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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5956733" data-attributes="member: 42582">A spilt system makes it hard to do the following sorts of things:* This round, you lose 6 hp from fallin in a pit - it's a strained ankle!; next round, you lose 6 hp from a hit from a spider at the bottom of the pit - it's a near miss! * I just collapsed because my pools are all empty - am I dying from a serious wound, or just swooning? We won't know until the death saves are rolled. * I've taken a slash to the thigh from the hobgoblin captain's sword, and the stinger from his wyvern narrowly miss skewering me (but a bit of poison got in nevertheless, and is now coursing through my veins) - luckily the commander has my back ("Inpsiring Word"), and so I can keep going despite my injuries.The first involves narrating a "fate" loss after a "meat" loss, without any intervening healing - this doesn't work with a layered system, unless you introduce some additional complexities like that falls always go to the second layer (and with that complexity, I lose the narrative space of heroes jumping off cliffs to escape their foes, and surviving).The second is the standard 4e death and dying mechanic - its fortune in the middle character depends entirely on it being mechanically ambiguous whether that final blow was a serious blow to your meat, or an unlucky twist of fate from which you'll shortly recover.The third is inspirational healing to meat hit point loss.As I see it, the examples all have a common underlying structure - they do not fit with a process-simulation constraint, because they treat excalty the same mechanical event - the deduction or addition of some numbers from or to a single hp pool - as sometimes meat, sometimes fate, depending not upon any further mechanical considerations (such as which "tier" has points left in it) but upon context and narrative.I'm interested to see what your solution looks like. But I'm a little bit sceptical. The divide between process-simulationist mechanics and other sorts of mechanics (especially fortune-in-the-middle ones) is a pretty deep aspect of RPG design, I think. And the affinity between certain sorts of mechanics and certain sorts of playstyles is also, I think, non-accidental.And again for maximum clarity - I've got no objection to any one using "tiered" or "multi-pool" hit points. I just don't think that should be core. Because once it's core, modularising in non-process simulation approaches is likely to be a challenge.</blockquote>

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