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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5936457" data-attributes="member: 42582">I wanted to XP all of these. They capture my sense of what hp are.Like Raith5 says, they are first and foremost a number that shows who's winning and who's losing. (HeroWars, and pre-revision HeroQuest, used a somewhat, similar very abstract notion for conflict resolution called "action points".)But when that going-up-and-down has to be translated into an ingame description, Campbell, Gold Roger and Minigiant are spot on: it is entirely contextual. When I ran a behemoth (= 4e dinosaur) with 200-odd hit points, it had gashes, and arrows sticking out of it, and the full works as the PCs fought it (a bit like the Oliphants in the LotR movies). When I ran a high-level mage NPC with a comparable number of hit points, hit point loss represented parrying with her staff, and the wearing down of her magical defences, and the like - no actual physical injury was narrated until she was down to her last handful of hp.As Ti-bob said, it's about "script immunity" - I gave that NPC wizard had that many hit points because I wanted the confrontation with her to occupy a certain amount of dramatic space in the game.I voted for the first option in the poll because (i) it's somewhat closer to what I think is typical, especially for a PC, and (ii) it was the only option for "not all hp loss is physical injury", but I could just as well have voted for Peanutbutter Jelly. It seems that's what most of those with whom I agree voted for.I have always taken this for granted. And Roger Musson talked about it way back when in his White Dwarf article "How to Lose Hit Points and Survive". As far as I know, that was the first published wound/vitality system for D&D, and in discussing how it applied to monsters Musson distinguished between "NPCs" like bugbear chieftains, who will use PC-style wound and vitality pools, and creatures like a giant plug, where all there hit points should just be plonked down into the wounds pool, because "a giant slug never dodged or parried anything in it's life" (a rough paraphrase without the actual text in front of me).This is a good point, and makes me think I should have voted for Peanutbutter Jelly.Very sound advice.Two things.First, you don't have to be consistent. That's the importance of the point about context: in a poison context, you have to narrate even minor hit point loss as some sort of physical injury. But nothing in the rules, or the logic of gameplay, obliges you to extend that narration to other cases.Second, "one could easily argue that a save made means the skin didn't break": Schroedinger's Wounds!. As I've often said, 4e didn't introduce fortune-in-the-middle mechanics into D&D. Gygax spells them out in his DMG, in his discussion of hit points and saving throws. (Though it's true that, in AD&D, the playtime elapsed between resolving the attack and resolving the poison save will often be less than that in 4e between resolving the attack and resolving the death save. But the reversal of ingame causation and at-the-table resolution is still present.)Why not? That's the whole point of "contextual" hit points. And you've already agreed that the saving throw result can modify the narration.Is this true? Especially given that you don't get debilitated by hit point loss. I came into D&D from Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks. In this books you have Stamina points, that you lose in combat. And there is a strong sense in the narrative of those books that losing Stamina isn't about being wounded, but about being worn down. (Eg you can replenish Stamina by eating rations, and when the books do narrate serious injury or disablement it tends to be in the form of a penalty to your attack bonus.)When I started playing D&D, I think I though of hp as being pretty much the same as Stamina. And in due course I read the Gygax passages that set this out in detail.Sounds reasonable. Do you envisage any problematic corner case situations where it would be hard to set up a uniform mechanical structure into which individual tables can plug their current preferences? I'm thinking maybe some forms of poison delivery, and some healing spells, might require careful design to make sure that the basic structure doesn't prejudge the issue one way or another.</blockquote>

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