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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ccooke" data-source="post: 6257874" data-attributes="member: 6695890">To me, hit points are (and have been since a long discussion with my 3.0e group years ago) your ability to avoid a serious injury.Whenever hit points are lost, I narrate that as anything that would, in context, wear down the victim such that they are less able to avoid a serious injury - for a barbarian, it might be shallow cuts and bruises. For a rogue, fitness and the ability to dodge. For a skeleton, it's the physical integrity of its body. For incorporeal creatures, it's the magic that protects them.When damage would take someone to less than 0 hit points, that means - to me - that they are seriously wounded because they were unable to prevent it. Anything that happens before that blow isn't a serious injury - it's something that (with sufficient willpower, resilience or just dumb luck) you could ignore. The barbarian had too many small wounds, slowing her down enough that she couldn't avoid a heavy blow, for instance.This is why I prefer harsher systems in place to deal with situations where someone has been dropped, as well. I mentioned a while back an exhaustion-based wound system I'm trying out - it seems to be working very well. Exhaustion is such a natural mechanic <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":-)" title="Smile    :-)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":-)" />I guess this interpretation is why I'm absolutely fine with martial healing - there's never a case of "shouting a limb back on" in my games: Purely hit point damage includes cuts, bruises, scrapes, a nagging sense of doom, the knowledge that all your works will come to nothing... It's easy to imagine that the right words could make you ignore all of that for a while. As soon as you've been dropped, though, nothing short of (Int/Dex/Wis)[Medicine] (depending on the injuries you took), a Lesser Restoration cast from a 3rd level slot or days (maybe weeks) of untreated rest is going to bring you back to full health, even if you can restore all of your hit points. Martial healing won't do it, but then neither will Cure Wounds (I'll allow a Paladin to spend 15hp of his Lay on Hands for it, or a Cleric to use a healing Channel Divinity. Both of those fit thematically. I can't think of a purely martial way that it would work, but I don't expect that to be a problem. (Just to be clear: I do allow Cure Wounds (and I would allow martial healing) to get someone up from 0 hit points. I just apply consequences to the character such that getting up doesn't mean the problem has gone away)Ugh. Another long ramble. Oh well.</blockquote>

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