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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8942487" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, I was there almost at the start, I'm a old fart! I am reminded of the way Gygax tried to retcon some sort of fiction onto hit points in his famous "obviously the fighter is not as tough as a warhorse" essay in the 1e rules. Its a wargamer hack. In fact Dave Arneson literally stole hit points from a wargame. It was a simplification there, and it was also in D&D. Its impossible to say you are wrong here, the mechanics of hit points certainly establishes a fact about D&D characters, that they don't go down until you deal them a mortal blow (in D&D/1e rules at least). Was that intended? I don't know, but it differs a bit from most of the primary sources. Sure Conan never seems to be in such bad shape that he can't 'do his thing' and various action heroes of more recent time seem to adhere to a version of this trope. I wasn't there to ask Dave what he was thinking when he invented it.I don't really agree with you on this one. Nobody's Battlemaster is going around saying lines like "Well, I have 1 more Superiority Dice left and the next encounter is going to be tough, lets rest here..." I think its a game mechanic, it is there to regulate how much you can use your maneuvers because otherwise they'd be at-will. Someone didn't like that, for whatever reasons which almost certainly have to do with "how it plays" considerations and nothing to do with how the fiction will sound. These gamist solutions are SIMPLE and people are generally perfectly happy with the fact that D&D is a game, and don't demand anything else. In fact, I have never heard outside of message boards people talk about how 'meta' something is or isn't. Hit Points were, historically, a bit of an anomaly that way, as bigger tougher monsters have more, and so do higher level PCs, so people kind of saw that as a question. Nobody EVER questioned why 1e Monks can only do this or that a certain number of times/day.And what would Superiority Dice ever represent in the fiction?Well, we do still not agree on specific examples in 5e, but I think that we've established that difference of opinion, and its not really all that significant in the larger picture. I will reiterate my observation though, people don't really seem to care much about this, its mostly used as a cudgel to beat up on people for not conforming to liking and disliking the 'right' stuff.</blockquote>

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