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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mxyzplk" data-source="post: 4095866" data-attributes="member: 16450">So brave work all in ignoring the point of the original post.  But there's a reason people put so much work into wordsmithing in politics, business, and religion.  The greater conceptual distance between the terminology you're using and your subject, the greater "distance" you create.  This is one of the reasons people criticize D&D for being anti-roleplaying.  When you choose to create a lexical and mental gap between the rules and the in-game world, you are making a specific design decision to create "distance" and promote a metagame-heavy gamist environment rather than one condusive to roleplaying or character immersion.  Yes,"hit points" has been a long-standing example of this.  But they seem to be going out of their way to add in enough anachronistic terminology to make the game feel like a minis wargame and not a roleplaying game.  Take some other games as counterexamples.  In Deadlands, the Western horror RPG, characters have attributes such as "Grit" and "Wind".  They have skills such as "Filchin'."  When a "huckster" tries to cast a spell (hex), they play a hand of cards against the Manitou spirit to see how well it does.    This is how you craft terminology and rules to support the game world rather than contravene it.  At least Tweet should know better; he's *written* some of those games.  The decision to go the way they have is either a) unplanned and completely lazy, which I find hard to believe, or b) part of a strategic decision to spin the D&D game in that way, which I certainly don't like.</blockquote>

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