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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6471162" data-attributes="member: 6775031">There's the part where being hit by a sword causes damage, and that damage is removed by curing the wounds. And if you weren't able to heal magically, then it could take weeks to heal. There's the part where golems and undead don't heal, because only living creatures are capable of healing naturally. There's the part where - at least in core 2E and 3E - the only things capable of causing HP damage are those things which are capable of causing physical harm (albeit psycho-somatic-ally in a handful of edge cases), and where everything that influenced luck or skill or divine protections used a game mechanic other than HP.The only thing which fails to 100% unequivocally support the meat position is the part where Gygax describes what HP are supposed to represent - where he says that meat is merely one component of HP - but the actual mechanics of every edition prior to 4E are consistent with the view that RAW do a better job of describing HP as meat than as mojo (in spite of RAI, whatever that may have been).You could try to re-define every word in the game to mean something other than its actual definition, of course. You could say that "hit" and "damage" and "wounds" and "healing" are just metaphors for what is actually going on. But to what purpose? To satisfy your desire for realism? Because you can't stand to have a meaningful injury that doesn't cause a mechanical penalty, so you would prefer that you can never have a meaningful injury period? Because it makes no sense to heal that injury over a week or a month, and if it doesn't take months or years of rehabilitation then the model it entirely worthless?Then again, Gygax was talking about pre-2E. Maybe the oldest editions made a stronger case for non-meat HP. I can't say for certain.</blockquote>

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