What makes me a little snarky is someone talking as if from a position of knowledge, who in fact is unfamiliar with the most basic features of what they're talking about.
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with ignorance, particularly in relation to trivial matters such as RPG rule sets. But I'm surprised to see bold, confident assertions being made from a position of ignorance.
Which doesn't apply to the back-and-forth that you and I are having; I was talking about damage on a miss, and as best I recall I didn't make any mention regarding percentage-based healing in 4E; I
asked about it specifically because I wasn't aware. To which you made a snarky comment that was, quite frankly, uncalled for.
PC or NPC is not a property of a character in the fiction. It's a description of who among the game participants owns/controls a character. So the real question is Why do the players get to control the implacable warriors, while the GM is stuck controlling the sea of mediocrities? And the answer is because - as per the blurb on the back of the PHB, THE WORLD NEEDS HEROES, a premise of the game is that the players control the protagonists.
I agree that PC or NPC is not a property of the character in the fiction, and yet it's treated as if it was when the PC has access to options that NPCs don't, by virtue of nothing other than the fact that they
are a PC. If the NPCs are built differently, and don't have access to the same powers that the PCs have, then if we accept the premise that those powers have an in-game aspect which the characters can recognize (on some level, at least), then their being PCs is making an in-character difference...but in a way that has no aspect which is recognized in the narrative, creating a disconnect.
The character operates under the same "rules" as everyone else: they draw their sword (or whatever) and engage their foes in melee. They just happen to be implacable, relentless, remorseless, however exactly you wish to characterise it. Like Conan, or Eomer, or Aragorn, or Lancelot.
To me, it seems like complaining that (say) Cathy Freeman (Olympic 400m, Sydney 2000) or Gary Kasparov (champion chess player) or Rasputin (notoriously hard to kill) doesn't operate under the same rules as everyone else.
Right, but it's not that they "just happen" to be that way. They have powers and abilities that make them that way, which no one else has access to. And yet, in-and-of themselves, there's no reason for this. Certainly, you can invent a reason for why they'd be so different (just look at the
isekai sub-genre of fiction), but in-and-of itself the game doesn't present a reason for this, which means that those of us who want to bridge that gap need to do it ourselves.
You are imposing an a priori conception of what the mechanics must mean, and then complaining that the fiction doesn't match that conception. And you're correct, it doesn't. So perhaps you shouldn't play 4e. But I can report from experience that I had no trouble understanding how the mechanics and the fiction relate - even though for the previous 19 years my main game had been Rolemaster, which has a completely different way of relating mechanics and fiction (and would have no room, either mechanically or conceptually, for "damage on a miss").
Again, it's not "trouble understanding," it's discomfort with the fact that 4E is so casual about dismissing and altering the concept of the narrative connection between the in-game results of the mechanics being used. Calling it an "imposition" strikes me as mischaracterizing the entirely reasonable expectation that such a thing would be a central conceit, if not for an RPG in general, then at least for one calling itself Dungeons & Dragons, which prior to that was entirely comfortable playing up that connection (and at least trying, in my opinion, to obfuscate instances of it not quite being able to bridge a gap between the fluff and the crunch).
