Basically, a house cat as statted in the monster-manual has a 51% chance of killing your average unarmed commoner in 3.5 in combat, and even if the commoner survives, they will end up seriously injured. It's among the many absurdities of trying to build a tabletop system that works on both a heroic and practical scale.
Another example is the so-called commoner-railgun, which uses the fact that handing someone within 1 meter of you an object is a free action, which means you can organize a long chain of commoners with a wooden pole and have them all ready the action of handing the next person in the chain the pole when it is handed to them. The last one simply lets go of the pole. The pole travels the full length of that chain in one turn, which is 6-seconds. That means for every 6 peasants in the chain, the pole is going an additional meter a second. Line up 120 peasants and they "fire" the pole at 20 m/s. A quarterstaff is 1.8kg. That means that our pole is delivering 36,000 newtons of force, which is about 12 times the amount of force needed to break a bone. That quarterstaff will probably kill you if it hits you. Now find a city and get 12,000 peasants lined up in the direction of another city. Now we're talking about just shy of 4 million newtons of force. You've got a railgun.
Basically, a house cat as statted in the monster-manual has a 51% chance of killing your average unarmed commoner in 3.5 in combat, and even if the commoner survives, they will end up seriously injured. It's among the many absurdities of trying to build a tabletop system that works on both a heroic and practical scale.
Another example is the so-called commoner-railgun, which uses the fact that handing someone within 1 meter of you an object is a free action, which means you can organize a long chain of commoners with a wooden pole and have them all ready the action of handing the next person in the chain the pole when it is handed to them. The last one simply lets go of the pole. The pole travels the full length of that chain in one turn, which is 6-seconds. That means for every 6 peasants in the chain, the pole is going an additional meter a second. Line up 120 peasants and they "fire" the pole at 20 m/s. A quarterstaff is 1.8kg. That means that our pole is delivering 36,000 newtons of force, which is about 12 times the amount of force needed to break a bone. That quarterstaff will probably kill you if it hits you. Now find a city and get 12,000 peasants lined up in the direction of another city. Now we're talking about just shy of 4 million newtons of force. You've got a railgun.