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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9099234" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Indeed, hit points are said to include factors such as minimizing or avoiding the effect of blows!  So if what's happening is "a hit is a meaningful attack that can cause damage" and part of your hit points is "luckily avoiding a serious injury", then "an attack so powerful that you can't easily avoid injury" should be logical- like say a giant hitting you with a club as big as you are!I mean, you can see this sort of thinking, because every few months, someone has the idea of "maybe armor should provide damage reduction instead of a miss chance"- because even though that's what AC and hit points are modeling, the terms "hit" and "miss" make it seem very counterintuitive to some people; ie, if you say it's a "miss", then it should really be a "miss", not "an attack that hit and failed to deal damage".  The fact that AC is derived from two very different factors, either Dexterity (avoiding blows through physical effort) and/or armor (avoiding blows due to protective gear) doesn't help.Indeed, we're perfectly ok with layers of damage avoidance; to defeat an Arcane Trickster, you might have to get past their AC, Shield spells, hit points, and Uncanny Dodge.  And we're ok with some methods of bypassing defenses- magic missile vs. AC, counterspell vs. shield, and so on, but somehow partially bypassing AC is more strange and exotic than completely bypassing it.</blockquote>

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