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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7841403" data-attributes="member: 996">Sadly, I have forgotten far less about 1e than I should have.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />   OTOH, I have trouble retaining things about 5e that I read last week.  In the whole Older & Wiser aphorism, the 'wiser' part is more of a stretch goal for me. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />  (Actually, I routinely accept a lot of what you, personally, say about 5e, because the time's I've cracked a book and checked up on you, you've always been right on the facts.) Oh! a Klanth?A wargaming-era-style 'Judge' who only interprets rules, to settle disputes between players, perhaps? I don't think anything's largely accepted, a consensus, or non-controversial, when you're in an on-line forum.  There's /always/ someone willing to offer themselves as a counter-example to any universal assertion, just to tag someone 'wrong' for whatever imaginary points their toting in their head. OR?  I'd like to think that I'm a pedantic Gygaxian apologist on this issue, with no ideas of my own, at all. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />I mean, unless 'meat' is literally taken to the point of an animated pile of hamburger - undifferentiated physical structure that must be destroyed, as hps would tend to represent with a clay golem, for instance.Yeah, I guess that's another thing:  Hit points work the same, mechanically, for PCs, NPCs, and monsters, that last category of which includes noncorporeal entities, macroscopic single-celled organisms, plants, animated lumps of stone or clay or dead flesh and/or bone, fantastic machines, swarms of much smaller things working in concert, conjured forces, whirlwinds & conflagrations from their corresponding elemental planes.  Heck, in 3e objects had hit points (in 1e they /generally/ didn't, but made saving throws, but some did, too), and in 4e traps often did (5e, I forget, see above).So, abandoning my self-appointed role as Gygaxian apologist for whom it's still 1979, I'd have to say that, hps are, necessarily an abstraction, representing many different things that stand between a specific creature and defeat - death for most monsters, destruction for many monsters & objects worth the trouble, banishment/dispelling for a few monsters and spells effects, and unconsciousness & death saves for PCs and those NPCs worth the trouble - so while a 'standard' interpretation that makes sense for PC races might be viable (and couldn't reasonably include supernatural durability without /actually/ getting into the wuxia/anime/Exalted paradigm so often presented as unthinkable when the possibility of giving martial concepts some cool toys comes up), it couldn't ever be universal.</blockquote>

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