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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9217161" data-attributes="member: 8461">We're not talking about Rolemaster, though, and since the examination of D&D's hit points isn't a comparative quality with other RPGs, we can overlook that. Likewise, if you find having one mechanic potentially represent two different things (which it leaves up to the players to interpret) as somehow less complex than that same mechanic being only representative of one different thing, then I'm not sure what to tell you, except that you're arguing something that strikes me as self-evidently inarguable with no basis in rationality that I can see. You might not find that increased complexity to be all that much of a problem, but saying that an additional level of interpretation being off-loaded onto the players is more complex isn't really a matter of opinion, as it has the people interacting with the game necessarily performing an extra step that they wouldn't need to be doing if the game was doing that step already.The fact that 4E is blind to this distinction is the very problem I'm outlining, as it's offloaded that distinction to the players, who then have to go through the extra mental gymnastics in order to make sense of things. Again, if the DM and/or players narrate the fireball's damage as physical injury, and that the hit points recovered are resilience, and that further hit points lost are also injury, then all of a sudden you have a cognitive gap, as the game is now indicating that the character is alive despite having led the players down what was up until that point a valid interpretation that they should be dead.Hence, the issue does arise in 4E play, even if "arise" means that you're making the necessary adjustments in game to avoid such a blatant contradiction. Again, resolving the issue means acknowledging that it's an issue in the first place.Except I've already demonstrated that those assumptions are already part of the course of play, it's just that the game is off-loading the trouble of dealing with them onto the players.Yes, and like Gygax's essay back in AD&D 1E, its insistence on a particular definition doesn't mean that the actual operations necessarily work the way it's insisting they work. Hence the problem, as yet unresolved, of players legitimately interpreting various operations of hit point loss as being injury, likewise legitimately interpreting hit point recovery as being resilience, and then having to navigate the problem of the character having taken more "injury hp" loss than is survivable, yet still being alive because of "resilience hp" recovery.Again, that's because that assumption is being off-loaded onto the players; 4E is so gamist that it simply doesn't want to acknowledge that level of in-character representation, which means that the players have to (at least, if they care about that level of engagement at all; and to be fair not everyone does).See above, the incoherence is that the game is one that's quite content to sit back and, by its own (limited) presentation of what's happening, lead the players down a path where they can assume that the same operation is two different things, which can result in a cognitive gap in terms of what's happening. At this point, you're saying that you have fireballs that don't burn people, despite them causing fire damage, so I suppose that won't be convincing to you, but to most other people I'm aware of that interpretation is axiomatic.Which at least establishes that wounds are being cured, and so you don't run into instances of characters having repeatedly taken injuries which they're ignoring thanks to "resilience restoration" despite the cumulative total of their injuries being above what they should be able to survive, in terms of hit points lost.That's still far better than shouting encouraging words at someone to make them temporarily regenerate their wounds shut.Which is fine; as I noted elsewhere, plenty of people can step over a broken stair, or fix it without any sort of significant effort on their part, etc. But it's still a broken stair that you have to deal with somehow. Likewise, the "it can't be injuries, because there's no loss of prowess" argument is an appeal to realism (which is distinct from verisimilitude), which D&D has never been concerned with.</blockquote>

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