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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6212601" data-attributes="member: 42582">Haven't you answered your own question?A brick to the head will cause bruising, swelling, bleeding etc. It might concuss you. It could fairly easily kill you. (Though not if you have enough hp left! I'm not 100% sure what that means in your hit point model.) The headache is the least of your problems.For better or worse, it never occurred to me that a psionic attack upon a psionic who has no points left, and hence takes hp damage instead, causes the bleeding, bruising and concussion that a blow to the head does.If this is meant to be an example of the consistency that is being destroyed by damage on a miss, it's not really working for me.No doubt psionics are harming you in some sense. So can a missed attack (eg it misses because you dodge it, but in dodging it you sprain your ankle, or bump into something and bruise yourself, or trip over and knock yourself out on a rock). The question I asked is "what is the tissue damage, such that losing hp to psionic attacks resembles being stabbed by a knife but doesn't resemble running up and down stairs".  You haven't answered that question - which is fine; the question was partly rhetorical. And I think my point has been made.Because by definition the attack of a great weapon fighter with this ability doesn't "totally wiff", whatever exactly that means. I canvassed three possible narrations just above this paragraph. Rodney Thompson has given at least one more. Take your pick.Leaving aside the whole lethal/non-lethal thing - which makes it somewhat mysterious how someone might ever die from exertion - how come "fun" is a good enough reason to drop simulationionst hit points when it comes to stair climbing, but isn't a good enough reason when it comes to playing a dreadnought two weapon fighter? Whatever move you make to handle the stairs case, you can presumably make the same move to handle the auto-damage case.How, in your game, do you tell whether a person suffers injury because, when trying to avoid a blow, they stumble or bump themselves or twist their ankle or suffer a shock to their shoulder from parrying? Or do these things just never happen in your gameworld.?I will restate [MENTION=6688937]Ratskinner[/MENTION]'s question. (And he can correct me if I've got it wrong.)You seem to place great stock on the integrity and consistency of the fiction - that, after all, seems to be what you are objecting to in relation to damage-on-a-miss.So, consider this scenario. My cleric PC is walking down the road and comes across an unconscious woman lying in a ditch. She is bleeding to death, and I decide to heal her. I decide to start with Cure Light Wounds. Now here are two possible ways this might unfold: she is a commoner, and Cure Light Wounds restores her to full health; or, she is a 10th level fighter and Cure Light Wounds retores her to between 5 ad 10% of her total hit points. How, in the fiction, do I as a wandering healer make sense of these differences of outcome? And for bonus marks, what is the physical condition of each character after receiving the healing?I believe that there is no way of explaining this without reference to the metagame notion of hit points - hence Ratskinner's comment that it's as if everyone in the gameworld is walking around with a health bar over his/her head.</blockquote>

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