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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Doug McCrae" data-source="post: 5599005" data-attributes="member: 21169">I'm not sure if Boromir is a protagonist, the story doesn't follow him in the way it does Frodo, Merry/Pippin, and Aragorn.Yeah, you're right, noir heroes are frequently getting slipped a mickey and the like. I think it's a common device in many forms of pulp fiction, particularly detective pulp, and noir is the more artistically respectable offspring of detective pulp. I was thinking of a couple of scenes in REH's Conan – Conan is KO-ed by a single sling stone to the head in Shadows in the Moonlight, and paralysed by poison in The Scarlet Citadel (he's imprisoned and placed in a D&Dish dungeon) – superhero comics (superhero, ofc, also being the offspring of pulp), and it happens twice within the first 200 pages of Neil Gaiman's American Gods, in fact the first time it literally is chloroform, a terrible cliché.Another example would be the one you mentioned of Luke Skywalker being taken out by the tusken raider. If we give our heroes lots of hit points even at 1st level, as 4e does, then that can't happen.This is the problem with hit points – they are too consistent to represent fiction. Heroes are sometimes laid low by a single strike while on other occasions they sustain many wounds and keep on fighting, as Conan does when he battles a Lovecraftian monster in The Slithering Shadow.The thing seemed to be biting, clawing, crushing and clubbing him all at the same time. He felt fangs and talons rend his flesh; flabby cables that were yet hard as iron encircled his limbs and body, and worse than all, something like a whip of scorpions fell again and again across his shoulders, back and breast, tearing the skin and filling his veins with a poison that was like liquid fire.The 'special move' as a fight finisher is very common in genres that have extended fight scenes between hero and villain. The kick on to the spear in Enter The Dragon (after a fight where both combatants receive a number of blows that draw blood), the Thing using Mr Fantastic as a slingshot to take out Galactus(!) in Fantastic Four #243. The monster in The Slithering Shadow goes over the edge of a cliff, it isn't just one more knife thrust from Conan. In fact going over a cliff is a very popular method of villain dispatch.It's dramatically necessary. When we've seen two fighters whaling on each other for a period, the fight simply can't end with more whaling. Something else must be brought in to break the deadlock.Which is exactly what happens in fights that may seem to be ended by 'just more whaling' – Return of the Jedi and Spidey's relentless barrage of punches defeating the Green Goblin in Amazing Spider-Man #122. In both cases the hero has a surge of energy, the tide turns. Luke is enraged, and empowered, by Vader threatening his sister. Spider-Man is enraged when the Goblin disparages the girlfriend he murdered, Gwen Stacey. What is going on there is not just one more punch, there's more to it than that. But with hit points that's all it takes. Stories work by different rules.I checked out the light sabre battle at the end of Return of the Jedi and I find it hard to see where hit points come into it. The fight is almost all light sabre parrying (and some dodging) and a couple of special moves – Luke kicks Vader down the steps, and Vader hurls his weapon, taking out the supports of the gang plank Luke's standing on. There's a game of cat and mouse as Darth searches for his prey and then – the key event – Vader mentions Luke's sister, at which point he becomes enraged. Luke does whale on Vader but it's still all parrying, until his father falls on one knee and he cuts off his hand. The emperor's lightning isn't hit point depletion – Luke is in agony, unable to fight back as he is zapped, which isn't how hit points work. It looks to me more like necessary Suffering before the bad guy can be defeated.From a story point of view, Luke is experiencing conflict between Love(Friends and Family) and Love(Friends and Family) – it's both the source of his power and what might cause him to fall. The emperor's taunting is boosting the negative side. For Vader it's Love(Family) versus Loyalty(Emperor) or perhaps just the Dark Side itself. Seeing his son tortured gives a big boost to the former and/or lowers the latter. On this interpretation all the sabre whacking is pretty irrelevant, that's just a vehicle for the expression of emotion.This might look Narrativist but, as I understand it, it isn't. In a Nar game, the player must make the key decisions, not the dice. If giving into the Dark Side is truly a viable moral option, which it wouldn't seem to be, then the player must choose.One could say that all the parried blows and dodging are hit point depletion. I believe that such an abstract interpretation lessens the utility of hit points as a mechanic for simulating fiction. After all, we still want hit points to do the job of Suffering, to be real physical damage. This means that the participants, the GM and players, are doing all the work – the interpretation – while the mechanic is being lazy. It doesn't mean anything, and if it doesn't mean anything then it doesn't simulate.</blockquote>

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