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<blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 5873454" data-attributes="member: 3400">Because hit points are sufficiently flexible for a number of different conceptualizations of combat injury and time has shown they're one of the best mechanics going as far as being non-cumbersome and useful. Plenty of games use an ablative health mechanism, or even an ablative energy/sanity mechanism. It's kind of an industry standard.The encounter powers, by comparison, don't have nearly as much going for them. They're confining in their use (honestly, some structure like the one I suggested in this thread could substantially alleviate that issue with little effort). And they don't really fix what they are supposed to fix - the need to spam off the same ol' attacks every round. This just bumps the issue up one level to spamming off the same ol' attacks every encounter.Besides, I think you're asking the wrong question. The question isn't why are hp sufficiently realistic while encounter powers are not. The question is why is the hp abstraction widely accepted but the encounter power abstraction not? They don't have to adhere to the same level of realism at all, but they have to be agreeable abstractions for D&amp;D playing.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="billd91, post: 5873454, member: 3400"] Because hit points are sufficiently flexible for a number of different conceptualizations of combat injury and time has shown they're one of the best mechanics going as far as being non-cumbersome and useful. Plenty of games use an ablative health mechanism, or even an ablative energy/sanity mechanism. It's kind of an industry standard. The encounter powers, by comparison, don't have nearly as much going for them. They're confining in their use (honestly, some structure like the one I suggested in this thread could substantially alleviate that issue with little effort). And they don't really fix what they are supposed to fix - the need to spam off the same ol' attacks every round. This just bumps the issue up one level to spamming off the same ol' attacks every encounter. Besides, I think you're asking the wrong question. The question isn't why are hp sufficiently realistic while encounter powers are not. The question is why is the hp abstraction widely accepted but the encounter power abstraction not? They don't have to adhere to the same level of realism at all, but they have to be agreeable abstractions for D&D playing. [/QUOTE]

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