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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6212913" data-attributes="member: 4937">Celebrim's Second Law of RPG's sooooo much applies to this thread: "How you think about playing a system is more important than the rules system itself."  It couldn't be more clear that even where the rules are congruent and we agree on them, that the participants of this thread are playing entirely different games.  Let me be frank and hopefully not offensive:Health bars?!??  WTH???  Pop-ups?  Gamists overlays?  This is this a PnP game you are playing or a cRPG?  I don't recognize the game being described at all.  What do you need all that meta-contextualization for if you have a DM?   I mean, there isn't anything wrong with that game any more than there is anything wrong with a cRPG (I loved the original Mass Effect, for instance) but I don't get it.  What I am saying is that the game being described is absolutely alien to me.  I can't imagine what my examples of play must sound like to them, and while I concede that my examples of play are somewhat idealized - in that PC on PC interaction is often purely meta (that being a decision of these particular players, but not a universal truth, as I've had strict thespians in prior groups) with the player declaring only, "I'm performing first aid on Rex." or "Who needs healing?... I'm down 18.  Ok, cure serious wounds", I think I'm being fairly representative of how I'd play a scene between a newly encountered NPC and a PC.   Do scenes between newly encountered NPC's in need of healing (do these even occur in such games, or is it hypothetical?) normally involve explicit meta-contextualization with somewhere in the narration appearing:DM: "She looks like she's lost 38 hit points."PC: "Wow, she is in a bad way.  I'll cast cure critical wounds on her."I don't know.  Hits aren't apparently usually narrated in the other game.  Combat apparently drops into a sub-game to a very high degree (I try to avoid ever pulling out a battlemap and miniatures unless the fight is clearly so complex that my players will be confused, just to avoid ever shifting imaginative perspective).   Damage occurs on a miss.  It's D&D, but it's not any D&D I'm particularly familiar with.Bottom line, if my player's come on to the scene of the death of some Boromir like captain, and he's surrounded by dead and dying allies and enemies, I don't think I need health bars to convey that he's grievously injured, nor do I find it breaks emersion with the source material if this Boromir like 10th level fighter has survived with 10 arrows when some of his comrades died with one.  Nor has it been overly burdensome to the fiction if 'Boromir' requires greater healing than his wounded page, whose just got one error in him.  But for reasons I've outlined abundantly in this already lengthy thread, there are just some situations where the absolute 'damage on a miss mechanic' (as opposed to 'damage on a glancing blow' or something of the sort) can't be narrated consistently AND is also not fair to the common fictional positioning/character trait, "I'm hard to hit."   Rather than doing back flips to fit 'damage on a miss' into the fiction, it's a lot easier to just say, "Change the mechanic to represent 'damage on a glancing blow', define 'glancing blow' consistently within the fiction at it no longer causes problems."</blockquote>

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