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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7750971" data-attributes="member: 42582">When I say that poison saves in AD&D were a "luck mechanic", I mean that what they model is luck. Clerics don't have the best poison saves because they're tougher than anyone else, but because their gods protect them from death.Gygax's comments on poison saves that I quoted upthread (DMG, p 81) reinforce this:recall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.There is also his more general remark (p 111-12) about the significance of improved saving throws as PCs gain levels:[T]he accumulation of hit points and the ever-greater abilities and better saving throws of characters represents the aid supplied by supernatural forces.That's not to say that being tough doesn't help with poison saves (qv dwarves; UA barbarians; bonuses from high CON in DDG) - which suggest that, at least for those characters, some successful saves may involve being poisoned but shrugging it off. But that clearly isn't the mandatory, or even the default, narration of a successful poison save.For this smurf, it's not so much "dissociation" (I regard that as a pseudo concept) but simply which suite of mechanics sets up both the gameplay, and the abstractions, in a way that suits my purposes.I don't mind the AD&D approach too much, except that (i) there are too many saving throw categories, and (ii) there is no really satisfactory way of dealing with fatigue/exhaustion other then perhaps temp hp loss, which is already a part of (some versions of) the unarmed combat rules, the subdual rules and the slippers of kicking, but is a pain in the neck in all those contexts and so doesn't really warrant being expanded to other parts of the game.Obviously I don't mind the 4e approach - everything hangs together neatly around hp/HS except for encounter powers and action points, but I'm quite happy to have these features - which in various ways feed into action economy - be separate things to play with.As I said, my least favourite is 3E just because it anchors just enough stuff to the fiction (eg Fortitude saves clearly involve "toughing out" being poisoned; stat damage clearly represents genuine physical debilitation) the you can't ignore it, but then leaves the core mechanics - AC and hp - basically unchanged from AD&D (and so quite abstract in relation to the fiction). I find it neither fish nor fowl but an unhappy combination of each.</blockquote>

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