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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 6457287" data-attributes="member: 27160">You are very welcome to disagree - everyone has their own model of the world they carry in their head. Your reasons for disagreeing do not sway me in the slightest, however, and I will try to explain a little bit why not.The problem here is that hand-to-hand combat with medieval weapons (or even modern weapons, come to that) does not really work with a hit/miss model. Hit with what? If you are talking about a hit with the blade of your sword, then many, many successful attacks will not "hit" - they will result in a pommel strike, an arm lock/break, a throwdown or some other damaging "miss". And this is before even getting into the issue of what "hit points" are, exactly, bearing in mind that the first solid cut or thrust with a sword blade or spiked axe will very likely end the fight. This leads to the conclusion that, to render a plausible movie in our heads, many "hit point" losses must take the form of "damage" to balance, confidence, equipment, will to fight, stamina and all the other assets essential to full effectiveness in a fight to the death.We would generally assume that only the blade of your sword is poisoned; in fact, poison tends to be expensive and difficult to apply, so it would actually be more plausible still that only the point was really properly coated. As I outlined above, though, not only are many strikes not with the point, many are not even with the blade. Consider the focus of concentration of your opponent in a fight. If they are sane and/or competent, their primary concern will be to make sure your blade does not strike them. This is likely to be redoubled if they know the point of your weapon to be poisoned. So the most likely form of attack to succeed is a blow with the blade that you expect to be parried, with a follow-up knee to the groin, or pommel to the face, or twist into an arm-lock, or...Take a browse <a href="http://swordschool.com/" target="_blank">here</a>, especially at some of the seminars (the dagger one is long but great), to see something of how medieval fighters trained. The style is efficient, exceptionally brutal and very effective.This is a fair point, and it may very well be that the terms "hit" and "miss" (which have wargame roots) are less than ideal. But the fact remains that hand-to-hand combat really does not fit the naive "I swing you swing and we either strike and draw blood or miss and look dumb" model that many of us start out with. The solution to that seems to me not to be to pretend that the simple, mechanistic model has any real currency, but to adapt the way we explain and describe combat in the text and during the play of the games.For beginners the GM (or experienced players) probably should draw on their own, rich mental models to describe what they "see", but for experienced players I think part of the beauty of the hit points mechanic is that what everyone imagines need not be the same. Each player needs to build a world-model in their head that is plausible to them and which reflects the rules of the game - but those models do not need to be identical to one another. This is a great mechanism for getting around the fact that different people find different things "believable". One possible, and very effective, route that a rule set can take is to define those things that are essential for the story to be coherent for everyone, while the details of how the situations created by application of the rules arise can be filled in by each player to suit their own tastes.So, for the Melf's Acid Arrow example, the "hit" on a 100 hp character can be a mere splash as it ricochets off her shield or a full-on soaking that just does little harm because she is just that awesome or a near miss that just saps a little confidence. Pick whichever one works for you, and meanwhile your friend next to you can even pick a different one, provided that you are clear that the character is not dead/down/hors de combat until the HP total goes to 0. The game system defines the structure and boundaries of your world-painting, but the colours and patterns within the lines are yours to define to suit your palate/palette <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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