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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6603853" data-attributes="member: 6790260">See, the problem is that the concept of "HP" has always been schizoid. It has never had one consistent interpretation, and there is ample conflicting evidence for both things.You've mentioned the biggest examples of irrefutable evidence that HP are meat: it's referred to as "Curing wounds," recovering them is called "healing," and losing all of them makes you die.But you're ignoring or dismissing all the *equally* irrefutable evidence that they are not meat. While in the very earliest versions of D&D, you could gain (at best) 3 hp/24 hours bed rest, the most common "early edition" healing rule I've heard is "1 hp per level per day" (possibly with an extra point or two for solid 24 hours of rest and another for sumptuous food/high comfort surroundings/etc.); this essentially worked out to ~(hit die size/2) days to fully recover from 1 HP. Someone who was a cat scratch away from death could bounce back to full health in a week! Even with the 3/day (the ideal healing situation in very early D&D), most characters will be fully healed within two weeks (42 HP) even if they were almost dead. This is clearly nonphysical. Further, you have Gygax himself explicitly pointing out how ridiculous it is that a high-level Fighter--who is physically indistinguishable from a low-level Fighter--able to take as much damage as a draft horse (or perhaps even a TEAM of draft horses with good HP rolls!) *and still keep fighting.* Again, it is clearly nonphysical that a human being, through doing nothing more than killing enemies and stealing treasures, could become more physically durable than a horse.HP cannot be parsed. They just can't. The PURELY physical interpretation makes no sense, but the descriptions contradict a nonphysical interpretation. Since physical and nonphysical are mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive, there is no possible interpretation. HP are HP. They model HP, they signify HP, and they communicate HP, and nothing else. Trying to analyze them any further--trying to say that they are meat or that they are not meat--is a fool's errand that will result in nothing but tears and people being equally adamant that they ABSOLUTELY MUST BE [actual wounds||grit and skill], and anyone else is just "willfully ignoring" the enormous preponderance of evidence to the contrary.</blockquote>

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