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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tomtill" data-source="post: 6206393" data-attributes="member: 37444">Hoo boy, you can say that again. Again and again. And somehow, it never sticks.Losing HP has nothing to do, mechanically, with suffering an injury.If you have 60 hp, and somebody rolls a natural 20, and does maximum possible damage upon your person with a massive battle axe, you will suffer no injury, except as described by fluff. You will not have any massive gaping wound pumping out your life's blood, you will not have broken bones or a caved in skull, you will not even have sweat dripping into your eyes to blind you. Except as described by fluff.There will be no impact upon your ability to do battle (except for certain class features).Mechanically, the only fall out from the worse possible thing that anyone can do to you with a battle axe is that you are now a bit closer to that point where a single blow does matter. Losing HP creates stress in the player because things start to get real when you get into the HP range where a single blow can kill you. Still, it's only the transition from 1 hp to 0 hp that matters.In truth, the only time in the history of the game that DnD HP loss has ever mechanically represented "injury", is when you go from 1 hp to 0 hp. Everything else is fluff.You can lose 59 of your 60 hp, and mechanically, you are right as rain, with zero impact upon your ability to perform (massive damage rules in some editions aside). You are 100% an effective combat soldier, with no wounds that have any mechanical effect, as long as you don't lose that 1 additional hp.Wounds, bleeding, injury, trauma, etc mechanically have nothing to do with HP. They are either fluff, or come from a different subsystem grafted onto or triggered by the HP system.HP is a gamist abstraction that measures your likelihood of surviving an attack. If the maximal damage from an attack is low relative to your HP, you will definitely survive. You have no chance of dying. If the maximal damage from an attack is more than your HP, you run the risk of dying (maybe). If you have a lot of HP, you can fight a long time before you even have to worry. If you have a few HP, even a mundane dog bite can be lethal.Some people try to make HP a simulationist concept, because they wish there was such an easy to use and straightforward concept that could simulate taking injury in battle. It only takes a few minutes of unbiased thought about what HP is, mechanically, to understand that HP can never be anything but a gamist abstraction.If you want a simulationist combat system, you will have to look elsewhere, and it will be either rules light, or very very rules heavy (and good luck finding players).If you are arguing about what HP "represents" in DnD, you are arguing about fluff.</blockquote>

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