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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomBitonti" data-source="post: 7615357" data-attributes="member: 13107">Shadows cause damage supernaturally, with inverted similarity to a paladin laying on hands.A Marshall bolstering a companion doesn’t have the same feel.  Purely psychological effects have been modeled as fear, or as bonuses to checks, but not as adding or removing hit points — until 4E.  I don’t find this new model to be inconsistent with a Gygaxian description of hit points, but I agree that until 4E no one followed the Gygaxian description to its clear conclusion.But then, oughtn’t “berate” be a possible attack that does hit point damage?  And, oughtn’t anyone be able to perform a bolster action (albeit with a much lower chance of success?)An additional problem is the loss of certain attributes that 3E folks were accustomed to, with very jarring results.  As a 3E veteran, I’m used to thinking of certain creature types as being mindless, which makes the immune to mind affecting abilities.  That level of detail was dropped from 4E.  Not wanting to drop the older model, I’m left with a contradictory result.A problem, I’m thinking, is that 4E went too far in allowing effects to be reskinned, with keywords not having any fixed interpretation.  Putting Fire as a keyword had no interpretive meaning, other than purely syntactic interactions provided by the rules.  I very much prefer keywords being an interpretive guide!Thx!TomB</blockquote>