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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8412636" data-attributes="member: 6779196">So, first of all, 4e fully embraced the abstract nature of hit points. Most hit point damage was assumed to be luck/morale/energy/divine favor/whatever rather than actual physical injury. The only thresholds that mattered were Bloodied (which meant showing visible but largely superficial signs of wear like cuts and bruises), and 0 HP which meant unconscious and possibly dying - technically this is how 5e says to narrate hit point loss as well, but in 4e, many mechanics actually relied on this narrative. Which incidentally is one of the reasons I say it is objectively not true that the fluff didn’t matter - it very much did matter, to the point that some fluff couldn’t be ignored… which was a problem for folks who prefer “HP as meat.”Now, keeping in mind this model of narrating HP loss, this means healing magic doesn’t fuse broken bones and knit open wounds. It restores your stamina, energy, resolve, will to fight, etc. And once we accept that, it’s pretty trivial to accept that you have a limited reserve of such willpower, and that past a certain point, no amount of magic is going to help. You’re just plain tapped out for the day.It is definitely transparent. To me, that’s an unambiguously good thing.I want to understand what the rules are doing and why they’re doing it, and in 4e, that was always abundantly clear. And personally I think that’s the true source behind all this “dissociated mechanics” nonsense. 4e pulled back the curtain and showed the gameplay purpose the rules served, rather than pretending the rules existed primarily to model the fiction. A lot of folks didn’t like that (though for the life of me I’ll never understand why), and “dissociative mechanics” is what came out of their attempts to articulate that.</blockquote>

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