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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7750905" data-attributes="member: 996">It's only 'wrong' when you make a successful attack against a stone or turnip.  (And I know D&D has stone golems and galeb-dur, and I'd be surprised if no one had ever created a turnip-monster for it, too.) ... or, y'know, anything else about the attack, the character, or the situation precludes drawing blood, or if you'd find the mechanics of resolving the injury inconsistent with it drawing blood.  So, certainly not wrong, but also not necessarily always right? I think the real point is you (as ahem, 'injured party,' can narrate the injury in accord with your established narrative - if you're playing Mr. Spock, you narrate a wound as bleeding green blood; as the DM you can narrate what makes narrative sense in your world, like the old 'lasers cauterize the wound, so you're not bleeding,' thing (yeah, I know); you pick the narrative, so you can associate it as much (or as little, to really tick off that guy at the table who's bothered by it, or to prove the game mechanic is dissociated) as you want, to your standards of narrative-to-mechanic correspondence.  It's just another iteration of what D&D does throughout:  if there's a problem with your game, it's your fault, not the system's, every time.  You knew the DMing job was Empowered when you took it, Fred.  If you think that sounds logically fallacious or unfair or don't like references to 50+ yo cartoons or something, well, /that's your fault too/.  Because discussion of RPG rulesets is all about assigning blame when the game sucks, not about making them better, right? That's not how the idea got started, though, that was (should have been) the end of if.  It got started because people complained long and loud, back in the day (way back, even before my day in the day), how unrealistic it was that characters gained HD as they leveled.   Because, well, if you think of hit points as representing nothing buy physical damage, going from having 5 to have 66 without becoming much larger or much sturdier doesn't make much sense, and, 'realistically,' (yeah, I know) most human-like fantasy races don't get that much larger (at least, not through the repeated experience of killing things and taking their stuff) or that much sturdier (when they do get that much sturdier it usually involved a medusa or cockatrice or something, and is quite sudden).So EGG, being who he was, wrote a long involved rationalization of the game mechanic.  And it was fine until 40 years later, some nerds decided it was 'dissociated' because hit points /had always been all about physical damage/, when, in fact, on the grounds of (defense against) realism, hit points had 'always' (as of 1979) been about non-physical factors, as well or even instead.   Yep, and D&D has been disappointing you from the beginning. ;P  You make /a/ roll to hit, but you're not swinging only once, for instance.  No matter how much 'damage' you roll, you won't be removing body parts ... unless, of course, the monster's entry says certain bits are cut off after taking X damage, in which case you can chop bits off it with a mace or fireball or psionic blast. Isn't it? I think it has been for a while now (I may be thinking of the more-than-one-swing-in-an-single attack roll bit).  It's a whole lot shorter than EGG's way of putting it, but then, so's everything. I've rarely seen casual players bothered by the minutia of hit point rationalizations - though, to be fair, I had never seen too many repeat 'casual' players until 2010, when I started participating in Encounters.  D&D does seem to say you're being 'hit' a lot more than seems to happen with a character in genre, in the sense of struck and visibly wounded.  Particularly in pop-culture fantasy TV/movies, characters tend to swing swords a lot, but land more kicks, punches, trips, and the like - when the target is a main cast member or important villain, anyway, the mooks just get skewered.  D&D has generally sorta delivered, once you think through the hit <> hit and damage <> physical wound routine.  Because losing hps indirectly, but fairly simply models the way those characters in genre will run from a fight or appear desperate, even though they haven't been touched because "there's too many of them!" or "he's really good, we can't take him" or whatever (they're running low on hps, see?).  Except, of course, that you need Cure ____ Wounds & healing potions or weeks of rests to 'heal' your not-damage from when you weren't hit.  But, if you /don't/ bother to think through all that, it still delivers about the cadence of the pop-culture-fantasy-genre battle:  Hero goes into battle, villain comes on strong, here is pressed to even defend himself, but, on the verge of losing (dangling over a cliff, struck a serious blow, dropped to his knees, reeling or even unconscious for a moment as the villain gloats), he rallies and wins.  (Y'know, more or less depending on edition, variants, DM, PC being the 'hero,' monster being the 'villain,' the rest of the party, etc...)Besides, nowadays, if a newb asks you "what are these hit points all about anyway?" you can just tell him "meh, it's like your health bar in a fighting game," and he'll totally get it.  Because fighting games ripped off hit points from D&D, thankyouverymuch.</blockquote>

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