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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8501020" data-attributes="member: 16814">You've said that loss of hitpoints absolutely impacts fiction.  I've given you a loss of hitpoints.  How does this impact the fiction?  If you prefer, you can instead reference any of the orc examples I addressed in the parts of the post you quote here but decided to leave out.  That you isolated this, and then attempt to make it the focus of the contention, seems like you're intentionally ignoring the same point illuminated by all of the orc examples I presented in the same quote.It's back to no such thing -- this isn't a claim made by anyone except you in trying to describe the argument of others.  What's being said is that the existence of impact and it's direction is something we can note.  In 5e combat, the mechanics, not the fiction, creates the loss of hitpoints and that effect stays in the mechanics.  There's no required flow from the fiction to the hitpoint mechanic and no required flow from the hitpoint mechanic to the fiction.  You can arbitrarily introduce fiction, but it's not tied to the mechanic -- as I show above in my examples of the various ways you might or might not describe an orc losing hiptoints.  This is unrelated to the loss of hitpoints.  In fact, all of the descriptions I provided for the orc losing hitpoints also work fine for the attack missing and no loss of hitpoints at all!  This is because the mechanic doesn't drive any fiction -- only the complete reduction of hitpoints to zero drives fiction and generates one of those rightward arrows.Grapple is similar -- there's not flow from the fiction into the action.  The mechanic is selected, and it's resolution creates an impact in the fiction if successful (if unsuccessful, no real change is created).  The argument is NOT that there's no interaction.  It is, in fact, explicitly about exactly WHAT and HOW that interaction occurs!</blockquote>

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