Ovinomancer
No flips for you!
I see that you couldn't be bothered to read what I posted, as I made that exact observation that you're telling me I didn't do above. In the original post, all I said is that the poster was confusing abstractions with meta, which they did -- hitpoints are an abstraction but they aren't meta. The complaints made were about the abstract nature of hitpoints and didn't have any meta features. Strangely, you're here now telling me I am wrong for making the argument you just made.No it's not. You accused someone of confusing meta with abstract. If all things are abstract then this is a worthless observation.
The correct observation would be 'All things are abstract. There are subsets of abstract which are meta and not meta.'
But you didn't. You drew a distinction between meta and abstract and then proceeded from that distinction to make your wholly unsupported assertion that in fact D&D HP are abstract but not metagame, as if the abstraction removes the possibility of both abstract and metagame being present.
You now concede that this is not the case.
Wow. You need to dial it back. Saying that vice replacing my quote with that is slightly less offensive, but you're crossing the line.Gibbering attempt to avoid the question.
I answered your question -- I cannot determine things about my character's current state based on a short scene description. I also said that knowing my character's recent and past history isn't metagame. Knowing my character's story in the fiction of the game -- that I trained as a fighter and that I've recently begun adventuring and that, just a few minutes ago, I was pressed hard by some goblins but won through are all in fiction things that inform me, the player, to the answers to your questions. The abstract mechanic of hp, which would provide me the player with more information about how hard those goblins pressed me is still just the abstract representation of the information my character, if alive in the world, would have but cannot be otherwise represented to me, the player. That's not meta -- in any sense (and I disagree with most of the definitions of meta in this thread, some are confusing stance and/or limited authorial agency with metagame mechanics). It's abstraction.Given the same description, I could get very close to estimating that character's HP in Runequest 2.
So why are you struggling so hard to avoid the question when it's D&D HP?
You claim D&D HP are not metagame, but in-character knowledge. So use your in-character knowledge to tell me. I can do it for RQ2. Why can't you for D&D?
I'll tell you why, of course. It's because D&D HP are pure metagame. Some people then choose to pretend they aren't. But that doesn't make it not metagame in any analytical sense, it means they gain their enjoyment from a self-deception regarding the design of the game.
Which is fine, but it doesn't mean I've confused anything. I've simply revealed the emptiness at the centre of your misleading and completely false assertion that D&D HP are not metagame. They are.
D&D hitpoints aren't meta. They don't represent information not available in game. The don't represent mechanics that exist outside the framework of the game. They just aren't meta. They're just an abstraction of the game's fictional process of combat.
As for you being able to guess about where the HP in Runequest 2 is from the information in your scene frame, that's entirely because Runequest 2 has descriptions for damage based on HP level baked into the system. You're using information from outside of your scene framing to make that determination -- information you deny other systems. "Dirty pool, old man."