Lord British Postulate

This article is a stub. You can help 1d4chan by expanding it

The Lord British Postulate refers to the tendency of certain players to attempt to murder ultra-important and/or ultra-powerful NPCs for bragging rights and lulz. Whether such an attempt succeeds or fails, it tends to be an event on one of the extreme ends of The Henderson Scale of Plot Derailment. In a tabletop game, the ramifications of an assassination attempt on an important person (especially one that the GM didn't plan for) tends to have a drastic impact on the campaign that will almost certainly force the GM to change their plans; in video games, it's even worse, since a video game, by its nature, needs to be pre-programmed and has little room for improvisation, meaning that killing an NPC that the game doesn't expect to die (at least not at that moment) tends to make things get very weird very quickly. As a result, game developers tend to have a vested interest in stopping these sorts of shenanigans before they start.

The name comes from an incident in the classic MMO Ultima Online when the game's lead producer, Richard Garriott — in game name Lord British — was hosting a meet'n'greet, only for so many players to show up that it lagged Lord British out of the server and crashed his game. Someone cast a Fire Field spell on the tile he was standing on before he crashed, and when Richard logged back in, Lord British burned to death in the Fire Field before Richard could toggle his invincibility server admin powers back on.

Common LBP Targets (and how the game-makers dealt with them)

• Caine (Vampire: The Masquerade): Quoth Caine's stat block in the World of Darkness rulebook: "You fucking lose." No matter how powerful the PCs get, Caine is impossibly out of their league. There is only one PC build who has any chances of killing him, along with the entire Universe.
• Darklords (Ravenloft): The relevant article goes into this in depth, but in short: the majority of the Darklords (especially the higher-profile ones, like Azalin Rex or Strahd von Zarovich) have extensive contingency plans against assassination attempts, several of those contingency plans involve preemptively smacking would-be assassins down (typically in the most horrific fashions imaginable), quite a few of the contingency plans entail resurrecting the Darklord if they somehow do get struck down, and even if those contingency plans fail, the Dark Powers that made the Darklords what they are in the first place are more likely than not to either resurrect the Darklord or swiftly find a replacement. The only reliable way to get rid of a Darklord is to get them to give up on everything.
• Elminster (Forgotten Realms): Like Caine, the countermeasures mostly entail Elminister being way too powerful for any but the most suicidally insane PCs to even consider fucking with. And even then, there's many ways for Wizards to resurrect (e.g. Clone spell, prepared in private demiplane, whose whereabouts only the Wizard knows) — so he won't stay dead for long.
• Lady of Pain (Planescape): Like Caine, the developers didn't even bother giving her stats. This queen can curbstomp gods, why the hell does a PC think they stand any chance?!?

Power Hall Of Fame

List of the strongest characters PCs could actually fight. That is - the strongest characters with proper statblocks (not the "You Lose" can't-fight-him kind; therefore the likes of the Lady of Pain don't count).

• The Mortiverse from Immortal's Handbook - arguably, one of the strongest finitely strong, statblocked characters ever put to paper.
• Pun-Pun at full power is arbitrarily (infinitely) strong, but still does have a proper statblock.

See Also

• Murderhobo — By far the most likely type of PC to invoke the Lord British Postulate.
• Rocks fall, everyone dies — Not so much the trope itself, but the comic that named it is an excellent example of the sort of frustration that the LBP causes in DMs.
• Stupid Alignments — All 5 Stupid Alignments can get in on this. Chaotic Stupid and Stupid Evil are by far the most likely, given their penchant for committing murder at the drop of a hat for no discernible reason, but Stupid Good, Lawful Stupid, and Stupid Neutral can also engage in LBP behavior with the right motivations.
• Old Man Henderson