What's the highest level by D&D standards that a normal human being in the real world could achieve?

Most high school athletes could do what a 3.PF Fighter does at level 20 if they applied themselves.

Level 20 fighter.

Basic/Advanced?
0 or 1.

3e?
Hard to tell because ability scores in 3e don't scale well at all while level scales things too hard.

4e/5e?
Couldn't tell you, I only spent about 5 months with 4e and about 6 with 5e, and don't remember the maths well enough to extrapolate.

I want to see athletes fight someone who can shrug off tank shots, and flash his weapon so dazzlingly that it makes lesser men panic.

Hp is an abstraction, not actual meat points. No one survives tank shots not even dnd characters.

A level 20 fighter has A LOT of HP and can do many attacks per round with an amazing modifier. They can survive several fireballs and single handedly take down terrible monsters.
D&D has never been about athletic ability, but rather tactical combat, so rules were never designed for you to play Usain Bolt. Unless you make a ridiculous Tabaxi Monk combo

Did he sleep with dozens in the last year alone?

4e is definitely lower than 10. I'd honestly say like 2-3 as even low level 4e stuff is pretty superhuman (Like a heroic-tier assassin at-will lets them just climb or jump their full movement speed without a roll.)

D20 seems to suggest surviving a tank is like surviving a mid-tier's dragon breath.

It was a joke about dumb-ass devs and their brainless worshipers trying to perform/imitate certain physical feats and using the results to determine how to balance classes in a fucking fantasy game. Couldn't even be bothered to use feats from the best specimens humanity had to offer, no no. Their sorry attempts were more than enough to balance martials around.

About level 6.

Depends on how you play off HP, really. If HP aren't just treated as meat points and are instead viewed by as a resource for survivability, evasiveness and luck, then I'd wager that humans would be limited to martial classes and level up to 10 or so in 5e.

>implying hp is meat points
A 3.PF Fighter would die from having his guts ripped to shreds the same way a person would IRL. Unless you're one of the retards who also thinks that a dagger driven into your brain only deals 1d4 damage, it's easy to see that a Fighter would survive a tank firing at them the same way a real life people would - by not getting hit head on due to extrodinary luck, reflexes, or battle experience.
Meanwhile the Wizard just teleports inside the tank and makes everyone inside his mindslave.

Not so sure if Mike Tyson could survive being shot by 30-40 longbow arrows.

Depends on the level of the fighter. I mean, Heroic Tier? Yeah. An Epic-Tier fighter is likely more 'Blocking the cannon with his shield and just taking a little bit of impact' for the damage. I mean, mythological fighters did shit like 'Tie themselves to a rock by their own entrails so they can keep fighting for a full day'

I dunno. If some gangster thug could take 18 bullets before going down then I'd say it's possible to be level 1, even level 2. Especially if we're just talking NPC classes.

A dagger to the brain deals 2d4 damage.

Joe Schmo off the streets? Maybe like level 3 if he excersized and ate right. The real question you should be asking is what level would the prime specimens of our race be in D&D. Take a look a Louis Cyr for example: Dude is considered to be the world's strongest human being ever recorded. Then you've got Usain Bolt as world's fastest man, Michael Bisping as world's best fighter (would say Silva but the guy fucked up when he got caught taking roids twice), etc.. What level would people like that be?

>implying hp isn't meat points
So when you are completely naked and save against a fireball to avoid some of the damage:
Is it because you always dodge the fireball (unless it kills you) and you're checking how well you dodged it? In that case why does Evasion and Improved Evasion specifically allow you to completely avoid the blast?
Are you checking how lucky you are to only be singed by a surprisingly weak flame? Then why is the flame more powerful for someone at the very edge who failed their save?
Or is it because it's actually doing meat point damage, and as a result you're trying to avoid the brunt of that meat point damage?

As much as people want to say HP is not meat points, in D&D it most assuredly is meat points.

Then what about the coup de grace, or spells that are literally described as crushing their victim or ripping their skin off?

Finally, someone says the right answer.

>comparing 3.PF fighters to mythological fighters
If the devs had gone in with your mindset we wouldn't be having this thread.

Humans can have 20s in their stats at level 1 if they rolled an 18, put their racial point in it and chose a feat that gives them another point, like Athlete.

You want to know what HP really represents in dnd?
a gamist abstraction

Looking at the skill bonuses and the associated probabilities characters can achieve in 5e, I'd say about level 30-40.

Well, I was comparing 4e fighters to Mythological ones (Hence heroic and epic). 4e tended to go with 'It's not all meat points but there is a degree of meat'. 1/2 HP was Bloodied and more or less where you couldn't stress your body any more to avoid direct hits, hence why some powers fluffed as Finishing Blows did a shit tonne more against bloodied targets or why angels had a def bonus until they were bloodied due to their untouchable purity.

So you did get tougher to the degree an epic level fighter would just laugh in your face if Joe Peasant stabbed him in the stomach with a dagger there was also a strong element of willpower and endurance (Which is why healing surges could be taken away by environmental effects tiring you out and why a Warlord could heal you by inspiring you to fight through the pain.)

Case in point for the 'finishing blow' sorts of powers.

>Suffering's End
>Daily Martial, Weapon
>Standard Action Melee weapon
>Target: One bloodied creature
>Effect: Before the attack, you can shift a number of squares equal to your Wisdom modifier.
>Attack: Strength vs. AC
>Hit: 8[W] + Strength modifier damage.
>Miss: 5[W] + Strength modifier damage.

...

Explain to me why a level 20 fighter can survive 18 seconds fully immersed head-to-toe in liquid magma.

The devs are incompetent and have no idea what they're doing.

Do the rules allow for carrying cannons around with you, a la EDF's fencer (bug removing space marine) class?

Because he's a monster, a demigod, a being of power. At 20th level he's an inhuman creature of great power and incredible might. Feats break the laws of physics, even if they aren't supernatural. He's not constrained by physics, why would lava kill him instantly?

see

>He's not constrained by physics, why would lava kill him instantly?
Because he's constrained by physics everywhere else by design and it's a shitty double standard to say that he can swim in lava yet can't get any utility beyond "I swing sword"

Back in 3e, the answer was somewhere around 56. Baden-Powell had ridiculous numbers of followers so he must have had an equally ridiculous Leadership score.

>Explain to me why a level 20 fighter can survive 18 seconds fully immersed head-to-toe in liquid magma.
Because (whether the fighter knows it or now), they have become a champion of powerful supernatural entities which provide a certain amount of protection.

Divine favour has always been part of hp.

Don't bother. These "HP is not meat points" idiots just repeat the same thing over and over, and eventually break down into ad hominems when you keep pointing out there are situations in DnD where you literally cannot avoid describing something as actually harming someone.

Level 20 commoner. They were an NPC class in 3.5

In 3e Modern, Twitter accounts become some of the most powerful entities known to man, with followers in the tens to hundreds of thousands.
Little do they know that PunPun is no man.

Because in the good editions of D&D, being in lava means you are dead, flat out, after a round.
Your problem is treating the anomaly edition as thou it represents the game.

5E uses the same lava rules in the DMG (18d10 per round of immersion - basically 100 damage a round on average, enough to effortlessly kill anyone below level 10)

I would say about level 5 for olympic athletes for most physical feats, but there are some differences. Real people tend to move a lot faster than D&D characters - covering 120 feet in 6 seconds is not even close to a sprinter. Meanwhile a barbarian can deflect blades with just the toughness of their body and so on in ways humans cannot do.

>8d10 per round of immersion - basically 100 damage a round on average, enough to effortlessly kill anyone below level 10
It's trivially easy to get 100 HP by Level 10 as a Martial user. You also have to consider shit like the Bear Barbarian, who takes half damage from practically everything.

>It's trivially easy to get 100 HP by Level 10 as a Martial user
Maybe if you're prioritizing your CON more than most characters. Barbarians are an exception.
Most people want those first two ability score improvements to go into their main combat stat, presuming they start with 16.
I'll grant that a Bear-Totem Barbarian Goliath who focuses on their CON is going to last a lot longer than most.

There's an old D&D module called through the something mirror or something like that that has the PCs ending up in modern London
It explicitly notes that modern adult humans are all level 5-6 by virtue of social encounters but almost never go past that BUT can swing way above their weight class due the sheer amount of bonuses modern equipment grant. Fighting the police id assumed to result in a TPK against even a mid level party even if they may take a few officers down in the process, getting the military to come down on their heads is an epic level encounter with a CR of "Way too high for you"

In 4e, iirc 10 was the max a mortal could theoretically achieve.

Yes, because they're heroes already a cut above the rest of humanity. They've always been special only now they've chosen to dedicate themselves to a particular path. This is the same reason why the inverse is true in Shadow of the Demon Lord and you only get absolute average in stats and to move one point from one place to another, you're not a big damn hero yet, you're just another dude who's likely to get swallowed whole by an ogre as anybody else.

>Most people want those first two ability score improvements to go into their main combat stat, presuming they start with 16.
Going STR/CON is a fairly common build for most front-line martial characters user.

Even still, it's pretty weird how the Playtest Fighter got nerfed because people felt that superiority dice refreshing per round was OP but being able to swim in lava or fall off a cliff is acceptable for a "normal person" to do.

what like this?
youtu.be/LBi22AKvsK0&t=60

If they could do that consistently without clearly colored handholds (or any handholds in some cases), sure.

By level, veteran special forces might be something close to 8.
However, because life is not highly regimented and strictly laid out by level, you can just start learning feats and proficiencies whenever you damn well please. It'll take you years but you can just get it.

Level 2 with a shitload of bonus feats

You might find this interesting:
thealexandrian.net/wordpress/587/roleplaying-games/dd-calibrating-your-expectations-2
tl;dr: in 3e, lvl 4 or 5.

but thats still so little that even if you rolled max damage it would not kill a level 1 fighter with 0 con. That would mean that even a commoner born with decent constitution is stronger than any man in existence.

>barbarians only get angry when you narrowly miss them, not when you miss them A LOT
>they also need to narrowly miss you to maintain their rage, not miss by a mile
HP is meat points. Get over it.

Don't engage meatpoints posters, they will violently reject any logic or reason.

Skies the limit

>If we're being honest, most athletes IRL would kick the shit outta Level 20 martials in physicality. It's almost insulting how much weaker D&D characters are supposed to be while supposedly rocking a 20 in STR/DEX/CON.
>If you go by d20 Modern, 20.
>Most high school athletes could do what a 3.PF Fighter does at level 20 if they applied themselves.
>Level 20 fighter.

In D&D 3.5 a level 20 fighter can easily survive a direct hit from nuclear warhead. I'm not kidding, they actually give stats for one in d20 future.

People have survived high calliber bullet rounds to the face.

Phineas gage survived getting a rail spike through his head.

>nukes can't even do 300 damage reliably
How pathetic.

d20 modern also has a much, much lower massive damage threshold.

>d20 modern also has a much, much lower massive damage threshold.
yeah, but it was just as easy a DC to pass and it didn't even instant kill on failure unlike in D&D.

>>nukes can't even do 300 damage reliably
>How pathetic.
No. Its just that a fighter could survive the max damage it would deal.

He must have beaten them off singlehandedly.

How? A 3.5 Fighter has 300hp with max health rolls and a +5 to CON. Even if there's some minmax splat shit that would add an extra 100 to that, that's a pathetic amount compared to what a nuclear explosion should do.

What?!?

Lets take the long jump: World record is 29 feet, 2.5 inches which is a DC 29.

A Level 20 character with a str of 20 has a +28 or more to the skill if he maxed it. Put another rolling a one he would hit the world record.

What about the high jump? 8 ft 0.46 in, so a DC of 32. The level 20 would to roll a four to get that. Keep in mind that these are world records.

What about deadlift? 1,102 lb so in between a 22 and a 23 strength.

What about archery? Back in the day it was figured out that if a Olympic competition bow is a +3 master worked weapon a typical Olympic archer is a level 7 ranger in terms of to hit math.

I see you've escaped to Veeky Forums Carlos. But there's no escape from the Mung.

Holy shit, that sounds awesome.

Damage does not scale linearly in D&D, its really weird actually.

In 5e, even a mid-to-high level character can survive a fall from terminal velocity 99% of the time. The ridiculous HP scaling of everything in newer editions of D&D is one of my least favorite parts about it.

Because your dm isn't me.

Lava kills you in 1d6 rounds if you don't get out of it.

The problem is that in some ways the game rules treat hp as luck points, and in others as meat points.

THat's why I do osr and I make sure that hp is only for things which could reasonably affect meat points.

in serious 3.5 games everyone has liek 30 con by the time they hit lvl 20, because of +con items.

So make that 400 hitpoints.

Fucking kek user

Admit it. You created this topic just because you wanted to post that picture.

Is it though? Or is 300 just an incredible amount of HP? That's roughly equivalent to 3 feet of solid stone. That does sound a little low for a nuke but not absurdly low, especially if that's after reflex save and shit to reduce damage.

3 for an average human, 5 for a particularly gifted one.