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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7750600" data-attributes="member: 6873517">This is a very, very good point. Everyone's also going to have varying tolerances for different kinds of abstractions, too. Many years ago, Monte Cook defended hit points---something that often bothered me before I read his argument---as one of the prices we pay for having a game that can handle things of drastically different scale without really bogging down. Essentially his point was that hit points were one of the things that let us have dragons and pixies on the same board with each other. I can't find his post on this anymore but it was a good argument. The &quot;bloodied&quot; condition was something 4E did kind of neatly because it connected being at half hit points to qualitative things. Some monsters or characters got more powerful when bloodied. Some monsters or characters were incentivized to attack bloodied targets. It connected a game status to the rules and the narrative in a fairly elegant way that other aspects, such as &quot;encounter&quot; power or &quot;daily&quot; power never did, especially &quot;daily&quot; for characters like rogues or fighters. It wasn't perfect, but it was generally decent and is an example of something I wish the designers had kept in 5E. (Yes, I could house rule it....)There's a lot of things that 4E did I liked, despite being overall negative towards it. My biggest objection to it was how slow it was at the medium to high levels and how egregiously long character sheets got.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7750600, member: 6873517"] This is a very, very good point. Everyone's also going to have varying tolerances for different kinds of abstractions, too. Many years ago, Monte Cook defended hit points---something that often bothered me before I read his argument---as one of the prices we pay for having a game that can handle things of drastically different scale without really bogging down. Essentially his point was that hit points were one of the things that let us have dragons and pixies on the same board with each other. I can't find his post on this anymore but it was a good argument. The "bloodied" condition was something 4E did kind of neatly because it connected being at half hit points to qualitative things. Some monsters or characters got more powerful when bloodied. Some monsters or characters were incentivized to attack bloodied targets. It connected a game status to the rules and the narrative in a fairly elegant way that other aspects, such as "encounter" power or "daily" power never did, especially "daily" for characters like rogues or fighters. It wasn't perfect, but it was generally decent and is an example of something I wish the designers had kept in 5E. (Yes, I could house rule it....) There's a lot of things that 4E did I liked, despite being overall negative towards it. My biggest objection to it was how slow it was at the medium to high levels and how egregiously long character sheets got. [/QUOTE]

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