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Message: <blockquote data-quote="nnms" data-source="post: 5926232" data-attributes="member: 83293">This was actually an example I used back in 2003 when explaining why I was taking a break from D&D and going to more gritty systems.  What's the worst injury you can do with a dagger to a person?  Blade in the brain?  Heart?  Severed spinal column at the base of the skull?  Take your pick, but the answer is that you kill them.In most versions of D&D this was impossible.  It's not universally impossible in OD&D where weapons all do the same damage and HP were all a lot lower for everything, but when they made AD&D to undo the preponderance of house rules and to unify the player base into a single way of playing (sound familiar?) things changed (as well as if you get more HP).It's also important to note that the Runequest system started as Steve Perrin's house rules on 1974 OD&D.  From the very beginning there have been D&D players that have seen these issues as being problematic.  By the time 1978 rolled around Runequest had grown into a separate game completely and the approach of Steve Perrin in his original house rules was pushed out during the anti-house rule stance Gygax took as part of his attempt to standardize the industry with AD&D.The approach found in games like Runequest has been there since the earliest days of the hobby.  David Wesely (the guy who ran Braunstein for Arneson and others), for example, credits Modern Warfare in Miniature as being the first published RPG in 1968.  It is very, very concerned with player decisions being made with the information available to its characters.  Even to the point that the resolution system is largely hidden from the players entirely.In the Theory From the Closet interview with Wesely, he describes Braunstein as having more in kin with LARPing than with many sit down RPGs.  It was all about the dialogue and description and shared fiction with the guy running it only getting involved to settle disputes or to resolve things via a system obfuscated from the players.The only difference would be when you either describe something and have it retconned or when you are prohibited from describing something until a large compound layered resolution exercise is complete.For HP, the narration of a given strike is only delayed until the attack roll is rolled and the damage is rolled.  Then you can evaluate the relative damage vs the target's HP and make a sensible narration.The further the distance from the initial expression of desire to when the result is finally concretely discribed and added into the shared story, more it is problematic to those wanting a type of play that goes back to the Braunstein game in 1967 and which Gary Gygax largely abandoned in AD&D.</blockquote>

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