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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7841491" data-attributes="member: 71699">One question is whether it is right to envision such dualism? We do often read accounts that talk about it as something that is happening, and yet when we play we are engaged perhaps in a unified activity. A kind of rule-following acted narrative. I think cannot imagine that RPG play instances two separate universes, the first containing the story and the second containing the gameplay. Instead, there is one universe in which occurs a weave of story-game activity.To talk about a conflict then is maybe more to talk about what is entailed by the rules, versus what people say is entailed by the rules. This is not a ludo-narrative dissonance, but rather an analytical one: the claim would be that people are making a mistake in what they say the rules are doing, because looked at objectively the rules entail something concretely otherwise. That does often occur: my point is only that the idea of ludo-narrative dissonance isn't the right lense to look at it. The fault occurs in analytical claims about what the rules entail... i.e. that they fall short of capturing what the rules analysed more carefully do entail.PHB196 has "Hit points represent a combination of physical and mental durability, the will to live, and luck. Creatures with more hit points are more difficult to kill. Those with fewer hit points are more fragile." PHB12 has "Your character’s hit points define how tough your character is in combat and other dangerous situations." DMG248 has "...if a monster is below half its hit point maximum, it's fair to say that it has visible wounds and appears beaten down."What is described is that hit points are heterogeneous. And seeing as characters function mechanically unimpeded while hit points are positive, the rules in that regard sustain the above descriptions. That said, I like your argument that for damage types to matter, it might seem as though any hit point loss must be corporeal. Which I think goes in the opposite direction: it implicitly claims that hit points are homogeneous... all one substance.I think this comes from what I'll dub a simulationist or realist stance. One might feel that it's more plausible that for resistance to fire to matter, the fire must reach the body because that would chime better with one's knowledge of the real world. One could resist that feeling by taking a fabulist stance: hit points are a chimera that describes whatever is necessary to be described to facilitate play. Resistance to fire may then include a propensity to get out of fire's way.</blockquote>

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