check and we got consumed by mimics
And that Gurney's name? Albert Einstein.
Gurney? Is that some sort of gazebo?
A gurney is a device used to move a patient who can't easily walk and needs to lie flat. Unlike a stretcher, a gurney has wheels so that it doesn't need to be carried. When an EMT transports a patient from an ambulance into a hospital emergency room, she uses a gurney.
That happened.
Of course it didn't happen, it's a post on the internet! Much like at the gaming table we're here for fun, not realism!
A commoner(your average person) has 4hp. It would be difficult to kill someone in 1 bite unless you went right to the throat. 1 d4 is more than enough damage, and imo is actually too much for a single bite from a human.
If a common human can survive it, it dealt less than 4 damage. And unless you're a monk, tavern brawler or some race that adds a bite attack, that's an unarmed attack and only deals 1+Strength damage.
IRL letal damage is rarely immediately lethal, which is a fact not translated well into the game. The fact he went to the ER is a good sign that it very easily could have lead to death for someone without medical aid.
Also by biting the arm instead of say, the neck, is pretty clear it was a declared non-lethal attack
In either case, he'd have fallen unconscious first. If he did, then sure, but otherwise... And it still wouldn't mean it was 1d6+Strength, because you can still roll high on a d4.
Bite a bear and get back to me. That'll be a better metric.
Bringing realism into D&D is silly. For one thing, we're talking about a levelled character, they're necessarily super human. For another, by your bear logic a .22 rifle wouldn't deal damage at all.
This entire post is people trying to debate game mechanics using real world violence. I'm pointing out they're doing it badly.
And yes, PCs are superhuman to a degree. That's why they have much higher ability scores and, in the case of the barbarian, a bonus to damage while raging. And when they do an unarmed attack, it deals 1 + Strength (+2 for Rage). For a commoner, that's 1 or 2 points of damage. For a level 1 barbarian, that's around 6 points. 1d4 + mods doesn't make sense and 1d6 is right out.
I suggested a bear because it has twice as much health as a commoner, so there's more space to measure. A .22 rifle can kill a bear, but it might take a few shots because of a low damage roll. And it's a fuck ton more likely to kill it than just biting it. 1 point of damage isn't a small amount. We just don't want to measure anything smaller.
I came to say precisely this.
The standard hp for a regular human, which for the setting is probably in better shape than the office honed bodies of today, to be incapacitated for combat and eventually die is about 4 (depending on edition).
There is maybe one way a trained human could perform a combat biting attack that would render someone unable to fight back, which is a bite to crush the wind pipe, and with all anatomical protection in place, it seems unfeasible even if they would have the jaw strength for it.
Aren't human bites like super dangerous because of how filthy our mouths are?
Yes. We have one of the dirtiest mouths. Like flesh eating bacteria in a bite wound from humans is par for the course.
So 1+Strength immediate damage and a constitution saving throw with a DC of 10+damage dealt or suffer an infection curse? Sounds badass.
Worldbuilding idea for a challenging campaign: give every fully-sentient humanoid character, commoners included, a bite attack that powerful. That aughta put the kibosh on any murderhobo behavior for a time.
You could bite your own or someone else's finger in half as easily as you can bite a carrot. Don't underestimate the mechanical power of the jaw
A normal person cannot bite their own finger in half because the body has things in place to prevent you from overly injuring yourself like that. You would stop yourself short and just cause pain, maybe bleeding, but no long term damage.
Now someone else’s finger is a different story. Also people with certain medical disorders can ignore the feelings stopping them from biting their own finger off.
I've always wondered if this is actually true, or if it just gets spread around as true because no sane person would actually test it with all their might lol
Or maybe it's true in the sense that "a normal person can't stab themselves in the face with a knife because the body has things in place to prevent that"
I mean... There's this guy that cut off his arm to get out of a hole sooooo...
Chaotic cringe
I could see this as being fake, but I believe it is equally likely to be real. 11th hour, slightly buzzed or worse, character is hanging by a thread and you want to stretch every rule to infinity and beyond? I have seen some ahem interesting...examples to "validate" a rules "extension". Chainmail belts, blowdarts, contained arson, to name the standouts. Just biting someone hard enough to need stitches? Easily possible.
Hah, this reminds me of when I was a teenager and a girl bit me pretty hard. She didn't send me to the hospital (low roll on the damage?) but she did leave a bruise. To this day, I don't know if it was meant to be a form of flirting.
Stop calling it fake, they were just playing a game of DnD². Instead of pretending to be wizards and tieflings going on an epic adventure , they pretend to be a bunch of regular people playing DnD. Campains usually consist of trying to get all the characters together for a game of DnD.
I myself play as a human (only race available) named Dave, who's trying to find a balance between his work as an accountant and his hobby of playing DnD. In my last session I fumbled an extrovert skill check trying to order pizza for the group.
It's all very meta