"Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”
Funny, this is actually based off of real life (or a real legend, anyway, not sure). This (at least supposedly) happened in India, and when the king stopped paying for dead cobras the farmers pivoted and that’s where snake charmers came from!
Natural regeneration, devoid of magic, requires more calories than the severed limb will provide. The ring of regeneration creates new flesh via magic, bypassing the rules of physics
Technically if magic were real, then the rules of magic would be the rules of physics. Plus any rules of nonmagical physics.
This is invoked hilariously in Harry Potter and the Natural 20, which involves a D&D 3.5e character being portalled to Magical England. His name is Milo, and he works a little differently than the people native to this universe. For example, he takes actions over the course of exact 6 second increments. And he can heal almost any wound with 8 hours of sleep, with his body magically knitting itself back to full health at the moment 8 hours have passed. He’s not capable of learning new skills over time, his level of proficiency stays exactly the same in all tasks into he levels up, at which point improving his abilities requires investing skill points. He finds the idea of learning and healing gradually to be ridiculous and silly. Also, he can move faster going at a diagonal than a cardinal.
This reminds me of the time my group played a kobold campaign. We found a halfling scout and dealt with him. Then we made an improvised catapult and launched his corpse into the middle of his camp. And then we snuck in and wiped the rest of the halfling party while they were trying to figure out what was happening.
One of the guys in our party put skills in cooking and rolled a nat 20 making halfling jerky. A few sessions later a wizard or whatever granted us a wish, and we wished for our supply of nat 20 halfling jerky to never run out.
So now we’re rolling around the countryside raising hell and handing out halfling jerky to everyone because it is now the most powerful diplomatic tool in our arsenal. We never told anyone what it was made out of and pretty much any NPC who didn’t want to kill us on sight got a piece.
I don’t remember what happened to the party. I think our GM gave up in disgust after a while. Good times.
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