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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5648792" data-attributes="member: 42582">The first quoted sentence I have no independent view on, nor independent evidence for - all I can go on is the vibe I get from ENworld. That vibe suggests that "larger" at least is warranted. (And maybe "larger" vs "much larger" is just a quibble.)With the second sentence, again I'll quibble on the "vastly" but do think that 3E could be drifted to narrativism more easily than 4e to simulationism or to Gygaxian exploration-heavy gamism. I don't think the drifting of 3E would be completely trivial, though, for the reasons given in my post above this one.But what do hit points model in the game? This came up in a couple of recent threads - "In defence of the theory of dissociated mechanics", and "Unhealable injuries".Consider a player whose PC has 50 hp left. The player knows that no archer (other, perhaps, than Apollo or his peers) can kill her PC with a single arrow. Indeed, half-a-dozen members of the town guard could let loose with their crossbows and the PC would be fine, and able to run away unhindered. The player also know that her PC can jump over a 50' cliff with no fear of death, and no trouble picking herself up at the bottom and walking or running away.What does this knowledge, which the player has in virtue of how hit points interact with the action resolution mechanics, correspond to in the gameworld? Nothing that I can see. In practice, as far as I can tell, most sim-oriented D&D players treat hit points de facto as "meat", even though many editions of the game have contained text saying that they're not only meat but also luck, skill etc.My personal view is that Gygax was right in his DMG when he said the idea that a high-level fighter is as "meaty" as a dragon is ridiculous. (For games where hit points really are meat, but which deal with the issue of falling, being shot by a crossbow, etc, in a way that works with this rather than against it, see Rolemaster, or Runequest, or HARP, or . . .)But the notion that hit points just reflect skill is equally untenable, because that doesn't fit with falling damage, surviving area attacks, etc. The only way I can make sense of D&D hit points is as a metagame mechanic. (4e is the first version of the game to make this explicit.)Agreed. Yep. In my case, I was interested in 4e initially because I enjoy RPGs and liked to keep up with the news. And as the previews came out it seemed like 4e would be a system that could support narrativist play fairly well. And for me, Worlds and Monsters was the clincher. When I eventually bought the books with the intention of running it, it was narrativist play that I was aiming for.</blockquote>

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