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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 5779001" data-attributes="member: 83293">When it comes to Hit Points representing more than actual injuries and also representing, luck, exhaustion, will power, etc., all the various editions of D&D took time to talk about how it wasn't just injuries.But then mechanically just made it about injuries and damage.  And then healing surges and non-injury related "healing" restoring damage taken from injuries made the problem worse.In one 4E mod I ran, I removed all healing surges and had everyone be a minion with 1 HP.  They then got 1 or 2 near miss tokens, 1 or 2 scratch/winded tokens and 1 or 2 major injury tokens.  The amount was based on their class/combat role and con score so that it ended up representing the same number of HP and average damage monsters did using the damage by level system math.When someone got hit, they could spend any one of those tokens they wanted.  Warlord "inspiring word" could restore near miss and scratch/winded tokens, but not injury tokens.  Cleric healing could restore scratch/winded and healing, but not near miss.  If you spent a token, you had to narrate how you either avoided the blow or got hurt by it, but not killed.  Narrating was mandatory in that if you didn't do it, you took the hit and went down, with someone at the table narrating the result.If you got critted, you had to spend two tokens to make it go away.  If you ran out of tokens or decided to take a hit, then you went into negative HP equal to the damage roll of the monster and were dying.  There were no death saves, you just took a variable fading away damage while dying (so no one could count saves and wait till they failed two before helping).  Only actual healing could restore that and the heal skill could only stabilize.  A second wind restored near miss or scratch/winded, but not injuries.So by excising one sub system and replacing it with another, I was able to correct the whole issue to at least some degree.But it was a big change to have to first remove an entire subsystem of the game to plug in a new one.  I had to deal with the bonus healing from Healer's Lore and a variety of other issues.That's why I think the classic/traditional RPG approach based off of describing and interacting is a better starting point than a well developed system with lots of subsystems.  It's far, far easy to modify through addition than subtraction.</blockquote>

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