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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mlund" data-source="post: 5956188" data-attributes="member: 50304">The common theme I'm seeing here is that writers need to be less over-the-top narrating what monsters do. Most physical injuries characters take that simply move them from positive HP to a lower number of positive HP are flesh wounds, bruises, bite marks, etc.No edition, from OD&D to 4E, modeled HP loss attacks to severe injuries like having a giant meat-hook in your intestines - no one in the base game ever got maimed from losing 99% of their HP. The closest thing to ever crop up were 3E's awful "massive damage" rule with an arbitrary sum of 50HP.We have seen injuries that effectively maimed characters in 3E - Ability Score Damage. I never saw anyone successfully argue that they shouldn't die at 0 CON because they still had HP left.Instead of negative HP (since everyone hates negative numbers these days, judging by the Initiative complaints) just have all damage exceeding HP come out of the Constitution score. 0 CON = Dead. Have magical and mundane healing effects designed for physical impact explicitly or implicitly be able to stabilize the dying and restore CON (vital meat) and/or HP (endurance, energy, non-vital meat). Other healing effects based on morale, luck, blessings, etc. can just restore HP.It isn't a terribly complicated system. The HP / dying rules are as simple or more so than any other edition. The real key to making it work smoothly and simply for players rests on the designers consistently writing a demarcation. "All HP restoring abilities are fungible heals," isn't really a good simplification for players if you wanted to expand the design space into something like large-scale non-magical HP recovery.- Marty Lund</blockquote>

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