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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6501614" data-attributes="member: 4937">Gygax explains hit points very thoroughly and clearly in the 1e DMG.   I have no idea where this myth that hit points don't have an explanation comes from.   There are some important realistic features of injury that D&D pretty much doesn't model - shock, trauma and blood loss being some of the most relevant - but hit points themselves to the extent that they are intended to be realistic are given a very explicit definition.  A portion of that long and worthwhile description reads:"Each hit scored upon the character does only a small amount of physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and six sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage, our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts, and bruises. It will require a long period of reset and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points." - GygaxIn brief Gygax says that:a) All hit point loss represent some physical damage.  b) As characters increase in level, they gain only a tiny additional ability to sustain wounds.c) However, as characters increase in level, they gain greater skill (of some sort, depending on the class or flavor of the character) to advert serious wounds and take only minor injuries instead.   Thus, the more hit points that a character has the smaller a wound is represented by a given number of hit points.  For a low level character, a 6 hit point loss could be a serious or even fatal wound, but for a healthy high level character the same serious blow deals only a minor wound.d) As a high level character suffers wounds, his ability to avoid wounds begins to increase due to injury, with the result that blows become relatively more and more serious.  So the nature of hit points is quite explicit and clear.  What tends to confuse people is that damage is graded on a curve as it were, so that 6 hit points of damage is scaled to the particular target.  We can say what 6 hit points of damage means relative to the target, but having said it means a particular thing for a particular target doesn't mean that it means the same thing for a different target.  However, being a measurement on a relative scale doesn't make the definition nebulous.</blockquote>

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