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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7843231" data-attributes="member: 996">Here's a few definitions I found:"Ludonarrative dissonance is the conflict between a (video) game's narrative told through the story and the narrative told through the gameplay""the opposition between incentives and directives and how it is handled both in the narrative and ludic structures""dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story"Note "gameplay," which is an emergent quality of the system, not just a given mechanic. Also worth noting that, outside of more linear pre-packaged adventures like APs, there may or may not be a "story" being narrated in a TTPRG that's separate from the gameplay.  There can certainly be themes or genre tropes, though, and the gameplay of an RPG can stray very far from those, indeed.  Likewise, while an RPG will typically have plenty of incentives - experience points, pools, resources, in-game treasures with mechanical benefits, etc - they often (again, with the exception of linear pre-packaged adventures) have no particular "directives" (beyond, perhaps, implied genre conventions) for those benefits to be in conflict with.So, I hope this isn't offensive (clearly I understand I'm taking that risk), but, I'm going to snip out all the bits where you go on about what you or someone else said or argued or proved, and just reply to what you have to say about the above concept, or about the game in question... So, there isn't one specific narrative of hit points.  A point of damage is not a 'flesh wound' for instance.  Instead:"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."And"Dungeon Masters describe hit point loss in different ways. When your current hit point total is half or more of your hit point maximum, you typically show no signs of injury. When you drop below half your hit point maximum, you show signs of wear, such as cuts and bruises. An attack that reduces you to 0 hit points strikes you directly, leaving a bleeding injury or other trauma, or it simply knocks you unconscious."And, that's about it.Really, the omission of skill is mildly appalling considering hps increase dramatically with level. <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 suppose you could fold it into physical & mental durability, which are both very vague - 'physical durability' could mean anything from structural resistance to damage, systemic tolerance of damage, & just plain mass to endurance and even reflexes, natural or honed by training, like rolling with a blow or fall.  Likewise, the divine favor and 'sixth sense' EGG mentioned could fit under luck."More difficult to kill" sums it up, really.  Anything that might make you harder to kill gets abstracted together into a single maximum hit point score. That leaves us, really, nothing solid to work with.Con increases your hps - CON, also fairly abstract, measures endurance, which contributes to your physical durability.  Level represents skill, and, amusingly, increasing importance in the story, which could translate to increasing luck (author force/'plot armor'). I think there might be a category error going on here. Creatures are measured in hit points. Damage is measured in hit points.But creatures aren't damage and damage isn't a creature.  So expecting what hit points represent, narratively about an attack or hazard, to be the same as what hit points represent, narratively, about a creature is not tenable. That doesn't sound quite right.  I mean, that'd be a contradiction, sure.  If one system element said hit points were your character's resistance to damage, and another said hit points were your character's ability to score hits, that'd be a contradiction.  But that's not happening.  Rather, hit points are an abstraction used to denominate every possible thing that might kill a character, toted up against every possible factor that might save him, to determine whether he's defeated & dying, yet.When you have two abstract mechanisms that can be imagined various ways, and they interact, producing an equally (more? I feel like the level of abstraction would increase when you combine abstractions? Less?  Is it like a Venn Diagram, A intersect B of abstraction?) abstract result.  The more abstract, the greater your freedom to visualize what has happened in the narrative rather than be told by the system what happened.  So, you simply imagine something that makes sense.Sure, that meaning just happens on one, relatively 'high' level, what happens below that level isn't a concern.  Hit points tell you if your character has been defeated or can keep fighting at full power.  If there's a dissonance, it's that (and it's in a sidebar, and up to the DM, so hardly counts) idea that you show 'signs of wear' at 1/2 hps, yet that generally carries no mechanical significance.When I see "my main question" I think, "wow, I should try to understand this."I failed.Are you saying that there are things in the potential narrative that are represented /both/ by the abstract hp mechanic, /and/ by other mechanics?I suppose there still may be.  There aren't as may or precipitous save-or-else mechanics as there used to be in 5e, for instance, but you can probably find some.  Missing an attack roll by 1 and therefore, say, failing to penetrate armor (AC's own bizarre little abstractions), and succeeding on an attack roll, but not inflicting enough damage to reduce the target's current hps below half their maximum, and therefore 'showing no visible signs of wear,' could both look /very/ similar in the hypothetical narrative.But not the same.  The former didn't put you at a disadvantage going forward, the latter did.  Though both denominated in hps, those do describe different things - how hard you are to kill (defeat, really), how good something is at killing, in general.  The point of interaction is in the hit point measure, itself.  Hit points of damage (measure of the attack) are deducted from the target's hit points (measure of 'durability/luck/&c).  As long as creatures with higher hp totals are harder to kill, and attacks that do more hit points in damage better at killing them, that'd seem consistent.You can't really pick apart an abstraction, or it wouldn't be abstract anymore.</blockquote>

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