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<blockquote data-quote="KidSnide" data-source="post: 5762891" data-attributes="member: 54710">I think that this is the key point and that all the discussion about &quot;realism&quot; is a distraction.&nbsp; According to the genre conventions of sword fighting, the opponents fence back and forth for a while before the lethal blow is struck or knights who smack at each other's armor for a while before delivering a properly deadly blow.&nbsp; This is very consistent with &quot;hit points&quot; that represent strikes that are barely deflected, gutted through or turned to bruises.(I'll leave arguments about whether healing (from any edition) makes sense in this or any other context for another thread.)For firearm combat, the genre conventions for surviving combat mostly consist of ways to not get hit.&nbsp; This matches the luck / canny / dodged-just-in-time view of hit points, but is harder to match with the toughness / grit version of the fiction.&nbsp; For GMs who like to narrate a &quot;hit&quot; as a solid blow that is toughed through (rather than averted) by the high hit-point character, guns with regular D&amp;D stats seem insufficiently lethal.-KS</blockquote>

[QUOTE="KidSnide, post: 5762891, member: 54710"] I think that this is the key point and that all the discussion about "realism" is a distraction. According to the genre conventions of sword fighting, the opponents fence back and forth for a while before the lethal blow is struck or knights who smack at each other's armor for a while before delivering a properly deadly blow. This is very consistent with "hit points" that represent strikes that are barely deflected, gutted through or turned to bruises. (I'll leave arguments about whether healing (from any edition) makes sense in this or any other context for another thread.) For firearm combat, the genre conventions for surviving combat mostly consist of ways to not get hit. This matches the luck / canny / dodged-just-in-time view of hit points, but is harder to match with the toughness / grit version of the fiction. For GMs who like to narrate a "hit" as a solid blow that is toughed through (rather than averted) by the high hit-point character, guns with regular D&D stats seem insufficiently lethal. -KS [/QUOTE]

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