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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GlaziusF" data-source="post: 4557304" data-attributes="member: 74166">Two more problems:1 - a giant list of contingencies to plan for makes the problem of creating a damage model seem more imposing than it actually is. Actually it makes it seem as imposing as it actually is, but people make things out to be more imposing than they actually are, so you have to make your stuff look easy or it'll never seem worth it.2 - a giant list of contingencies may be used as a cookbook, which results in dependency and an unwillingness to account for anything the cookbook doesn't explicitly cover, viz: "What I cannot create, I do not understand." -- Richard Feynman, a guy who may have known a thing or two about teaching people complicated stuff. What a book needs to do to get people to create their own damage model is:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Sell people on the idea that narrating damage can be fun, perhaps via the concept of character agency vs. DM agency. e.g. As a DM I want all my players to narrate their own damage because a) then I don't have to do it b) it's something more they can do when it's not their turn and c) they fall down at zero anyway so what do I care what they say?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Show that assuming hit points to represent the linear continuum between health and zero-point death that they seem to represent has more than two problems</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Spell out the (extremely limited) mechanical implications of hit points and the strictures they apply to a damage model</li> </ul>I'm not sure that can be done without polarizing examples. I'm doubly not sure it belongs in what is essentially an introductory text because damage modeling is 201 material if ever there was 201 material.</blockquote>

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