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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Fanaelialae" data-source="post: 8441347" data-attributes="member: 53980">IMO, this is more a legacy issue for D&D, in that things that shouldn't be able to realistically cause serious harm have been attributed damage.The classic example being the poison needle trap (let's ignore the poison for the sake of simplicity). IIRC, in many cases the needle itself would inflict at least 1 point of damage. For a character with only 1 HP remaining, this would be a potentially lethal injury. However, it's rather hard to imagine a needle itself inflicting a lethal injury. What did they do, headbutt the needle and pierce their skull?IMO, anything that is exceedingly improbable to kill someone (a paper cut, a poke from a needle) shouldn't deal damage. Anything that is unlikely but could technically kill someone (a house cat) should be gated in some way (maybe on a crit a cat can do 1 damage, or maybe cats deal 1d6-5 [min 0] damage, or something along those lines). Perhaps, even if the damage is 0, the attack still prompts a concentration check, to indicate that there was superficial (but painful) injury.Inflating HP doesn't really help the issue much, aside from making it less likely to occur (but if you have house cats regularly killing commoners under RAW, I daresay something odd is going on in your game). Requiring 8 scratches from house cats to kill commoners still results in a silly outcome. IMO, it's better fixed by reassessing what should and should not result in damage, rather than by adjusting HP.</blockquote>

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