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="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9216866" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Wow, so this debate on hit points and what they are really took off.  Somewhere in there, someone begged a question about hit points and what they represent (I lost track of who) that reminded me of something D&D does that I always just accepted.In D&D, some effects target or suppress one's "life force", for lack of a better term.  A spell can have a very different effect on you if you have a certain level/amount of HD, for example:[ATTACH=full]338989[/ATTACH]But also, spells can have a different effect based on how many hit points you have at the moment:[ATTACH=full]338990[/ATTACH]In the case of Power Words (and similar effects, like the 5e versions of Sleep and Color Spray), where we have an effect that doesn't deal damage, but relies on you having a certain hit point threshold, it's obvious that hit points are being used to model something completely different than "hits to kill".  It's certainly not physical resilience to injury, as this is a mind-affecting effect.  There's (usually) no saving throw involved- somehow your hit points are your "saving throw".  Either what is being gauged is your "total life force", or perhaps the morale, divine providence, and stamina that Gary told us hit points are on pages 61 and the oft-quoted 82.I don't really know which, as again, I've never really thought about this until now-what is a spell like Power Word, Stun/Blind using hit points to model isn't very clear.  In the case of Power Word, Kill, it makes a little more sense (though there are many things in the game that can kill you that are completely unrelated to hit point loss, like level or ability drain/suppression).That you could be hit by an attack and killed despite having hit points remaining seems to run counter to what I've always assumed hit points to mean- and given the prevalence of ways the game itself, over the years has treated hit points as one thing or another, I wonder if the people who developed it even know themselves!</blockquote>

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