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Message: <blockquote data-quote="SKyOdin" data-source="post: 4012868" data-attributes="member: 57939">Dausuul, I have to disagree with you on a few of your points. Particularly the bit about Natural Healing on a daily basis. You use it as an excuse for why Hit Points are a bad abstraction, but it is actually a pretty good example of where hit points work very well. The part you forgot to mention is that Natural Healing scales with character level. For example, if a 20th level character takes 20 points of damage, he can heal it all up in one night of rest. If a third level character takes 3 points of damage, he can heal it all back in one night of rest. Thus, the 3 hit points of damage that a third level character takes is an equivalent injury to what a twentieth level character takes when he is hit for 20 hit points of damage.Hit Points are a pretty simple abstraction. Characters' Con score and the size of their hit dice represent their sheer physical toughness. Their level represents their ability to reduce the effect of oncoming attacks. If either a 1st or 20th level character lose 20% of their hit points, then they have taken equivalent amounts of damage. In other words, losing 10 hit points means completely different things for a 1st and a 20th level character.Now then, their are a few anomalies in this system. However, I don't agree with your first point. It is pretty easy to assume that whenever a character loses hit points, at least some physical contact was made, generally enough to carry the "rider". Second, it is possible to imagine that a paralyzed or unconscious character is not completely helpless. When someone is paralyzed, all it means is that they lack sufficient motor function to walk around or fight, not that they are completely incapable of the small movements necessary to avoid damage. Finally, there is no reason for Wisdom or Dexterity to affect hit points since the scaling of hit points has more to do with experience. At level one, most of a character's hit points represent sheer physical toughness.Now then, this leaves two remaining anomalies: Healing and Environmental damage. However, you yourself have admitted earlier in the thread that you can imagine a higher-level character capable of fighting his way out of the acid where a lesser character would just collapse and die.I have to admit that magical healing is only large anomaly in the 3E hit point system. However, there are signs that healing might change for 4E. In SWSE, the second wind ability heals one quarter of the character's hit points. A direct proportion of the total. There was also talk that a heal check "allowed a character to call upon their own healing reserve." This could mean that healing works differently in 4E than in 3E.The only other problem with the hit point system that you did not mention is that weapons do the same amount of damage no matter who wields them. However, we can also be pretty confident that this is changing in 4E too.Overall, I think hit points are an excellent abstraction of damage, and it looks like 4E might be cleaning up some of the anomalies in the system.</blockquote>

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