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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7209581" data-attributes="member: 42582">Gygax describes just this in his DMG: for most monsters, hp are "meat" rather than luck, skill etc.Agreed with Tony Vargas and Blue: the narration of the hp loss differs from occasion to occasion, depending on what happened in the fiction. So if someone got poisoned, some sort of scratch has to be narrated; otherwise not.There is no need for universal correlations between "hit point loss events" and particular narrations.A bit less poetically: hit points are numbers on a sheet. What is key, from the point of view of correlating ingame events to gameplay events, is the moment of loss and the moment of addition. When you mark of hit points on your sheet, something has happened that makes your demise more imminent; when you add hit points back onto your sheet, something has happened that makes your demise less likely (eg a wound has been healed, your morale has improved, your vigour has been restored, etc).There is no need for equivalence here - eg if your PC has been poisoned, then you (the player) deduct hp from your sheet to reflect that; then someone speaks a healing word, bucking you up, and you add hp to your sheet to reflect that. The change in hp total needn't be taken to indicate that you're no longer poisoned.Well yes, in the sense that a given "hit point subtraction event" or "hit point addition event" might have one sort of ingame correlate, and then another one might have a very different ingame correlate. But that doesn't mean that the fiction is abstract. Whether or not we know what is happening in the fiction depends on whether or not someone (player or GM) narrates it. And the hp mechanic doesn't normally prevent that (though it doesn't encourage it, either).I don't think this is right. I mean, of course it's just a game, but so are RPGs (eg Rolemaster, Burning Wheel) that use wound mechanics.If the fiction is evoked reasonably vividly - by some mixture of narration and the other events of play - then I don't find the hp mechanic causes any obstacle to immersion. Of course the narration has to match the consequences of hit point loss - so falls can't be narrated as "bone shattering" if the rules tell you the character is able to pick him-/herself up and keep going. This is where proper narration of luck/magical protection becomes important. But as long as that is handled properly then I don't see immersion issues.</blockquote>

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