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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 4011430" data-attributes="member: 18">I tend to agree.What's funny to me is, I think this whole "goddamit, HP are abstract NOW SHUT UP!" thing WotC are doing is a bit of a huge cop-out compared to some of their earlier stuff. I mean, I'm reminded of the old VP/WP system from the earlier WotC SW editions (maaaaan, it's kind of wierd to be talking about them in the past tense, it doesn't seem so long ago, but it kind of is!), where they actually tried to make a bit more sense of HP, and divided it up into the sort of "tiring/dodging/luck" VP and the "actual injury" WP. I don't know if that system was all that great, but it actually made sense to me, on a visceral level, when HP break down the second you get outside melee combat (and can be dodgy even within it). At least 3E brought Coup De Gras rules, and I hope 4E keeps them or something similar (bet it forgets they ever existed though).I just hope that in 4E, we get like, at least one paragraph which attempts to make sense of HP, and makes it abundantly clear that they're abstract, and I hope that it's clear that everybody who works on 4E believes HP are the same thing (something that was definately not the case in earlier editions).I can keep on going with HP as an abstraction. Maybe though, they should just largely separate the falling and poison rules from them. I'm not sure what to do with poison right now, but making falling an attack on your Fortitude, which could potentially kill you (though if they have AP-like-things, they should allow the spending of these to prevent said death), no matter how many HP you have, would be a step forwards.I don't believe that, really. What I would say is original D&D was so primitive as to pre-date "death spiral"-type mechanics, and by the time such mechanics became popular, they were a mark of D&D/AD&D's competitors, not of D&D, thus there was little to gain by suddenly adopting them. Later still, by the time 3E came round, maybe there was a mature decision to not adopt such mechanics, but I'm sure it was based more on preserving sacred cows than anything else. Now, by 4E, the drive is simplicity, so obviously such mechanics are out.So I don't believe avoiding that was ever a significant issue.</blockquote>

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