NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5622892" data-attributes="member: 42582">But how do they survive? This is similar to my response upthread to Jameson Courage - you don't establish a coherent gameworld just by telling me that Heirophants have a non-magical ability to square the circle, and that it is teachable and learnable. I want to know, how are they doing it? What fiction am I being invited to imagine?In the case of the fall, what might this be? Luck? Divine favour? (Surely not meat! Or really strong bones - after all, that is what a barbarian's DR models.) If you can regard knowing how lucky you are going to be, in advance, as associated, then I don't see why the same mind trick can't be played in respect of martial dailies.Well, the answer to the claw thing is meant to be that it doesn't really hit you, it just grazes you or winds you slightly.The breath I can't say so much about, and I think it's therefore not a coincidence that a more simulationist approach to breath weapons and saving throws is seen fairly early on in the history of D&D (I'm thinking of Roger Musson's "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive", in White Dwarf, but I'm sure it's not the only example).To me the easy solution to both the breath and the fall is that the player knows his/her PC will survive, but the PC doesn't. That is, that hit points are a type of mechanical resource that the player draws on to help regulate his/her PC's exposure to risk, knowing that a certain degree of narrative protection is available, but apt to be ablated.But this requires adopting author stance rather than actor stance. I think an actor-stance-only version of hit points will tend to produce play that is, in practice, indistinguishable from "hit points as meat", although most groups won't worry about what this means for the biology of their high-level PCs.</blockquote>

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