NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 4442477" data-attributes="member: 5890">Because the second character communicates such information to the first.Since damage is random, he doesn't know it to the nth degree. That 12 is one or two bites from a guard drake, more if the drake doesn't have friends nearby. It's 3-6 stabs from a kobold skirmisher... unless the skirmisher has combat advantage, in which case it could be 1-4. There's a pretty massive range of variance in there even if you know the exact hit point total.And the PHB explicitly hands the entire task of tracking hitpoints to the player. Does that not suggest that this is information that the character has access to? Did the designers really deliberately hand all tracking for a stat that should be concealed from players to the players themselves?So - would you accuse a player who retreats from combat because his hitpoints are low of metagaming? How about one with no healing surges left? Or one who doesn't waste his turn trying to cast a daily spell that he's already cast today?These are all things that are firmly and rigidly within the game. Discussing them in terms of mechanics may not be flavourful, but it's not metagaming.I was defending the idea that communication in the game was a basic state, whereas you seem to be approaching things from the point of view that noone should be talking to anyone without an explicit sanction on the topic of conversation.The rest of it basically covers the idea that the quickest and most effective communication occurs when there is a concise, unique way to express something, which means that if you're expressing something quantitative that your best bet is with a number.And yet your characters hitpoints are plainly written on your character's sheet, along with what powers he has, how strong he is and so on. It's information that is explicitly given to the player in a game where it's also explicitly suggested that the player should only know information that his character knows.</blockquote>

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