What about damage to a wraith or spectre?
What about damage caused by psionic attacks against psionics with no points left to deplete? (Is the tissue in their brains being damaged?! And then heaing via a few days rest?!)
I'm not even sure that damage to a skeleton or zombie is aptly characterised as tissue damage, any more than damage dealt to a door by an axe or to paper by fire is tissue damage.
All would be tissue damage the way I, Celebrim and apparently Gygax's definition of tissue damages/HP/physical damage works.
As Celebrim already said, part of the damage, some part any part, IS physical. It is happening. The sword/arrow scratches you. Because you have more HP than the hit causes you remain standing. If you did not then you would drop. But no matter what, every hit damages something, even if it is just a tiny scratch. Now, there is an element of vagueness about the REST of the hit. Someone getting hit by an arrow at low levels is going to die but at higher levels is able to shrug it off. That is where the luck, destiny, "fiat", part comes in. It hits them in a non vital part and they stay standing. But every hit is a hit. Every hit causes the necessity of rolling a save against poison.
This could be said for every single time anything or anyone takes HP damage during a D&D combat: "Bob deals damage and imagines the greatsword clipping the pixie..." Worse, what happens if the table agrees on the "exhaustion" narration for a hit but then somebody hits it with a healing spell?
Spell. Magic.
As long as it is, you have a built in explanation where one isn't given with a mundane/natural/non-magical one.
Swords don't fill the space with damage because they can't hit the full space. Magic can (when it is a fireball).
Magic can heal exhaustion just as it can heal HP. In 3e at least, you healed one or the other, usually, but not both. You can make people feel physically better without actually heal how tired they feel.
It's not clear from the text what wraiths and specters are made out of, but since at least magical weapons can cut it, it's got at least some physical substance. Ectoplasm maybe. Whatever ethereal things are made of - ether presumably. Or at worst, an energy field, which while intangible is nonetheless physical. Regardless, whatever the substance, from the general explanation of hit points, it's clear that if the sword whiffs and doesn't touch the substance of the wraith, it doesn't do damage and if it did do damage we know that it is because it can cut whatever wraiths are made of.
Same goes for the door that is damaged by fire. The damage/hit is accrued to the substance the object/person/creature is made of. Fire causes X hp in damage to the door's total HP. Makes sense. What would not make sense is if the door was immune to damage because it lacked skin or muscle.
So far as I know (and I admit my knowledge of 3rd psionic is quite limited, since I never embraced them, seeing as they were offered only as an alternative magic system) psionic combat was removed from the game by 3.5, but in general psionic attacks in 3rd edition for the most part did ability damage or put debuff conditions on the target very much like 1e. Those that do hit point damage, say psychic crush, presumably do physical damage to the brain - they explicitly did so in 1e. In fact, because by the definition and explanation provided for hit points, which I've already provided, we pretty much know that if some hit point damage has occurred, at least some physical wounds have also been sustained. The target may or may not have also lost some amount of metaphysical resources as part of evading the brunt of the attack, but if damage occurred the attack was by definition not completely evaded and some damage occurred. This is not only logical from the words 'hit' and 'damage' - to say nothing of the logic of the phrase 'hit point' itself - but explicitly stated by the text.
I understand you don't know. So I'll correct what I can. The following is wrong:
"[P]sionic combat was removed from the game by 3.5," is incorrect. There were psionics in 3.5.
That is all.
I'm talking about 1st ed AD&D, not 3E. A 1st ed psionic with no psionic defence points left to lose takes hp damage in lieu. What tissue is being damaged? The brain? Which then heals without treatment over the next X days?
What is wrong with it harming the brain? To me it makes perfect sense that it would. It would also, to me, follow that the brain would heal over time from such damage as all damage heals over time (doesn't it? we are talking about 1e). It makes far less sense (right off the bat) that a non-magical weapon could easily harm a magical (incorporeal) wraith on a miss, but that apparently you see as well. Do wraiths even get fatigued?
