The description of the breath (here from the adult red dragon, but apart from damage amounts and save DCs, they are all the same) says:
The dragon exhales fire in a 60-foot cone. Each creature in that area must make a DC 21 Dexterity saving throw, taking 63 (18d6) fire damage on a failed save, o...
The fight was tuned to give players a 50/50 of going down by that point, if they weren't playing at above the Jedi curve. It was the Act I finale fight, and they played it very smart.
The fight was supposed to feel perilous and while it did, due to their play, they weren't in any imminent danger.
Even if rocks fell, only the wizard would have gone down at that point.
And it was them who thought to run up to the boss and get under them.
Before this, the crab had used a tuned-down Reverse Gravity, dropped the people who failed and then used "Intensify Gravity", which was me homebrewing in a classic from Final Fantasy. If you failed, you lost half your current HP. If you succeeded, you would lose half of that (a quarter of your current).
It was all good fun when the Wizard triumphantly took the least damage out of everyone from that round.
@Shalvenay It's a term coined in Magic the Gathering card design, iirc. Below it, cards feel boring and weak. Above the curve, they feel overpowered on some dimension or axis. Card games depend on these imbalances existing to keep the game interesting. For example, Rock is unreasonably better than Scissors, but Paper is unreasonably better than Rock.
So, the Jedi Curve is the boundary between Normal people and Jedi, in the metaphor.
And everyone wants to be a Jedi
It regularly leaks into other realms of game design as the term is punchy and reasonably conveys the point, usually.
@Axoren because it reminds me of a character I had not too long ago that I really managed to fork at a key moment in their plot development because I got sort of stuck in a vision that turned out to be a bad idea, and it made me wonder if I had gotten into a situation where I had outleveled my knowledge of play
(like: this was the first time I had taken an arcane char in D&D anywhere close to epic levels)
Well, the Jedi curve is more of a description of game balance, rather than an actual feature. It's sort of a measure of the "average" performance. If a game decision is average, then there's no real drive for you to pick it over any other average options. There has to be something punchy about it, something that makes it better than average.
I suppose one could frame it more as a tactics question -- I'm trying to figure out what the best options are for my cleric when they're put into the interrogator's seat and have to deal with someone...stubborn/defiant, when they're someone who doesn't want to resort to disproportionate force and/or overt torture techniques if at all possible
(we can presume this is D&D 3.5e for the intent of this question, and the char I'm talking about is a Clr 14/Rgr1, Good aligned so Evil descriptor stuff and anything involving undead is out of the question ofc)
@Axoren yeah, mind magic wouldn't be out of place, the issue is getting access to the spell (they are Good and War domained, so they'd have to find a Knowledge domain cleric to scribe a clerical scroll of it for them)
Quite a few undead are immune to the unconscious condition:
(Plague Zombie)
Immunities death effects, disease, mental, paralyzed, poison, unconscious;
The only thing I found linking nonlethal and unconscious is Knocked Out and Dying:
You gain the dying 1 condition. [...] If the damage was deal...
so -- I have a char in a D&D 3.5e "game" (it's really a persistent world environment with some rule tweaks as a result, but we can presume D&D 3.5e for the purposes of this question), Clr14/Rgr1 with Good and War domains, who is scratching their head trying to figure out how to deal with interrogating stubborn/defiant NPCs who have no intentions of going along with the flow of any sort of non-punitive interrogation/interview strategy
but they would far rather use the minimum force required to get the job done instead of jumping straight to Jack Bauer and/or the fifth degree. the good news is that not only do they have access to all non-domain cleric spells up to 7th circle, they can get higher level clerical scrolls scribed for them if need be (up to 9th circle)...
the bad news is that their access to magic items is significantly restricted, to the point where they can't rely on "named" magic items to be available at all. the other part is that there's no epic magic or items at all in the world in question
am I missing a constraint here, or would that be sufficient to make a mainsite Q?
As in asking for whether there any in-game tools to interrogate stubborn NPC? That seems to me like it should be fine. Whether there are further constraint/info need I'll leave to those versed in 3.5 who can ask you in comments
Quite a few undead are immune to the unconscious condition:
(Plague Zombie)
Immunities death effects, disease, mental, paralyzed, poison, unconscious;
The only thing I found linking nonlethal and unconscious is Knocked Out and Dying:
You gain the dying 1 condition. [...] If the damage was deal...
