An Inconvenient Opinion

If the fire is hot enough, it'll cauterize the nerves and you won't feel a thing.

And anyway, lightning has incredibly high voltage and it still doesn't kill instantly.

Unlikely.
Fire is a purifying force. That's why we cremate bodies and simpler folk from the past used fire as an execution method.

Every one of these dumb alignment debates is based on the perception that even having an alignment requires an absolutist, extreme position.

Being aligned with Good does not necessarily mean pure or pacifistic. Good characters can and do use violence and pain (Source: Every narrative work in the history of humanity,) it just means that they avoid it when possible, and they don't get off on it.

Every form of killing someone is excruciatingly painful. It wasn't until we developed firearms that you could reliably kill someone suddenly and abruptly with minimal pain, and even then only on a lucky/good shot right to the brainpan or spinal cord

Suffering is just a fucking part of life. You deal with it as best you can.

Are you implying that being ripped apart with blades isn't extremely painful and disfiguring?

Amps.
It's the Amperage that kills you, not the voltage.
Think like this: Voltage is Quantity, Amperage is pressure.

You can swim in an ocean of water, millions of gallons, with no problem at all. But the moment that a quart of Super-Pressurized water fires through your sternum, you're dead.

Beheadings, when properly done, are fast and appears to be most humane to the victim. Though very gory for the spectators. Inb4 that one unrealiable, unscientific anecdote about winking decapitated head.

You have it exactly backwards. An even better metaphor is a hydraulic piston. It would be less injurious to be subjected to the force of the little piston, rather than the big piston, due to the difference in force, which is analogous to voltage.

The problem is doing it properly, it really wasn't until the Guillotine was invented. Headsman axes were pretty blunt cause they had to crack through bone and swords were expensive and the straight edge made it awkward.

The Guillotine was originally intended to be 100% human method of execution

V=IR boys. Voltage applied to resistance of body yields amperage.

They're all inextricably linked, and I still loathe the fact EE isn't at least high school required.

I actually did take analog and digital EE in high school, although that was quite a long time ago.

My understanding of the matter is that amperage really is a much bigger concern than voltage, when it comes to lethality—"it's the volts that jolt, it's the mils that kill"— and that this has a lot to do with the path electricity takes through the human body; at high voltages, electricity is conducted close to your skin, whereas the pathway for lower voltages is considerably more internal and much more likely to send your heart into fibrillation. I've never actually checked this, though.

There are better and there are worse ways.

Here's what I know. Interested to see if others have read differently.

>Drowning
>Panic when submerging, fear, choking and burning sensation when breathing water, calmness in the later 10s of seconds as brain runs out of oxygen
>approx 2 minutes total

>Electrocution
>High current can cause near instantaneous unconsciousness and also arrhythmia (heart stopped) which will result in death seconds later
>Low current may not cause unconsciousness, but can easily cause arrhythmia
>Probably the least painful way to die because it works on your nerves
>Probably the most painful way to nearly die but survive for same reasons

>Fire
>Will cause death by asphyxiation
>Most likely way is to die via inhaling fire, burning lungs, being unable to respire
>60-90 seconds
>During that time almost every pain receptor in your body will be activated and you will most likely lose all other sensations such as sight and hearing
>Extremely painful, but you're dead before most of the burning happens so possibly less painful than it may appear to others.

>Blood loss
>Time is dependent on rate of blood loss
>Pain is dependent on nature and size of wound
>Most fatal wounds to soft tissue are not that much more painful than superficial wounds as the noiceptors are mostly on the surface of the body
>Bloodloss itself results in a gradual mood depression and loss of consciousness

I don't really know about freezing to death from a rapidly freezing attack like magical ice or liquid nitrogen, but hypothermia is supposedly extremely painful because your body slowly dies from the extremities inwards.

There's a big difference between a burst of fire blowing someone's face off and actually setting someone on fire and letting them burn to a crisp. Evil is when you cause avoidable prolonged suffering.

FantasyCraft has specific rules for elemental damage. It's about the only good thing the system does

meh, true good would refuse to kill all together, believing that there is good in everyone and that anyone can be rehabilitated.

human body approximation (dry skin, any amount of tissue and bone) is about 1200ohms, which is really low. The surface of the skin has several K-ohms IIRC but this is easily broken and it enters the mushy wet insides rather easily.

50mAmps is enough for damage; or 50 volts for pain. 50=I*1200, I=~41mAmps for pain. I can't recall the death amp amount, but there's evidence that 9volts through the tongue can kill a person (though the resistance of the human body via tongue-exit is probably drastically smaller than the 1.2Kohms that's the ballistic-gel approximation of the entire body, skin-entry,skin-exit).

Could be mistaken.
t. electrical engie dropout

There are no humane ways to kill, even less so in the middle ages or fantasy, except magical knockout+poison gas. You'd need to get to sci-fi or artillery to get that painless death deal, and killing's still wrong.

>poison gas
>humane
>artillery
>humane
You're stuck with literal instant death sci-fi lasers if you want human ways to kill.

That guy looks delicious. I can't be the only one thinking this.

/ghoul/ plz go

>Ice magic

Go run an image search for frostbite. At least with some forms of fire you may get a relatively fast death from CO poisoning. Electricity is very useful in outright torture nowadays.

Not that you aren't a complete fucking moron overall. Lethal violence of all sorts is utterly horrifying, especially to the victim. Go over someone with mace or blade and the merciful option may be to slit his throat afterwards, but go look up the Dagestan execution video to see how fun that really is. Shattered bones will be a lot of fun, busted ribs makes ever breath hurt like fucking hell. Stabbed in the guts? You may have two weeks to live, rotting from the inside out before sepsis finally claims you. Basically every orc, goblin, kobold, robber or whatever that you/your players kill will suffer massive pain and soul-wrenching terror no matter what method is used. The question is if you go out of your way to hurt them even more or not.

Think I'll take a rock to the old noggin there friend.

I was once burned by hot tar. I've also been electrocuted by an electric fence. I've also been stabbed (accidentally), and hit in the head with a softball bat (accidentally).

ELEMENTAL DAMAGE IS SO MUCH FUCKING WORSE THAN PHYSICAL DAMAGE HOLY SHIT ARE YOU EVEN KIDDING ME

Being shot unexpectedly in the back of the head with a shotgun at close range seems like a pretty good way to go all things considered. Like if I had to choose.

Nah, fire magic is fine as long as it cauterises the nerves.

Also Dany did nothing wrong.

By D&D standards?
>Fire Damage
Fucking Hurts, and you can't put it out because it's MAGICAL fire, yeah, Magic makes up Cause and effect here, so that's fucked
>Ice Damage
Risk of heart attack, frostbite, or simply passing out or massive headaches from the cold affecting you fucking you over, and of course your body expanding from freezing making your brain feel like it's trying to escape from your skull
>Lightning Magic
How does losing all control of biochemical functions for a period feel, next to cooking inside out, risking paralysis, or just shutting down completely and even your brain frying and exploding like a session on the electric chair?
>Water
Drowning, Salty water, internal explosions, sickness, and whatever else is in the water next to being sliced to pieces via pressure based water jets, or crushed by the weight of a wave.
>Air
Stripped of flesh and bone in a tornado, buffeted, thrown around to experience blunt force trauma, getting a heart attack with air sent up your veins, loosing the means to breathe, gas related deaths, or having air sucked out of body or lungs like that Freddy Krueger scene
>Earth
Buried alive, crushed under landfall, poisoned via irradiated contaminated earth, earthquake damage, boulders, a lotta blunt force trauma here next to dirt in wounds which means they don't close up and heal, leading to you bleeding out.

Hit them right with a club and they won't even feel it. One second they'll see a big lump of wood coming at them, the next they aren't even experiencing existence.

Death by fire is actually more humane. 4th degree burns destroy nerve endings so you don't actually feel pain as opposed to having a collapsed lung which would be a horrible feeling.

Arson is legal and the only way to get to heaven

Ehh, injuries are horrific no matter the setting. Watching someone die is a truly terrible experience for everyone involved.

It's only excruciatingly painful if it's intentionally slow. My interpretation of fire magic is closer to explosions than "douse in gasoline and light".

From what I've heard, the real pain from extreme burns comes during the recovery. So even if you don't kill someone with a fireball, they're in for some agony. Given how painkillers really don't exist in your typical fantasy setting - barring magic - that person will probably wish they had died.

Ouch to the hot tar.

In most DnD stuff this is trivial to get around, use merciful spells.
What would a merciful fireball feel like do you think?

Can I just pretend to be a wizard without getting into ethical philosophizing or whatever? Fuck man.

If I had a choice then I'd have enough explosive to vaporize my body strapped to the back of my head.