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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6683868" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think everyone agrees with this.<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">Ron Edwards on a similar issue</a>:I suggest that Trouble in Orkworld, Hero Points in Hero Wars, and Spiritual Attributes in The Riddle of Steel are Resource-based metagame mechanics, whereas Power in RuneQuest, Sanity in Call of Cthulhu, and these mechanics' many derivatives in other games, are straightforward, non-metagame Resources. Similarly, I suggest that the role-playing bonuses based on out-of-game neatness in Sorcerer are metagame, whereas the Stunt rules based on difficulty or unlikelihood in Feng Shui are not.Gygax is himself ambiguous about this in his DMG. He makes it clear that hit points are not, primarily, a measure of physical injury (let alone of the ablation of physical wellbeing, as if humans are defeated in combat in the same way that one wears down a rough board with sand paper). But he does say, for example, that "the accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces" (pp 111-12). That leaves open a straightforward, non-metagame interpretation of hit points - though it doesn't answer the further question of how a particular character might know how much supernatural aid s/he still has left in the bank (so there would still be a player/PC knowledge gap).On the other hand, the passage on p 81 does suggest that hp are metagame and not representational of anything in the fiction: Gygax there says [R]ecall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained -at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.This makes both hit points and saving throws seem like metagame devices for rationing the narration of character death. In 4e I think this non-sim approach to hit points reaches its full realisation. My sense is that 5e is trying to go back to some sort of ambiguity.(Like pre-4e D&D, 5e also has the oddity that higher level PCs are harder to heal to full strength - that does suggest a non-metagame reading of hit points, either as "meat" - compare "light" to "critical" wounds - or as "mojo", with only powerful clerics able to restore the mojo of powerful characters.)</blockquote>

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