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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5049675" data-attributes="member: 4937">You said: "anyone kill-able in one shot is weak and not powerful -- which is indeed the case in a game like D&D, with its escalating hit points."Yet you are also asserting that a mechanic exists that would have made them equivalently powerful, but which was not escalating hit points.  But if in fact, "anyone killable in one shot is weak and not powerful" in a game with escalating hit points, this is the same as asserting no such mechanic exists.I don't have to argue that it was (although I could).  There is a different and easier to advance argument available to me.  Even if the designers of proto-D&D didn't fully understand the nature of hit points, they did have an advantage and an insight that let them select for hit points non-randomly and intentionally.  And that insight was, they had oppurtunity to play the game in boths ways, and select the way that provided the most enjoyment for them.  They knew which play experience they were trying to create, and it was most satisfyingly created by hit points.  This is hardly surprising if you understand the effect hit points have on the game experience and consideri that the designers were all former war gamers.And again, I have only to assert here that experience is often superior to intelligence.   Also, I don't have to believe that they didn't understand the purpose of hit points, in order to assert that they wanted to create systems that were more 'realistic'.  They needed only to have different purposes or to desire to create a different experience of play.  I don't have to believe that they thought 'hit points' to be inherently inferior.  For example, I would count Steve Jackson in the crowd of not-stupid game designers, and while he reduced the importance of hit points when he introduced GURPS he did not elimenate the mechanic.  And at the same time, when he developed CAR WARS or Ogre, he continued to use outright hit points as the mechanic appropriate to the play experience he was trying to create.I would argue that they made a trade off between their goals and simplicity here.  A truly unified game mechanic would have meant giving the players a complex array of things 'vigor points', 'willpower points', and 'fatigue points' to keep track of, and then provided various means of adjucating the loss and recovery of these things as well as what threshold on which the loss of these things actually led to the imposition of a condition (be it stunned or dead or whatever).  Even had the designers struck upon such a complex system, it might well have been rejected as being too cumbersome in actual play.  They would have had experience from the complex wargames of the 60's of knowing that tracking multiple resources could be a drag on play, and could have decided to leave special cases to be resolved by a table.   However, I would argue that the table that they did device indicated that they retained their basic goal of reducing the influence of luck over the outcome to successsful and skilled players in that the 1e table very explicitly made it easier and easier to pass a saving throw as level increased.Furthermore, we have some record of what the actual argument that the designers had over saving throws was, and its rather far removed from the modern perspective on saving throws.  According to Gygax, the saving throw was introduced as a 'luck' mechanic to represent a chance to evade the consequences of a bad decision.  In other words, they saw the imposition of a status change coming from something like, 'You see medusa, hense you should be turned to stone', as being unlike the more ordinary consequence of being in combat, and instead as the fair consequence of a failed decision making process.  They were looking at armor class and saving throws as being inherently different in a way that is utterly foreign to say the modern 4e approach of considering all sorts of attacks to be ordinary and normal.Good luck with that.</blockquote>

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