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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evildmguy" data-source="post: 5049564" data-attributes="member: 6092">Okay, it's taken me years to understand hit points and while I am specifically quoting mmadsen, this goes to any 1E players who want a low level minion to be able to kill anyone at any time.  What?  DND has never tried to be a realistic combat simulator.  As someone else said, one hit kills are great for a book but are anticlimactic for a game.  They should be avoided with PCs and understood that they won't happen.  This isn't bad.  It's about understanding the system.  Further, specifically talking about what mmadsen said, having a high AC to avoid damage makes no sense!  Armor, historically speaking, is about about avoiding damage.  It's about making sure a hit isn't fatal or debilitating.  Making sure the wearer survives the hits he will take with the weapons of the time.  (In European history, at least.) I could argue that only DMs want this, not players, because there were several Dragon articles back in the day to help DMs who have players that go around with all items or armor to have a -10 or who cast and had stoneskin on themselves all of the time!  I had one such player and ended up using some of those ideas.  But, this was a failure on my part to gain trust with my players.  Trust that I wouldn't do a one hit kill on them as they are walking down the street to go to the market, something I forced on them as the DM anyway, instead of them sending a servant.  Further, in the years of DMing, I have had villains fall to a failed saving throw, rather than trying to make it epic.  In most cases, the players complained that they didn't get a final battle with the bad guy!  That's the point that hit points serve.  It's just too bad, again as someone else pointed out, that the spell casters are given a game mechanic to bypass this aspect of the game with save or die effects.  That is definitely something I would remove from 1E if I were to run it again.  What I never liked about hit points was how a character is either fine or dead or dying.  I couldn't do a scene like Out of Gas from Firefly because nothing gives penalties in 1E.  The other problem is that there is a very big divide between role playing and the game mechanics.  The entire class system with its hit points does not allow for a certain level of realism.  There are no broken bones.  There are no concussions.  There are no realistic wounds.  Further, all RPGs that I have read don't allow for details in combat to give a combatant an advantage.  There is no way to notice that a fighter is using fighting style A and so if the opponent uses fighting style B, it will help counter A.  It doesn't work that way.  And only by understanding what the system does and doesn't do can a group make it work they way they want it to for their games.  If people really want to have a game that allows for one shot hits by anyone on anyone, then they should try WoD or Alternity, which rocks for SciFi and would allow for the Firefly scene I described above.  Despite my tone, I am not down on 1E as much as I used to be.  Understanding it better now, decades later, I could run it and have a lot of fun with it.  And I can explain away the stuff I don't like as this being version 1.0!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Good discussion!  Thanks!edg</blockquote>

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