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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 5504001" data-attributes="member: 3424">Well, arguably, given the way that hit points were defined from the earliest days of the game, even a high-level fighter wouldn't have survived a direct hit from a giant's weapon. The loss of hit points simply means that he managed to dodge, twist aside, or otherwise evade the full force of the blow at the last second, and converted a fatal injury into a minor cut or a mild bruise. I think a lot of the confusion in this thread has arisen from the fact that there seem to be two definitions of "normal" floating around. There is, as Dannyalcatraz puts it, the "statistical" normal - the mode (what the largest number of humans are) or possibly the mean (what the statistical average human is) or the median (what the human at the 50th percentile of all humanity is). This type of "normal" is "not exceptional". Then, there is "normal" as in "not supernatural".Most humans with class levels are not "normal" in the statistical sense. Depending on game assumptions about how many people even have class levels in the first place, they could be superior to 99% of the population. Furthermore, PCs (and elite NPCs) also tend to have above-average ability scores. They are thus exceptional. However, "martial" PCs (to use a 4E term), especially low-level ones, are usually still "normal" in the "non-supernatual" sense. They might hit harder, dodge faster and endure more than a "normal" (non-exceptional) human, but the difference is quantitative, not qualitative. To illustrate:A 0-level human, "normal" in both senses of the word, gets hit by a giant and dies.A high-level fighter, exceptional but not supernatural, loses hit points to the blow, but this is supposed to represent the fighter evading it or minimizing its effects at the last second through skill or luck. A demigod such as Hercules, or someone endowed with a magical ability such as Achilles, is both exceptional and supernatural. The giant could indeed have landed a solid blow on them, but their supernatural nature allows them to survive what a normal human, or even an exceptional one, could not.</blockquote>

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