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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 4216420" data-attributes="member: 42582">Hit points don't exist in the gameworld, do they? They're a metagame device for adjudicating certain ingame phenomena such as being healed by a priest, being roused by a commander, gathering one's second wind, dodging a blow, enjoying the blessing of the fates.Minions, poor souls, rarely gain the benefit of any of these things. That's what the 1 hit point on their stat sheet tells us. It tells us nothing about their physical durability - for all we know they are championship bodybuilders doomed to ill-luck.Physical durability is a property, yes. But the game mechanics do not model it (at least, not for creatures. We haven't seen object rules yet, as far as I know).Thinking about how minions interact with the world is easy - this thread is full of examples of it. Problems only arise if you treat the game mechanics in a way that they are almost certainly not intended to be treated, namely, as a model of some ingame property.If you choose to interpret hit points as a measure of the ingame property of durability, then go to town. You will get silly results, like high level wizards being more durable than your typical stone statue, and minions being more vulnerable than your typical housecat, and warlord "healing" will make no sense, and on the whole the game mechanics will deliver a bizarre gameworld. But maybe that's the game you want to play.Given that PCs are less than half the height of most giants, why would they be able to replicate the blows of giants? And if they are (eg by casting shapechange) then why wouldn't they be able to break down the doors. The issue you are attempting to raise is not to do with the application of the hit point mechanic, but rather with ingame consistency.  Then the GM may be railroading, and/or the players may be annoying. As Lost Soul said above, if they can't agree on how the game is to be played maybe they need to go off and have a chat about it. If they can agree, they use the mechanics to resolve the situation. But this tells us nothing about the connection between hit points rules and ingame realities.  Nothing in the rules says that an NPC currently statted as a minion can't be restatted as a PC, as far as I'm aware.Nothing about that them requires simulationist mechanics, as far as I can see. In fact, given the role that dice play in most purist-for-system games, there is actually no guarantee that a world-defying character won't get lucky and win! Conversely, of RPGs that I'm familiar with one that places the most emphasis on leveraging knowledge of the world's workings into power is HeroWars/Quest, and its mechanics are narrativist (not unlike skill challenges), not simulationist.Nothing seperates them in the gameworld except for the fact that the NPC hasn't actually done it yet, and probably never will.The mechanical privileges of PCs are a metagame device to make the game fun for the players. If you want to play a different (perhaps grittier) sort of game, RQ, RM, E6, Pathfinder etc are still all in print.</blockquote>

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