I'm not going to get into a Forge debate again because railing against "what Ron Edwards says" makes any useful discussion hopeless, in my experience. Suffice to say I find the model itself useful, and, no, it does not describe players' "type" or "taste in RPGs".
You're right it's best to steer clear from these sorts of arguments/debates, because then we won't have finished in time for supper, as they say!
My question, therefore, tried to stick with practical, in-play issues. I'm not really talking about being "like the real world", or "being a physics engine", either. Just about a system that fully supports a consistent game world. Hit points and levels always come to a point of dissonance, for me, where they don't any longer describe any sort of world I can believe in from an "immersed in the world" standpoint. I realise this is a persoanl thing - as is more-or-less everything around immersion-led play "suspension of disbelief".
I think I get what you're saying in that we are seemingly speaking the same language and share some concerns of verisimilitude as far as the game's rules are concerned.
I don't have the same issues as you do, however. Maybe it's a question of how much abstraction we are comfortable playing with, you and I? It's always been clear to me Hit Points didn't represent wounds, or that levels are something abstract that represent the adventurer's experience of the dangers that lie beyond and how he deals with them, how far removed from level-0 normality he really is, if you will, or that AC is itself an abstraction of numerous elements and not just "how hard you are to hit".
I do have concerns regarding immersion and suspension of disbelief, however, and some mechanics generally rub me the wrong way towards that end (like bennies or fate points allowing you to change the scenery or "edit scenes", power attrition based solely on game balance or narrative concerns, and so on.
The central issue, I think, is that hit points necessarily mean that a character reaches a point where any meaningful damage will kill/incapacitate, and high level characters will always be able to walk away from damage that would kill in any plausible milieu. If the damage is defined after the mechanical effects have been resolved, this can work fine, but I have never managed to play using character immersion where the system worked this way.
I'm not sure I can relate (as in, I don't think I'm grasping your point fully because I don't share the same experiences and POV, so I might get it wrong).
To me, hit points are a compound. They represent a number of things, like say fatigue, energy, health, the will to go on, and so on, so forth. This abstraction works fine for me in many ways, and I don't think there's much of an issue when some very particular corner cases create some dissonances on that level of abstraction (I'm thinking of the case of falling damage for instance which is usually referenced when talking about problems with the abstraction of HP). I think that generally, things start going wrong if you interpret HPs to be only one thing at the exclusion of the others: if you only interpret them as fatigue, then things like bigger weapons doing bigger damage will start not to make sense; if on the contrary you interpret them as pure wounds, then other stuff like the Warlord "shouting people back to health" stop making sense.
So it's all about keeping the abstraction intact when you have rules that deal with HPs IMO. Take for instance Healing Surges. As an abstraction they are fine with me... up to a certain point. The problem with them is if, for instance, you were to recuperate ALL your hit points that way, exclusively. Then you're basically saying "all hit points damage can be healed by shaking stuff off and taking a breather" which doesn't compute with me at all: one part of the abstraction is favored to the exclusion of its other parts, as if cuts were closing magically, bruises became brown instead of purplish blue in a matter of minutes, and so on. So some abstraction of a second wind that allows you to recuperate HP damage, I'm fine with, or the Warlord's ability to heal people by helping them out, giving them back the force to fight, that's cool too. When it starts getting wonky is when ALL damage can be healed that way, or that the recuperation rate is so high that characters basically can heal all the damage they took in a matter of seconds, minutes, hours, a day or two at most. That's wrong and that creates problems with my suspension of disbelief, a problem I do not experience at all when talking about CLW spells and potions because these spells' effects are up to interpretation, and may represent the same compound of effects as HP themselves do (a Cure Light Wound potion might reinvigorate you, heal some of your cuts, make you feel psychologically better... all at the same time, so the abstraction remains intact).
I believe there's an excluded middle here somewhere. What I hope is that stuff like Healing Surges will be available for those that want them, but that then there will be discussion in the rules book about what surges are, with possibilities for the DM to decide what value of HP recuperation he can attach to each surge, and how that affects the rest of the game's HP economy from there. Then the DM (and players together) can decide what amount of abstraction is cool for the game table, and what isn't.
I hope the game achieves that in terms of modularity (note the same could be said of this or that choice or option regarding save-or-die effects, or level drain, or whatnot: provide options to the DM, not necessarily this option to the exclusion of others, but several choices/options with the explanations that make such choices meaningful for a DM to make in the way he wants to play the game his way, not WotC's way): that some of the very fundamental aspects of the game can be tailored to the needs and inclinations of particular players at particular tables, and thus will be able to play "your D&D" however you see fit, without necessarily jeopardizing the whole structure of the rules and game in the process, but by being conscious of what each choice between this or that option or module entail, and how that affects the rest of the game's play. That'd be fantastic to have.
Thus, I have always found that systems where a wound is something separate from all other wounds you may have, and is dangerous to some degree in itself, works better for immersionist play.
I really think our difference is the level of abstraction we are ready to deal with. Your threshold on that level seems to be lower than mine. Would you agree with that, from where you're standing?
P.S.: Out of curiosity - do you use random characteristic and spell/item/etc. determination for character generation when you play? I think I may be seeing some threads, here, but it is, as you say, hugely complex (and often unnecessarily vague, IMO, but still...)
Yup. Random stats (4d6 drop lowest in AD&D generally, and 3d6 in order with OD&D), spells as per DMG (that is, you get some automatic spells plus some random ones).
From my experience transitioning from a 3rd edition game format to a 0e/1e format, I'd say that interestingly enough my players have been more enthused by random generation. When you deal with point-buy and those kinds of things, it requires the player to know and understand what the currency means, what amount of points equates to that rating and so on, whereas when you roll, that's it: you've got your scores generated and you're done. My wife actually prefers random, 3d6-in-order stat generation because as she says "it's really cool: you see what the dice of the universe throw at you, and then you make the best of it!" That's how she played her first fighter ever and LOVED it, btw.
