Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="SteveC" data-source="post: 4011169" data-attributes="member: 9053">The age-old Hit Point debate. It was fun back in the days where Runequest first came out, and it's still fun now!Hit Points have never just represented physical damage, as the quote from the AD&D PHB comes in.I have always thought of increasing hit points as being a very simple method of representing a damage divisor. Let's say you start off with 10 HP at level one. We'll call that your physical toughness. When you reach 20 HP what's really going on is that all of the damage you take is divided in half by luck, fate, training ... you name it. When you hit 30 HP you have a damage divisor of three, 40 HP divides damage by four and so on. When you're hit, you still take some physical effect, but it is largely turned away.The other side of this argument is healing, which doesn't scale with HP, such that a cure light wounds spell can full heal you from near death at level one, but when you hit 20 HP, there's no way it can do this. My answer to that is "of course." The very same factors that help you absorb damage in the first case hurt you in the second. Sure, that cure light wounds spell might be just the ticket for Joe the Nameless Fighter, but mighty Beowulf needs more of everything to make him go. If this isn't the case, then the Inflict Wounds spells should directly attack your Con or something similar.The new edition of the rules gives us a chance to tweak the damage rules a bit, by adding the Bloodied condition. Maybe the snake that bites you only causes HP damage unless you're Bloodied by it.Similarly, if a character heals at a higher rate, you could easily have cure spells heal based on how a character would heal naturally. In Star Wars SAGA a second wind heals you 1/4 of your HP or your CON, whichever is higher. You can make that the effect of a Cure Light Wounds, with a Cure Moderate healing twice that and so forth.I think those changes would be received positively by the gaming community, but I'd also say they're only necessary to help with verisimilitude.Just my $.02,--Steve</blockquote>

Verification