So does everyone else in 4E. Consistent ingame explanations for HP and dmg are flat out against the rules.
What? Why?
Damage represents shock. Not the electrical kind, the socked-in-the-heart-with-a-boxing-glove kind. Hit points are your capacity to absorb shock and stay conscious. Generally you can shake off shock if you can sit down and rest for a few minutes, but sometimes there's just not enough left in the tank and you need to sleep. At half hit points you begin to show signs of wear, at zero you pass out and will likely go comatose without help. At negative half hit points you've been too badly beaten to regain consciousness unaided, and if you're there or comatose you're also beyond the reach of most conventional healing, unless it happened very recently. You need ritual healing to get you up and running again.
How you paint this on yourself depends on your character - a ranger who only takes bruises and scrapes and even the shot that knocks him out leaves him wondering why his legs stopped working, a paladin whose muscles tear and bones break but is knit back together with divine energy, a warlock who is little more than a spindly husk surrounded by an aura of blue-black flame that flares to repulse blows but gutters and dies....
You can create the explanation you like that is consistent within your character. If you want to enforce a whole-world model, you can probably do that, too, perhaps segregating obvious exceptions like undead and oozes.
Irda Ranger said:
The distinguishing characteristic is that simulationists recognize rules like "city guards are between 1st and 4th level" and narrativists don't. For a narrativist a city guard is whatever level he needs to be to advance the plot (within reason).
But for the simulationist a city guard is whatever level he needs to be to advance the plot, as well. It's just that there are some plots that city guards could not be called on to advance.
Irda Ranger said:
However, we have gotten very far afield. My main point of argument is that if you give a player a +1 to attack, it should mean something. In all previous editions of D&D it meant (1) old foes were more easily bested and (2) new more powerful foes can be challenged. However by simply scaling old foes up with player advancement (even if at "a reduced scale") you are taking away reward number one. To quote S'mon, "Where's the cookie?"
And by scaling more powerful foes down to compensate for inadequate player advancement, you're taking away reward number 2.
But this is about more than just number scaling. Number scaling falls apart after about 5 levels, and the DMG reflects this. This is about role scaling.
Consider the salamander lancer, a level 14 brute worth 1000 XP with 170 hit points. It can stab with its long lance, push with a tail slap, or produce a whirlwind of flame as a long-recharge power. Here's what might happen if a DM wanted to feature this monster in a 4E campaign, perhaps as the iconic servant of a demon prince or somesuch.
For a level 4 or 5 party, the lancer can be reconcepted into a "final boss", perhaps the product of a summoning ritual designed to devastate the countryside. It's a level 5 solo brute worth 1000 XP, with about 300 hit points and lower defenses. In any given turn it can stab twice with its lance and make a tail slap as an immediate reaction against a melee attack. It's surrounded by an aura of flame and flings its whirlwind out every other turn, and immediately when the PCs first wound it.
For a level 10 party, it can be reconcepted into a "lieutenant", a powerful presence among a hidden sect of cultists. It's a level 10 elite brute worth 1000 XP, with about 250 hit points and slightly lower defenses. In a given turn it can stab or slap, but not both, though it still gets the tail-slap as an immediate reaction, but only on a miss. It may have an aura of flames, but the aura doesn't deal damage, and the whirlwind only comes out every three turns, though it does immediately recharge when the lancer is bloodied.
For a level 14 party it's a run-of-the-mill monster, part of a typical resistance the PCs might face trying to rescue an artifact from the Elemental Chaos. It's a level 14 brute worth 1000 XP with 170 hit points and standard defenses. The whirlwind of flame may come out once in the encounter.
For a level 22 party it can be reconcepted into a "minion", part of a mass of servitors that surround the demon prince for the party's final showdown with him. It's a level 22 minion worth about 1000 XP, and one solid hit will put it away but it has higher defenses. It can stab or lob a bolt of flame, both for relatively minor damage.
Why have it gain and lose attacks, or gain and lose hit points, or gain and lose defenses? Think of it as a quick abstraction on top of a deeper simulation. In the simulation, damage isn't binary. It's a continuum, based on the base damage of the power and base defense of the enemy, that increases with a higher attack roll. You can do things like make multiple attacks per round at a penalty, ready a reactive attack at a penalty, or have an ability that charges up from round to round and can be released whenever.
To help the simulation resolve faster, some assumptions are made. Binary hits and misses show up - the hits do random damage somewhere in the hit range, the misses would do damage but not enough to be worth keeping track of. The extra abilities the salamander gets at a lower level are models of choices it could make to distribute its attack power and charged power differently. The higher hit points but lower defenses model a lowering of the "it matters" threshhold on the damage continuum. At a higher level, the salamander does small but constant damage because that's all that makes it over the "it matters" threshhold - and the same with it dying to one solid hit, since four misses in the abstraction might well kill it in the simulation, but that's just too much bookkeeping.
In effect you are fighting the same simulated monster as a solo, elite, normal, and minion version, but it's allocating its powers differently and its hit points and defenses scale so you don't have to recompute your damage roll.
If we actually had the underlying simulation system, things could happen a bit differently, of course. I wouldn't just have to ad hoc what the salamander could do at solo and elite level, I could compute it directly, more or less. But ultimately that's something I'd need a computer for to prep ahead of time, instead of something I can sketch up with a pencil and paper in the coffee shop on my lunch break, or tweak slightly in Notepad.
