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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hypersmurf" data-source="post: 5938859" data-attributes="member: 1656">I'm inclined to disagree.Consider the little picture of the PC's face at the bottom of the screen in Doom.  When you're at 100% health he looks fine.  As he takes damage, the face becomes bloodied, then bruised - you can glance at that face and get a readout of how much health you have left.If you treat a 4E PC the same way, then yeah, you can't narrate an injury that can't heal overnight.But what if you don't?Let's say I have 30 hit points.  On the attack that Bloodies me - drops me from 21 to 14, say - we decide to narrate it as a goblin stabbing me in the shoulder with a spear.Now, the cinematic description of "stabbed through the shoulder" has no actual mechanical consequence.  All that mechanically matters are two things - I have the Bloodied status, and I'm 7 hit points closer to being rendered incapable of further direct influence on the course of the narrative.We polish off the goblins and take an Extended rest.  Voila, I'm back at 30 hit points.  We could take the Doom approach, and say that this means my shoulder is completely unblemished.  But that's not the only way to do it.I'm happy to say that I have 30 hit points, and there's a nasty wound in my shoulder that's still oozing into the bandages we strapped on me after the fight.Yesterday, when I was at 14 hit points, the shoulder wound had no mechanical effect on my combat capabilities.  Today, when I'm at 30 hit points, the shoulder wound has no effect on my combat capabilities.  So it doesn't mechanically break anything to say "I'm at max health, but the little face at the bottom of the screen still looks battered and bruised".I can complain about how my shoulder is still aching like blazes for the next couple of in-game months, if I like.  What the extended rest has done is to replenish my capacity to resist attempts to prevent my direct influence on the narrative, rather than removing any medical evidence within the fiction that someone stuck a spear in me.In summary - I don't think that "being at full hit points" mandates "showing no evidence of physical trauma narrated to explain previous hit point loss".Yeah.You obviously can't narrate an attack before the attack roll is made.  You don't know if it's a successful attack or an unsuccessful attack.It's generally accepted that it's a bad idea to narrate an attack before the damage roll is made.  vs AC 15, an attack roll of 15 sounds less impressive than an attack roll of 27, but if it's 15 for 13 points of damage vs 27 for 2 point of damage, the damage roll will presumably impact on the description you choose.It's a bad idea to commit to a narration before DR is considered.  If you deal 8 damage but the creature has DR 10, that consideration will influence the narrative.It's a bad idea to commit to a narration before the existence of poison is confirmed or denied, since poison may mandate physical injury to be involved in the narrative resolution of the attack.But, as Lanefan concedes, a successful saving throw against poison may negate that mandate - if we know that the attack did not result in the character succumbing to poison, then we retain the freedom to narrate the attack without the poison being successfully introduced to the victim's bloodstream... which means physical injury is no longer a necessity.In the D&DN playtest or 4E, we also need to consider if the attack can reduce the target's HP total despite an unsuccessful attack roll.Once all of those factors are considered, you know what is forbidden in the narrative ("He failed his poison save, so you must incorporate physical contact"; "DR prevented all hit point loss, so you shouldn't narrate major inconvenience"), and anything else is really fair game... assuming one allows for hit points to represent multiple avenues of plot resilience.(For certain types of DR - zombies, say - even the reduction of damage to zero doesn't require no wounds in the cinematic depiction.  You can carve big chunks out of a zombie with an axe, and he keeps coming... perfectly valid zero-damage attack!)-Hyp.</blockquote>

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