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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8614691" data-attributes="member: 7026617">Actually, I don't think they're a problem at all if you're willing to acknowledge them as an in-setting reality.  Consider Earthdawn: it reifies a rather large number of D&D tropes, but they're things that actually exist as referenced in-setting.  To pick the example we keep going around, people do have enhanced hit points above what a human can take, because all characters are magical adepts and their bodies are supernaturally reinforced; they can absolutely be meat points because they aren't supposed to be in any sense normal people.But people get soggy about doing that in D&D; a normal fighter is supposed to be just a highly trained guy for many people, so you can't just define his hit points as superhuman durability.(Now, a setting like that may be too weird for some people of a strongly simulationist bent, but its not violating their ethic here; it is what it says on the tin, and if something is resolved a particular way, its generally just what it appears to be).Yeah, but its usually not the most straightforward interpertation of the mechanical process.  You can't use the most straightforward interpretation of hit points without it looking weird. As soon as you zoom in on it as anything but a high-order abstraction, it starts thowing problem areas fairly commonly (parts of its use can only be resolved as a gamist and secondarily dramatist construct. ) Other than genre convention support mechanics (which I've argued before fundamentally can't be simulationist as I see it, because you can't normally have characters in the setting acknowledge them and have them work as conventions), that's not intrinsically necessary with any set of mechanics It just requires extra work that may be viewed as either unnecessary or undesirable.It can be desirable to do those things, but it shouldn't be necessary just to have them make sense.  If I'm using a very vanilla BRP hit point model (no hit locations, no effect until half hits, no further effect until zero) it may well be desirable to narrate more color than that--but if I don't, I'll still know someone took actual injury, and approximately how serious it is.  The system won't actively avoid telling me that.</blockquote>

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