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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7641030" data-attributes="member: 16814">Fundamentally, here's the thing:  what kills the bugbear isn't loss of hitpoints, it's a swordinnahead.  At low player level, where Joe has 35 hit points, it takes a few passes of reducing hitpoints to get to swordinnahead, but that's the bit that does the thing.  Once we get to swordinnahead, Joe is dead.  Now, at later levels, the heroes are way better at achieving swordinnahead, which is the relevant fictional endpoint for our poor Joe.  Again, it's not loss of 35 hitpoints that kills Joe, it's swordinnahead.  If we want to represent, in the fiction, the heroes' greater ability to achieve the swordinnahead state for poor Joe, then we can do lots of things.  Maybe we have a system where the heroes now can do 35+ hitpoints so it doesn't matter that Joe has 35 hitpoints -- any hit will result in swordinnahead and a dead Joe.  Or, we could reduce Joe's hitpoints, as they don't exist anywhere but as a pacing mechanism for achieving swordinnahead, and say that any successful hit on Joe will go straight to swordinnahead.Hitpoints have no fictional reality in game.  They're a pacing mechanism to control how fast you get through a fight (or lose one).  As such, they're as malleable as encounters per day or days for a trip -- the exact number has no reality, only the applied pacing does.  This goes to minions not having fewer hitpoints being a violation of previously established fictional reality -- hitpoints never hit the stage in the fiction, so to speak -- but instead just being an alteration of the game pacing mechanisms.  The fictional result is that the heroes cause swordinnahead to Joe, either at the end of his hipoints, where previous "successes" have no fixed reality except to move closer to swordinnahead, or because they're minions and any successful hit causes swordinnahead.</blockquote>

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