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That's not what Gygax says in his PHB, if the attack hits but the saving throw succeeds, then there is no need to narrate the hit point loss as actual injury.

As Gygax explains in his DMG, only if the attack hits and the saving throw fails. Not in general.

Unlike @TwoSix, I find this posited world just too ridiculous to take seriously in my RPGing. To me, this seems to raise the same silliness issue. If hit points are a "thing" that get ablated in combat, such that when you run out of them you die; but having them ablated doesn't affect your...

But presumably the players communicate their remaining hp to one another? As part of the rationing of healing resources, making choices about whether to retreat/avoid, etc.

I think I agree. Or at least, I think the "being scared" has to be generated by some sort of internal effort, a willing oneself into a certain emotional state. One thing that I personally have found works with CoC Sanity is that it gives a type of permission, in the context of the play of the...

Robin Laws gives good advice on this in one of the original HeroWars rulebooks (it might be in the Narrator Book, but maybe it's in the main book - I can't remember): use ambiguous narration, similar to what LotR uses when Frodo is struck/stabbed by the Orc captain's spear.

I play mostly "death spiral" games, and will not try and conjecture about preferred experiences. But the fact that some (many) people don't want a death spiral, and hence use D&D hit points, isn't an argument that D&D hit points aren't meta. If anything, it seems to me to push the other way...

As I posted: In my experience, players use the numerical/mathematical information that their PCs' remaining hp give them all the time: in deciding whether to rest, whether to fight, who to heal, etc. But as per my example, the characters can't have the sort of information about the likelihood...

I think that here, and in subsequent posts, you have misunderstood @hawkeyefan. Hawkeyefan, in the post you quoted, was pointing out what he takes to be a tension between: (i) the notion that social/emotional mechanics are bad, because they dictate that the PC does something other than what...

I don't think they represent injury, and I'm not being disingenuous. Generally I think the loss of hit points consists in being set back in the current fight, but what that being set back looks like I think is very contextual. Some instances of hit point loss correspond to the suffering of an...

Just say no!

The PC can't experience their luck being ablated. I mean, ablation of luck doesn't even make sense in the fiction (unless it's a very particular fiction).

That's why my PC carries around a meat-meter, to measure my depth of meat remaining. My plan is to have my PC's artificer friend automate it, so as the meter reading drops, a device pumps healing potion into my PC intravenously!

When a D&D player looks at their PC's hp, sees that they are getting low, and so has their PC drink a potion of healing, that's pretty meta! I mean, the PC can hardly know that their luck is running out. . .

Burning Wheel is pretty clear on what a GM can do to dice pools by spending Fate or Persona for a NPC. Marvel Heroic RP is pretty clear on what spending Doom Pool dice is for.

Yeah, I've GMed it quite a bit - of MHRP and also my various fantasy hacks. I like spending 2d12 from the Doom Pool and making the players cry . . . EDIT: In the first session I GMed, I spend 2d8 and it turned out that the PCs had defeated not Dr Doom, but rather a Doom Bot. That was fun too!

This is why, upthread, I wondered about Goading Attack and Menacing attack:

Baker talks about this in the blog post that I linked to.

Right. I mean, I think I was pretty clear in my post: I didn't say anything about what people can or can't choose, but about what they will or won't choose. And as @Hriston noted, my way of thinking about this is informed by Vincent Baker, who I think is also pretty clear: As far as I'm...

I did once trick one of the friends I play with into reading it. He cursed me afterwards. But we both did agree that we were at least well-informed on Pabodie's remarkable drill!