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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 9473320" data-attributes="member: 3400">The hit points - meat vs non-meat - is always such a bizarre topic to me. Hit points haven't been tenable as just meat since at least 1st edition, so the insistence that they have to be all meat has always been ridiculous on its face. But the issues of non-meat hit conceptions of hit points persist as well because some ideas just don't work with them. The simplest solution I've ever thought of is not dividing hit points into meat and non-meat - it's treating each hit point, both in a PC's hit point pool and incoming damage, as both meat and non-meat. As the PC levels up (or wears down), the proportion of what's meat and what's non-meat varies. But the point is the same - there's always a bit of both types of damage in every attack. It may not be particularly bloody, but meat includes strain on the body including being awash with pain, inflammation, pain-managing hormones, strains, sprains, scratching, bruising, and bloody noses and jammed fingers. Non-meat includes divine protection, luck, general weariness, and every other less tangible manifestation of being worn down and closer to losing the next fight.Then you don't have to worry about whether a poison-carrying attack might hit meat or not, it always does just a little bit - enough to potentially allow the poison to take effect, depending on the save. And yet, most of the damage might still not be flesh and so be amenable to inspirational healing.The problem with inspirational healing wasn't just the idea of a "warlord shouting someone's arm back on". It was also the idea that most of the healing it generated was from a specified internal resource and could occur so often that the inspirational narrative comeback of the character, drawing from an internal well of grit to pick themselves up off the mat and fight back to a win, was so routine that it became utterly ho-hum and no longer a dramatic, or even distinctive, narrative at all. And that sucked.</blockquote>

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