Tony Vargas
Legend
I don't suppose there's a whole lot of functional difference between HP as 'plot armor' or hp as 'ability to defend yourself.' Either way, if you're being shot at, you're not being hit, or taking less serious hits, whether it's modeling author force (plot armor), divine intervention, a sixth sense, finite luck, or desperate defense.I addressed that by discussing the fact that HP is recording your ability to defend yourself from the attack. If you're not defending yourself then that dagger attack is going to kill you no matter what your HP. The difference for guns is there is no reasonable defensive tactic except cover..
Picking one of those possible interpretations and calling it 'fact' is overstepping.
In some genres, bullet-time would be just fine. In most genres, characters being shot at do move & dodge, defending themselves not by seeing a bullet and moving out of it's trajectory like Neo, but by making themselves a much harder target.
Even IRL, you can decrease your chances of getting shot by more tactics than just seeking hard cover. A moving target is harder to hit, for instance. What do characters in genre shootouts (rather than showdowns) do? They /move/ & fire, making themselves harder targets to hit. That's defending yourself.
There's going to be more running, dodging, seeking cover, dropping prone, and more rounds exchanged - and hps ablated - before someone in a white hat gets shot in the shoulder, or someone in a black hat get's killed or implausibly disarmed.Sure that's fine for cannon-fodder, but for actual shootouts with competent adversaries?