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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5699290" data-attributes="member: 3887">Oh sure... but invariable the DMs, myself included, drifted back to a direct correlation between damage rolled and wound severity, regardless of the target's remaining hit points. I think a big part of this is psychological. You roll a 17 on 3d6 and it's (relatively speaking) a big number. Probability-wise, a unlikely occurrence. So the natural tendency is to describe it as being "big", a serious injury, even though it's not really to a character with 80 HP. It's harder, or at least counter-intuitive, to base your descriptions on a PC's remaining HP total, and not on the damage dice, even though that would fit the system better. Maybe it's because dice-rolling is a physical action, it's easier to correlate with the blow landing, or a fireball exploding, whereas mental subtraction seems more passive, internal... I don't know, I don't pretend to be a psychologist <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=":)" />.So we have a history of D&D combat descriptions where colossal blows from giants barely rattle a PC's bones, let alone break them, and cuts the depth of cat-scratches that kill them.  For the record, I don't think it's a problem. It's just a consequence of D&D's implementation of an ablative hit point system. Frankly, it plays fast and well and at this point, is part of D&D's charm. Hey, we're the same age!Let me be clear about what I mean re: flesh wounds.D&D doesn't model specific injuries, nor impairment. So all damage done to a target could be described as flesh wounds (they don't hamper/decrease effectiveness). Up until the point the character keels over. I'm commenting on the way D&D has two character health states: fine and dying. Injuries (HP loss) have no effect other than to make the closer, mathematically, to dead. Oh sure. I'm just (still) curious why people see them as significantly different from traditional HP. Narrating the effects of surges seem trickier to me than the stuff DM's have been doing all along; describing the injuries of a PC whose lost 99 out 100 HP to a bunch of irate frost giants, or how a thief caught in a room without cover survived a flight of fireballs.</blockquote>

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