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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8501880" data-attributes="member: 42582">This is all fog.I've played a lot of D&D. I don't need to make reference to the shared fiction in order to determine whether or not an attack roll is successful, hence to determine whether or not a damage roll is required, hence to apply the result of that roll to a hit point tally.There can be epiphenomenal leftward arrows if a table likes - that is to say, participants can narrate stuff about the fiction in response to those various dice rolls. [USER=71699]@clearstream[/USER] gave some examples. So did [USER=16814]@Ovinomancer[/USER]. But none of those matter to resolution - eg whether we narrate the hit to the Orc as the Orc reeling, or the Orc parrying, or the Orc taking a cut to the forearm, or anything else, nothing about the resolution process changes.It baffles me that this point even needs to be made. Gygax was aware of it - he argues against the use of rightward arrows in this very context, in his DMG (p 61):As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them.In other words, there are no leftward arrows that actually matter. Gygax goes on:Lest some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away campaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents.This is an argument for non-fiction-grounded game play - the chance to preserve a favourite character based on a purely cue-based consideration (depleting hit point total) - at the expense of the fiction and leftward arrows with teeth.And those who want meaningful rightward arrows in their combat (ie such that the leftward arrows are not merely epiphenomenal, but actually have teeth) designed a whole series of games that deliberately depart from D&D's attack resolution process - games like RQ, RM, etc. These feature the very hit location and special damage rules that Gygax eschewed!Even at your table you use a system that departs from core D&D hp - a system with CON as "flesh" hit points, of the sort first set out by Roger Musson in an early White Dwarf and then set out by WotC in some d20 products around 20 years ago - in order to generate rightward arrows that are absent in core D&D!The only version of D&D to depart at all systematically from Gygax's conception in this respect is 4e D&D - with its much-derided "damage + condition" as the default structure for the consequences of a hit - but even in 4e there is a lot of reliance on cues to mediate the relationship to the fiction, as [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] discussed upthread. Nevertheless, this departure of 4e from the D&D default was an essential part of why I was prepared to play the game in a serious fashion. The conditions, not the hp loss, are what generate a robust and constrained set of leftward-pointing arrows.I thought my post was clear enough:</blockquote>

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