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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Korgoth" data-source="post: 4218700" data-attributes="member: 49613">I don't know which is more funny: "Ron Edwards makes [blank] clear" or "WoTC agrees with Ron Edwards"!   <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=";)" />   Anyway, I don't think that these statements clarify anything.  Technically, every role playing game ever written has been "non-simulationist" because, as far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a "simulationist" game."Simulationist" appears to be nothing more than a semantic placeholder for "thing I'm going to say compares unfavorably with whatever it is I like".  It doesn't have any content.  Is "simulationist" trying to simulate reality, or a genre?  If reality, does it matter how that is done?  Two games might set out to simulate reality.  The first one models gun fights by comparing bullet caliber with the target's bone density to adjudicate the precise trajectory of the bullet after it strikes your femur.  The latter one models gun fights by saying "FBI statistics show that 1% of bullet wounds from that range of that caliber are instantly fatal, and a further 32% are eventually fatal.  Roll percentiles please."  Both end up (for the sake of argument) returning a "realistic" result, which is to say a result that basically measures up to how that scenario would play out in the real world.  But their methodologies are completely reversed.  Are they really in the same category?  And what if you're trying to simulate genre?  And what if you're trying to simulate genre, but within certain parameters of verisimilitude?I'm sorry that my thread has deteriorated to this degree.  Perhaps I can help get it back on track?  I think that Charwoman Gene had an excellent point earlier.  It has always been the case in D&D that, whatever hit points are, a basic villager cannot have more than 6 of them.  Is D&D attempting to claim, therefore, that this villager (Villager Bob) cannot sustain more than 6 actual injuries?  Or that Bob's diminutive son, Villager Tim, who has 1 hit point (whatever they are, it has always been possible to have 1) cannot endure even 1 single injury?It seems that this is not the case, if we assume that D&D has attempted to make reasonable claims about the denizens of its virtual villages.  A cut is an injury.  I have given myself a good gash with the old hobby knife on occasion.  If, in the course of a D&D session, a character accidentally cuts himself with a hobby knife (or let's say a butter knife at the family dinner table) does that necessarily inflict at least 1 hit point of damage?  I can imagine Tim cutting himself with a small knife and not flopping over dead.  Would D&D have ever posited that 1/6th of the inhabitants of its virtual world flop over dead from common household accidents?  We could maintain that it has done so... but why assume something ludicrous only to get upset about its implications?Rather, if the D&D rules are applied to its virtual world consistently, we must say that not every cut or other minor injury causes the loss of hit points.  If we allow the text to tell us what it is really telling us, it is saying that the loss of even 1 single hit point represents a life-threatening injury.  It must, since some people can die from it.  I think we can conclude 2 things from this: first, hit points must represent, at minimum, your ability (for whatever reason) to avoid dieing from life-threatening injuries; and second, not every cut, bruise and sting does hit point damage.Since the latter point is an interesting challenge to DM narration of results, how do we account for minor cuts, bruises and other non-life threatening injuries that can crop up in combat (like getting nicked by a blade, or suffering a minor flesh wound)?  Obviously, since hits do 1 point of damage or more, those must be "misses".  Or at least, they can be misses... though one might also narrate hit point loss as the luck or skill that reduces what would have been life-threatening strikes to those minor and incidental wounds.</blockquote>

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