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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6289125" data-attributes="member: 4937">Both hit points and levels are treated as pure metaconstructs.  Neither exists in the game world and its not possible to discover hit points or level, nor have any magical effect be triggered on or by hit points.  For that matter, class per say is also a meta-contruct, but in some cases there is a very tight relationship between the metagame class and the character's in game station in life, relationship to the world, and chosen profession.  A character with the cleric class knows he is a cleric and is in the game world a cleric.  A character with the cleric class doesnt' know in game whether he is a multi-classed cleric/expert though, nor does he really understand what that means (because it doesn't mean anything in game, class being just an abstraction of concrete in game world skills that are usually acquired together), but to the extent that multiclassing reflects specific periods of his life history he might know that.Characters know how seriously they are wounded, and can convey this to other characters.  In general, I don't squash players telling other players how many hit points they've lost because not everyone is of such a thespian inclination and it tends to slow down gameplay in larger groups if you are that hardnosed about being IC.   But their characters can't refer to hit points in character, and NPCs never do so.It is possible to use a heal check to tell how seriously someone else is wounded, but the same result is obtained if a person with 10 hit points has 2 hit points left or a person with 100 hit points has 20 hit points left.  Both are assumed to have more or less equivalent injuries - in both cases quite serious and ugly looking but not crippling or life threatening.  Although often we could make distinctions about how the injuries were obtained, even that is not certain.  The characters know that they are feeling tired, achey, or pained by their injuries but they can still grit through them (although presumably a less than heroic character would not want to and would require motivation to do so).  Neither character would exactly know that the next blow they took was likely to be quite serious (and after all, in the case of the character with 20 hit points, it might not be), but they'd certainly both understand that they couldn't take much more of this, their luck was running out, and they'd have a hard time fighting through the pain to avoid any more danger.  It is also possible to appraise whether or not someone is more skillful than you at a particular task if you observe them performing the task for a reasonable period, and in D&D this implies level but does not prove it nor does it obtain an exacting figure.  For example, if you watch another character fight or spar against them, you can reasonably quickly establish if they know what they are doing or if they know more than you do.  But you can't establish their level (which could be multi-classed)Although levels don't exist, it is possible for spellcasters in game to effectively know the level of other spellcasters because the level of a spell is something that explicitly exists in the game world.   A wizard that can cast 5th level spells is said to have "penetrated the 5th circle of mysteries".   The title Archmage can be claimed by a wizard that has "penetrated the 9th circle of mysteries".   The particular path of learning to reach the next circle of understanding is formalized among wizards, but no one thinks or talks about it in terms like levels and if you asked wizards about graduations among wizardry they'd say that there were 10 - it doesn't really occur to them that a Wizard that can cast 4th level spells might be 7th or 8th level.   For one thing, a potent hedge mage might be 9th or 10th level, but if he only has a 14 Int, he won't penetrate the 5th circle of mystery (5th level spells) and so as far as the wizards are concerned 7th, 8th, 9th, or 10th level all look the same.  Being able to cast a certain number of spells of a given level doesn't prove anything either, as that's dependent on Intelligence, Feats, and so forth.   Inside the game world, the level of the wizard is still an abstraction for the concrete thing of being of a particular skill in his chosen profession.</blockquote>

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