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<blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8827495" data-attributes="member: 42582">In reply, I feel that your post is like saying hp are meat.Or, as [USER=205]@TwoSix[/USER] suggested upthread, that the action economy of the game is also the reality of the fiction, such that it's some weird stop motion world.To address the NPC gladiator matter more directly: when the GM rolls a successful hit with a gladiator attack, and rolls the bonus damage dice, how many blows did the gladiator strike? What does that correspond to in the fiction? Does it matter whether the damage dice result is low or high? Does it matter whether the hp loss to the victim drops them from (say) 50 hp to 40 hp or (say) 11 hp to 1 hp?D&amp;D combat is so unrelentingly fortune-in-the-middle - ie we can't say anything very definite about what is happening in the fiction, either action or consequence, until all the dice are rolled - that trying to treat any particular mechanical component as representing something in the fiction seems ridiculous to me.To try and illustrate the point another way: there was a version of the 5e playtest rules that gave martial PCs bonus damage rather than bonus attacks. Does anyone think that the fiction of what PC warriors do when they fight opponents would be different in a rules framework that went down that pathway? It seems clear to me that these are all just different mechanical devices for permitting players to play puissant warriors.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="pemerton, post: 8827495, member: 42582"] In reply, I feel that your post is like saying [i]hp are meat[/i]. Or, as [USER=205]@TwoSix[/USER] suggested upthread, that the action economy of the game is also the reality of the fiction, such that it's some weird stop motion world. To address the NPC gladiator matter more directly: when the GM rolls a successful hit with a gladiator attack, and rolls the bonus damage dice, how many blows did the gladiator strike? What does that correspond to in the fiction? Does it matter whether the damage dice result is low or high? Does it matter whether the hp loss to the victim drops them from (say) 50 hp to 40 hp or (say) 11 hp to 1 hp? D&D combat is so unrelentingly fortune-in-the-middle - ie we can't say anything very definite about what is happening in the fiction, either action or consequence, until all the dice are rolled - that trying to treat any particular mechanical component as representing something in the fiction seems ridiculous to me. To try and illustrate the point another way: there was a version of the 5e playtest rules that gave martial PCs bonus damage rather than bonus attacks. Does anyone think that the fiction of what PC warriors do when they fight opponents would be different in a rules framework that went down that pathway? It seems clear to me that these are all just different mechanical devices for permitting players to play puissant warriors. [/QUOTE]

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