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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6289556" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, you're not a fantasy hero. And that 1d8 sword guy isn't sticking a sword through the chest of the 100 HP fantasy hero. At best, he's gonna leave a mark *trying* to stick a sword through the hero's chest.I don't see it as "avoid the blows," (that's a distinction between a hit and a miss), I see it as the skill to turn a lunge for the heart into a scrape that leaves a mark (a hit, but not for significant damage).Yeah, for me, he basically is. My 100 HP fantasy hero knows a typical guard with a longsword isn't going to be able to kill him in a single blow, even if he manages to get a lucky hit in. Heck, the guard might even know that. The skill is apparent. Yeah, different things wreck the verisimilitude in different ways for different people. I've got no problem with the high-level 100 HP hero knowing that after he's slain armies of goblins, steadings of giants, caves full of trolls, alien aberrations from beyond the world, and a dragon or twenty that some dude in an alleyway isn't going to be able to kill him with a single lucky sword blow. That feels real to me: this guy knows danger, he knows adventure, what putting his life at risk looks like. This isn't that. "I've taken dumps with more risk to my life than this, friend."I'd compare it to how you might know you can read the word "verisimilitude." You've seen words, you know language, you know what sounds letters make, and how to string them together. You've also got experience on D&D message boards, so you've likely seen the term before. You're skilled at reading, so you know you can probably read and understand that word. A D&D adventurer is that skilled at risking his life: he knows what he can handle fairly intuitively. It's not that they know they're fictional protagonists, it's that they know they live in a world of danger and magic and adventure, and they know what they have faced before and may be able to handle again/in the future. They have an expertise about risk that you or I would lack in the same way that you have an expertise about reading that a typical fantasy hero would probably lack. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> That feels a lot more real to me than pretending that 96 of my 100 HP's don't exist, that my professional adventurer with a long career is frightened by some dude in an alley with a sword, that he thinks that this is exactly as likely to kill him as a red dragon. I can't get into that dude's mind. So playing like that is less fun for me.Though, you know, if I played that guy in a system where 1 hit was lethal, but a high-level character was given 99 "dodge points" or something, that could make sense to me. It's just not the vibe I get from the HP system.</blockquote>

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