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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6212151" data-attributes="member: 6688937">That's perfectly legitimate, to me. However, IME, most DMs don't narrate the hits in any detail whatever. I believe that the system actively discourages it.As I suspect you realize, that sort of limits the scope of the narrative.I don't think they actually can be. Isn't that what this huge argument has boiled down to? I wouldn't think "can be visualized" is the same as "not entirely abstract." If so, there are some pretty wild systems (like Fiasco) that now count as only partially abstract. If "can be visualized" is okay for HP, why isn't it okay for "damage on a miss"...certainly a variety of narrations for a variety of circumstances have been presented in this thread. Obviously, "damage on a miss" can be visualized. I mean, if they don't define the wounds, then they are abstract, no? I can visualize them as rather nebulous nicks and scratches (at least until that last HP), but then nobody should get a "Cure Critical Wounds" cast on them until they are below zero because they haven't suffered any critical wounds! So my visualization has to change from moment to moment depending on what mechanical things are happening in the game, not the narrative. Its also absolutely sensible to picture HP as nothing but a bar above the character's head that gets smaller and turns from green to yellow to red as the character gets hit. In fact, the cartoonish video world where everyone has a health bar is more narratively consistent with D&D's rules than any genre source narrative. I'm fairly sure that I can make the argument that any pre-4e cleric must be able to see that health bar in order to properly select what healing spells to use, since their titles and or descriptions do not actually reflect their typical use.Wait, that's not something particular to the hit point system...because these other hit point systems have it too? (A wound track being just a "chunky" hit point system.)<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f615.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":confused:" title="Confused    :confused:"  data-smilie="5"data-shortname=":confused:" />I think that that "un-fun" issue is only relevant in a game like D&D where every fight is expected to be "to the death" (or at least that's the practical implication of dungeon-crawling..) I'm not sure if FATE's consequences count as "highly realistic", but they are at least true to the narrative and consistent. They do not appear to limit FATE's appeal or applicability to diverse genres or narrative feels, either. They certainly aren't "tedious". I'd be surprised if there are not other systems that folks are familiar with that have similar functionality.</blockquote>

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