NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mannahnin" data-source="post: 9198985" data-attributes="member: 7026594">I agree with a lot of the other stuff you wrote, but I think this in particular is a bad example.  As you rightly observe, the language around "hitting" in combat and individual attacks (especially missile weapons, which always ran contrary to OD&D and AD&D's one minute combat round and its premise that a given round and a single attack roll represented multiple in-fiction attacks), and of healing spells, was always sabotaging Gary's explanation of what hit points actually are.  The latter was compatible with characters fighting and moving at full effectiveness no matter how much damage they take (until zero, anyway), but the game rules and language around hitting and damage and hit points always created this cognitive dissonance.Ben Laurence did a great job <a href="http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2021/04/injury-and-abstract-combat-round.html" target="_blank">articulating a lot of these issues in a blog article a while back.</a>I might also suggest that hit points are more of a narrativist and gamist concept than they are simulationist.  Like saving throws, the essential purpose of hit points is to keep characters alive, because a storybook hero doesn't die to one sword stroke (as a rule).  That was the original reason Arneson put them in his game (when a player playing a knight was dissatisfied by being killed in a single round by a troll), and it's still the main reason D&D uses them.IMO 4E did the best job to date of squaring the circle reconciling hit points to work better and make more sense.  Particularly in its linking most healing to the Healing Surge, a value of (usually) 1/4 of a character's max hit points.  This meant that we were finally relieved of the issue D&D had always had of "Cure Light Wounds" being capable of restoring a first level character reduced to zero HP unconsciousness (seemingly a serious wound) to full health. And the issue that a low level character or low-HD class like magic user healed more quickly from injury than an experienced character or a combat-trained one who is inured so pain and injury.  By making healing proportionate to the character receiving it, 4E made hit points a little less nonsensical.I think you're right, though, that the overall changes to the hit point system were a bit too much for a substantial percentage of players who had reconciled themselves to the contradictions of D&D's hit point system and didn't want to think about them anymore.</blockquote>

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