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Message: <blockquote data-quote="robertliguori" data-source="post: 4226035" data-attributes="member: 47776">Hit points are an abstract measure of toughness, luck, battle skill, and the like, but they are a concrete example of the amount of damage it takes to kill someone or break something.And if the system of D&D had a single attack and damage roll, your example would be true, and this would not be an argument.  But since there exist concrete effects that are tied to hits versus misses, it's trivial to tell whether or not any given blow was a hit or a miss, no matter how it's flavored.  For instance, if a secondary effect triggers on a hit, then even if the GM flavors it as a just-barely-dodged from the minion's perspective, the player knows it's a hit.  Plus, you can always tie up a character and swing at it repeatedly; if its a nonminion, then it will take several max-damage Coup de Grace attempts to kill it, while a minion will squish.The thing is, even if you abstract an attack into a round's worth of feints, maneuvers, and swings, the attack still exists, and it will still be known that you need to put a certain amount of effort into an attack to have a chance of connecting.  We've seen attacks that trigger on hits and imply significant wounding happened with the hit (such as the goblin picador); this means that there is a limit to the amount of reflavoring possible for missed attacks versus HP-depleting hits.</blockquote>