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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kirowan" data-source="post: 45992" data-attributes="member: 2728">I understand that hit points represent both a character's ability to sustain real damage and turn potentially vital blows into minor wounds. I can accept this at lower levels of play, but not at higher levels. Imagine a 100 HP fighter. Say he is hammered by a volley of 15 arrows by the town garrison (many more archers missed). On average, they do 4 points of damage each. Our figher has only lost 60 HPs. Now, I just don't know how to describe this visually to my players. Sure, I can say 2 or 3 lodged themselves securely into his flesh without puncturing anything major, but how do I rationalize the other 12 just nicking him. It just seems ridiculous. At first I thought about having the majority of most character's HPs represent the ability to perfrom extreme stunts to reduce vital blows, even to the point of the blow missing the character completely (to get rid of the problem of having a character walk around like a human pincusion). Hence, a character's normal AC defenses would represent his non-draining defenses while his hit point loss would represent taking flesh wounds and performing insane stunts that drain his vitality (a la Matrix). So, in the scenario above, our fighter might take an arrow solidly to his thigh, a few would nick him, and the rest would be avoided by his dazzling acrobatic prowess. Then I remembered cure spells. I mean, natural healing makes sense in this context, but applying a cure spell to someone just because they might be feeling physically drained doesn't. All I'm looking for is help with describing combat to my players visually. I know characters in D&D are suppossed to be heroic. I'm just afraid that at high levels, combat will seem ludicrous. Note that I'm aware that people will be doing more damage because of magic weapons, so it is kind of relative. However, there will be instances when someone will be attacking a high level character with his trusty non-enchanted longsword and the high level character will walk away bleeding from 50 wounds that would have killed him if he weren't so skilled. Thanks in advance for any help!</blockquote>

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