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Message: <blockquote data-quote="innerdude" data-source="post: 6292597" data-attributes="member: 85870">I have to respectfully disagree that each of these are "still basically hit points." Even splitting hit points into wounds and vitality has a distinct effect on the "narrative fiction" of the game being played, especially if you're playing a system where wounds can be attacked directly via a critical hit, making the "standard" D&D-slow-HP-attrition-spiral into much different, more dangerous fights. As far as damage saves / soaks, I'm a huge fan of Savage Worlds, but the "wound soaking" mechanic has always stood out to me like a sore thumb. Everything about Savage Worlds is so elegant and coherent, but this . . . this . . . wound thing . . . what to do about it? As you say, it's the functional equivalent of a "saving throw" based on meta-game currency. Expend a resource ("bennies") for a chance to "save against wounding." In Savage Worlds' case, to me it's the designers sort of waving a white flag, accepting that for their system to meet their aims of "fast and furious," they had to do something other than slow HP attrition across gobs of enemies / players. What does a "soak roll" mean in Savage Worlds, in terms of "verisimilitude"? Nothing. It's totally dissociated; there's no relationship between a player spending the "benny" meta-game currency, and the character being able to attribute that meta-game currency to in-game cause.But in a sense, as much as it bothers me sometimes that it's clearly a "metagame / dissociated" mechanic, at the same time, it's almost like I can hear Shane Hensley in the background saying, "But what's the alternative??? D&D hitpoints? Long, drawn out whittling down of resistance until someone finally gets 'hurt'? Nope. Some intricate, simulationist attack / active defense / armor mechanic that takes way too long to resolve, like GURPS? Nope."But at the very least, it makes clear what the actual effect of a true "wound" is --- it's "meat." There's no abstract, "Well, if a fighter has 100 HP, and a Wizard 40, what does a 25-point damage attack mean to either of them?" True, in Savage Worlds if a character's Vigor is higher than another, a 25-point attack may have a different effect, but generally it's the difference between, "Gee, I'm pretty screwed here and gonna get hurt," versus, "Gee, I'm SERIOUSLY, TOTALLY screwed here and gonna get hurt." A wound save / soak roll also gives players more meaningful narrative control, because he or she can CHOOSE to not make a soak attempt at all, saving the meta-game currency for later. (In a sense, this is more in line with "healing surges" in this regard, except that Savage Worlds at least mitigates the "heal up before every fight" dissociation by making wounds a serious, game-affecting problem). In Savage Worlds' case I'm willing to forgive this aspect of meta-gamey-ness for two reasons: 1) The wound / soak mechanic is largely the ONLY pure meta-game construct in the game. Nearly everything else operates from a very consistent, process-resolution basis. 2) It fully serves the purpose of the system to meet its designed mode of play. For me, it communicates something about the hitpoint debate as a whole, which is that in general, most RPGs set up their "combat damage" mechanic to not model reality. Really it's just a question of how much "non-reality" you're willing to deal with. You want gritty, deadly, one-hit-and-you-die combat, don't look to D&D and Savage Worlds; go to GURPS and Runequest. Now that said, I'm generally of the preference where I'm okay for combat damage to be modeled on "non-reality," but prefer most of the rest of the game world to operate at least somewhere in the "appropriate reality spectrum," tuned for genre, etc. Which is why I can largely deal with the wound mechanic in Savage Worlds, but totally balk at 4e's wide-and-varied dissociations across multiple gameplay spectra. Last but not least, "Damage Avoidance" is by far the most "simulationist" way of treating combat. People who go into life-threatening combat do everything in their absolute power to avoid taking damage. It's why the whole "combat as war" motif is powerful---you play combat-as-war to give yourself every advantage possible, because in the real world, damage avoidance can only go so far. Having played GURPS some, damage avoidance is  HUGE, HUGE part of the game's makeup, and it has a DEFINITIVE change on playstyle. It's "not just hitpoints." Yes, hitpoints, soak / damage saves, and damage avoidance all serve the same general purpose, to model combat damage. But in play they're vastly, vastly different.</blockquote>

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