Let's Talk About Metacurrency

[Lanefan]

As Gygax explains in his DMG, only if the attack hits and the saving throw fails. Not in general.

Only if the attack hits. The poison has to have been potentially delivered in order for a saving throw to even be required.

 

[mamba]

Unlike @TwoSix, I find this posited world just too ridiculous to take seriously in my RPGing.

that’s fine, I am not going to pretend that it is the least bit realistic.

If it is too unrealistic for you then the conclusion is to not play 5e I guess. Pretty sure you aren’t, so all good

Personally I find it at least as unlikely that if humans lived in a world like that, they would not have learned to gauge the shape they are in pretty precisely. So hiding that information in some form does nothing to make this more realistic for me.

To me, this seems to raise the same silliness issue. If hit points are a "thing" that get ablated in combat, such that when you run out of them you die; but having them ablated doesn't affect your physical capabilities; then what the heck are they?

mostly exhaustion I guess, if you need a real-world equivalent

And why does a greatsword take away more of them than a dagger?

avoiding / blocking a greatsword takes more effort, plus it might deal more damage to the non-exhaustion part of HPs

the 4e implementation of that treatment makes the most sense.

which is what, a measure for whether you can keep on fighting? And you think people would not be aware of that measure or could gauge it pretty accurately? I fully expect them to

 

[mamba]

Third, assuming a typical degree of lethality in the adventuring side of the game/setting, most of the low-level mages (or low-level anyones) who set out into the field don't come back.

and I expect most of them to not go adventuring in the first place, why would they

 

[TwoSix]

But presumably the players communicate their remaining hp to one another? As part of the rationing of healing resources, making choices about whether to retreat/avoid, etc.

Sure, although generally only when we’ve obviously switched into an OOC meta channel discussion.

 

[pemerton]

Only if the attack hits. The poison has to have been potentially delivered in order for a saving throw to even be required.

That's not what Gygax says in his PHB, if the attack hits but the saving throw succeeds, then there is no need to narrate the hit point loss as actual injury.

 

[Micah Sweet]

that’s great, but my claim was not that whatever system you are concocting would not lead to a low magic setting, it was that when basing the setting on 5e rules it would be high magic

As you know, I use the Level Up rules as my base. I have run multiple games in various fantasy and sci-fi settings of my own creation, and magic (or psionics in the case of the sci-fi games) has simply not been all that prevalent in most of them. Certainly not ubiquitous, which is what "high magic" is to me. Part of that is the higher number of non-magical classes available in that game, but also I just don't often use a lot of magical NPCs.

 

[TwoSix]

that’s great, but my claim was not that whatever system you are concocting would not lead to a low magic setting, it was that when basing the setting on 5e rules it would be high magic

For sure. My current, more supernatural, approach was based on taking the 5e rules around injury and dying, and classes and levels, as essentially true, and asking what sort of setting narration would frame those rules within the fiction without requiring a meta layer intermediary narration.

It just means you can have a mid-level warrior look like Boromir at the end of Fellowship, have the arrows pop out and the bleeding stop, and keep on adventuring. I'm OK with that!

 

[TwoSix]

To me, this seems to raise the same silliness issue. If hit points are a "thing" that get ablated in combat, such that when you run out of them you die; but having them ablated doesn't affect your physical capabilities; then what the heck are they?

Supernatural resilience.

My current 5e narration is that "classes" are universal (multiversal?) archetypes that exist within the Astral; when a soul aligns with one of those archetypes, it gains power through that resonance, which is where class powers originate from. The supernatural resilience is because Astral archetypes are ideals, and resistant to being changed; that lack of mutability is extended to the physical housing of the soul.

By the time a character is mid-levels, their biological trappings are more suggestions than actual function; their existence is being sustained by their soul much more than their body.

 

[Umbran]

That's absolutely true. Perfect sim is impossible. But acceptable sim, for me, definitely is. As far as picking your battles goes, I will fight against narrative conceits in general and PC exceptionalism in specific every time.

You have whatever fights you want about your own table. Since nobody here is at your table, we aren't involved in those fights.

I just note that rejecting worlds in which the PCs are exceptional is not a simulation issue - that's a separate issue of your personal taste in genres.

 

[Artamo]

That's absolutely true. Perfect sim is impossible. But acceptable sim, for me, definitely is. As far as picking your battles goes, I will fight against narrative conceits in general and PC exceptionalism in specific every time.

What is there to fight about? As you’ve said, you’ve run multiple fantasy and sci-fi games of your own creation with modern rulesets. That sounds like you’ve won.