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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 6260151" data-attributes="member: 8461">First things first, I don't think anyone has an objection to "others being willing" to do anything; the debate is about what the game rules are suggesting, not that anyone is having badwrongfun. That's a small distinction to make, but an important one.Secondly, regarding not worrying about rules that don't make room for being unable to...to...Triple-negative! Unable to follow! Abort! Abort! <img src="http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/worried.png"  class="smilie" loading="lazy" alt=":-S" title="Uhm    :-S" data-shortname=":-S" />Okay, presuming I'm understanding the second half of that sentence correctly, you want to know why I have no problem suspending disbelief - or rather, suspending any expectation of simulationism - with regards to natural healing, but not with damage on a miss?That's a multi-part answer. The first part is "screen-time." Natural healing is a comparatively rare thing, in terms of how often it happens to the PCs. Most healing tends to be magical spike-healing, whether via a (divine) spellcaster or from magic items. Admittedly, some natural healing does still happen, but nowhere near as often (to say nothing of how it will often take place after magical healing has commenced - to cover any remaining hit point loss after the cure spells have been used - and so can be hand-waved as taking care of what few bruises and scratches are left).In other words, natural healing is a corner-case, and simply doesn't happen often enough to seriously hurt my sense of immersion-via-simulation. (Notice also that I mentioned how often this applies specifically to the PCs. That this is more common for background NPCs doesn't make it happen any more often "on screen," and hence isn't any more directly noticeable, and so doesn't impact that suspension of disbelief).Damage on a miss, on the other hand, is happening in every single fight. In fact, it's happening multiple times in a given fight. It's hard to ignore something that impinges on your sense of simulationism when it's going on constantly. Rarities can be ignored, but commonalities must be addressed.The second part is that I think that the expectation of "process-sim as realism" is (rather ironically) an unrealistic expectation. D&D's simulationism isn't trying to model the real world so much as it is trying to model the real world as portrayed in an action movie. The PCs are expected to operate not on the same logic that applies to you or me, but to that of Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Sly Stallone in any of their action flicks. Hence, major wounds are never so serious that they can't "play through the pain."The problem with damage on a miss is that doesn't apply towards that action movie mentality. The bad guys don't go down because you've near-missed them often enough to tire them out, let alone punched them in the luck so many times that now you can finally hit them directly. Likewise, if you want to say that "damage on a miss" means landing a very light blow, then that's fine; just don't give it the counterintuitive moniker of "damage on a miss"!Hence why we don't want simulation of real injuries (that's leaving aside the obvious solution of "don't narrate the physical damage of hit point loss as specific severe injuries that we know require serious medical attention and long-term rehabilitation"). Rather, I was saying I'd prefer slightly more realism...maybe enough to go from "action movie" to "gritty action movie" in that one particular area, but no more.</blockquote>

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