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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3701178" data-attributes="member: 1645">It's hard for me to imagine a D&D game -- or an action movie or novel -- without the threat of death and dismemberment, but that doesn't mean the game system should make it easy to die when there are so many other ways to suffer a setback that's just as interesting.D&D has developed a number of kludges for tracking setbacks.  It uses a highly abstract hit point system, then treats those seemingly abstract hit points as oddly tangible, with explicit magical healing to recover them.It makes disabling easy at low levels, since most characters have enough hit points to take only one or two hits, but it makes permanent death difficult, since only -10 hit points means death.  But then at higher levels disabling might become difficult, but scaled up damage makes that -10 buffer trivial.Then it bypasses the entire ablative hit point mechanic when it comes to save-or-die spells, since those don't do "damage".I'd much rather see a Ref Save to dodge, a Fort Save to endure, and Drama Points to sidestep failures.  Drama Points would be managed like Hit Points, but they wouldn't reflect anything tangible, and they'd apply to more things than simple damage.</blockquote>