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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5619112" data-attributes="member: 42582">With hit points, it seems to me that there is information available to the player - eg I will die if I take one more hit, or I can jump over that 200' cliff and survive, or There's no way a single blow of that sword can kill me - that is manifestly not available to the PC.As to decisions which have no association with decisions being made by the PC - deciding to use a daily power has an associate with all sorts of decision made by the PC, like where to move to, what to do beforehand, what to do afterwards, etc. If by "association" you mean something like "the player's dedision-making process, in deciding to use the martial daily, does not correspond to any particular decision made by the PC", that may or may not be true. If a particular table, following page 54 of the PHB, takes the view that martial dailies represent deep reserves, then there is this sort of correspondence - namely, the player decides to use a daily and the the PC decides to draw upon every last ounce of his or her being. But obviously some other tables will run (at least some) martial dailies in a purely metagame fashion - doing a 3W daily rather than a 1W at-will becomes equivalent to spending a Fate Point for bonus damage. I believe some versions of 3E (eg Eberron) use such a mechanic. So does Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed/Evolved. The presence of this sort of mechanic in 4e is not all that revolutionary, although it's packaging of it (as a mechanism to balance martial PCs against spell users) might be new to some.If it's physical punishment, why does it not wear the character out?Do you do some houseruling, like positing an adreline rush during combat? That keeps going even hours or days after the combat ended?Yet Pogo the clown has no impairment to any limbs or organs. What sort of biological condition is a creature in such that both (i) a bad scrape would knock it out, yet (ii) it has no functional impairments?Perhaps some houserules would settle this question!Assuming that you houserule that it's not colourless, as the actual rulebook appears to suggest!So now a GM who decides to run beseiged foe as a curse is houseruling! A GM who decides that, instead, it represents telepathic guidance is houseruling!In Gygax's DMG, the combat section has a discussion of saving throws. He explains how a saving throw is always permitted - that it represents a last-ditch chance at ingenuity and luck. Even a fighter chained to a rock gets a save against dragon breath - perhaps at the last minute the fighter finds cover behind the barest ridge, or perhaps the chains break! Not until this thread had it ever occurred to me that a GM who runs saving throws as per Gygax's instructions in the DMG - which is to say, extrapolating some saving situation out of the context of the game that is ready-to-hand for the participants, although variable from occasion to occasion, houseruling! I'd always assumed that this was called running the game.</blockquote>

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