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<blockquote data-quote="mmadsen" data-source="post: 3313408" data-attributes="member: 1645">The evidence seems to point to most lethal weapons really only having a fairly small chance of killing someone -- like 10% for a pistol shot, much less for a knife wound.It's not the abstractness of hit points that makes them unrealistic; it's the predictability.&nbsp; Ablative hit points make it very, very hard to kill someone in one blow -- or very, very hard to not kill someone in two.&nbsp; From a realism perspective, the problem is not that a high-level D&amp;D fighter can survive a dozen sword cuts and spear thrusts but that he cannot die by any one attack.Hit points tend to model injuries poorly because characters either have an &quot;unrealistic&quot; number of hit points and can't be killed by a single good sword stroke, or they have a &quot;realistic&quot; number of hit points and can't survive three or four stab wounds.If we eliminate ablative hit points and instead give each wound a chance to end the fight, then we end up with a &quot;realistically&quot; random system, where one shot can mean one kill, but a dozen shots might not mean a kill.For instance, instead of having 10 hit dice, a great warrior might have a 1-in-10 chance of falling to a spear thrust (via, say, a Damage Save). By either set of rules, the great warrior should expect to survive roughly ten spear thrusts -- he's equally tough under both sets of rules -- but the two systems play out differently.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="mmadsen, post: 3313408, member: 1645"] The evidence seems to point to most lethal weapons really only having a fairly small chance of killing someone -- like 10% for a pistol shot, much less for a knife wound. It's not the abstractness of hit points that makes them unrealistic; it's the predictability. Ablative hit points make it very, very hard to kill someone in one blow -- or very, very hard to [i]not[/i] kill someone in two. From a realism perspective, the problem is [i]not[/i] that a high-level D&D fighter can survive a dozen sword cuts and spear thrusts but that he [i]cannot[/i] die by any one attack. Hit points tend to model injuries poorly because characters either have an "unrealistic" number of hit points and can't be killed by a single good sword stroke, or they have a "realistic" number of hit points and can't survive three or four stab wounds. If we eliminate ablative hit points and instead give each wound a chance to end the fight, then we end up with a "realistically" random system, where one shot can mean one kill, but a dozen shots might not mean a kill. For instance, instead of having 10 hit dice, a great warrior might have a 1-in-10 chance of falling to a spear thrust (via, say, a Damage Save). By either set of rules, the great warrior should expect to survive roughly ten spear thrusts -- he's equally tough under both sets of rules -- but the two systems play out differently. [/QUOTE]

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