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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jacob Lewis" data-source="post: 9754917" data-attributes="member: 6667921">[USER=78087]@jian[/USER]The issue with your suggestion isn’t that it couldn’t work, but that it assumes hit points have a fixed meaning that can be cleanly extended. The truth is, HP in D&D (and most systems that borrowed them) are deliberately undefined beyond “are you still alive?”. That abstraction only holds together because their single function is binary: above zero, you keep playing; at zero, you don’t.Once you say, “Well, they mostly represent luck, so why not spend them?” you’re no longer dealing with the same concept of HP. You’ve redefined them, and that redefinition has ripple effects through everything else in the rules:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If HP are luck, then what are healing spells restoring—luck? stamina? divine favor?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">What about poison, starvation, or suffocation damage? Are those really luck depleting, or something else?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">If HP are spendable, should we also separate out “meat damage” to track real injury, like Star Wars d20 did with wounds?</li> </ul>What you’re really describing isn’t “hit points with extra options,” but a new resource system that replaces the old abstraction. And that’s the catch: the more you try to stretch HP into other roles, the less they remain the common shorthand that makes them easy to understand in the first place.</blockquote>

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