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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9216971" data-attributes="member: 8461">No, it doesn't "shift" the problem. It still requires some adjudication in terms of the specifics of what's being represented, but it still establishes what's being represented. That's a far smaller cognitive burden than having to determine if it's an injury or just some sort of depletion of personal stamina, luck, divine protection, etc.Which is why I've noted previously that the game is more about heroic fantasy than realism, with characters taking numerous injuries (oftentimes serious) with no corresponding loss of prowess. In that regard, you're free to narrate any particular set of wounds that you want (within reasonable limits, obviously; no one is going to seriously countenance you saying someone's head has been chopped off or their eyes gouged out) without creating any sort of cognitive gap in doing so, unlike the one that you'd get when you suffer burn wounds and then have someone else at the party make them go away (according to the game's operations) by shouting at you to buck you up.Strictly speaking, I was including the Dungeon Master as one of the players in this context (which is a whole 'nother can of worms), in that someone sitting around the table has to do what the game could (and arguably should) be doing on its own for them. Of course, historically it has done exactly this, at least insofar as determining that the loss of hit points has been injuries taken; as noted before, prior to 4E the game was remarkably consistent in that regard.More convenient for you, certainly, but not better. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />And it "helps them heal."No, it's the game's hang-up, too. That's fairly self-evident from the fact that the mechanical operation is exactly the same as the cleric's healing word (4E PHB p. 62), in that they use positive energy to let the target spend one of their own healing surges, while the text describes it as "You whisper a brief prayer as divine light washes over your target, helping to mend its wounds." Given that it wants to have the same thing be two different things (i.e. "recover resiliency" and "mend wounds"), that creates an issue with what the keyword is denoting, since it can vary by context, and so that context has to be parsed by the players (including the DM) more than they would if it was only connoting one thing.More like a self-evident truth. Having one mechanic present potentially two different things depending on the circumstance is more complex than if one mechanic presented itself as only one thing, period. That's not really something that can be argued. You might say that's not a big deal, and it might not be for you, but it's undeniably more complicated (and doesn't need to be).Which is why I've taken the trouble to explain it.That's a semantic distinction, and not really helpful in what it offers. If something is vague, then you have to expend mental energy figuring it out. It's a gap that your cognition bridges. Changing the shorthand doesn't change that.Except the game used to get alone just fine doing exactly what I've been talking about. Remember, 4E changed things up by actually having that idea of "Hit point loss/restoration isn't just injury" actually be present in the game's mechanical operations. Prior to that, the idea received lip service in essays, but wasn't ever actually suggested in how the mechanics functioned. Then a change was made, and while that might have addressed certain issues, it also presented new ones, which to my mind were much greater than anything it fixed.No, I disagree strongly, in that 4E took its gamist aspects much further than any edition before or since, and so abandoned much of the heavy lifting with regard to conveying what the various operations were actually representing from an in-game standpoint. As you yourself noted, it's vague.From a gamist standpoint; not in terms of actually connecting meta-game operations to in-character happenings.You don't "have" to deal with the problem, in the sense that you can just ignore the issue. Or simply bridge the cognitive gap on your own. In that regard, it's much like any other issue, in that you don't have to fix a broken stair when you can just step over it, or you might think that fixing the stair isn't a very hard job to do, and can be accomplished with ease. But I'd say it's still better for the stair not to be broken in the first place.I'd like to encourage you to read the rules as well, so that you can have a better appreciation for things like how the framing fiction for inspiring word says it restores the same hit points that a fireball causes, despite the fact that one is causing fire damage and the other is reinvigorating you, making the players (including the DM) be the ones who have to track which thing the hit point changes are representing (i.e. injury or stamina) when mapping the game-play to what's happening in the setting.You need to go back over what's been said in this thread, since this issue (i.e the problems with damage on a miss) has already been raised and dealt with before. But to reiterate, the problem is that the game indicates that the same operation can represent multiple different things, creating a cognitive gap where the players (including the DM) have to then figure out how to connect the two. If your character is badly burned, and had a warlord yell at them, then there's an issue with figuring out how they keep taking wounds and not being healed, but rather motivated to stay active even when the "wound hp" damage they've taken exceeds their total hp, but the numbers are still in positive amounts thanks to "resilience hp"-type healing.Not as well as it could, and did before.It's actually less clear than in other editions; all of them, in fact. That's because the gamist applications that 4E champions simply don't prioritize the connecting of the mechanics with in-game representation. If they did, we wouldn't have Schrodinger's hit points, where they can be injury one round and then personal stamina the next.</blockquote>

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