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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6302059" data-attributes="member: 42582">That's my point: within the gameworld there are only those various different circumstances. It's not that the qualities of the powers are hidden by outside factors - the powers have no qualities within the gameworld.Within the gameworld there is no such case. Within the gameworld there is this one particular event in which person A was killed, or was bloodied, or was knocked prone, or was wrongfooted, or whatever other observable thing took place. But within the gameworld there is no way to correlate this to hit point loss, or power usage. Those are all artefacts of the metagame - the actual play of the game at the table.You seem to be positing the inhabitants of the gameworld performing some sort of "hidden variable" experiment based around longsword swings to try and measure hit points as a real but unobservable quantity. I'm not enough of a mathematician to work out if that makes sense, given that there seem to be at least 4 hidden variables in play (the stats of each power, the power actually used, the damage result, and the target's hp total).But even if such an experiment does make sense, the inhabitants of my gameworld are not undertaking any such experiments. In my gameworld, what is observable is the loosing of arrows, the killing of their targets, etc. The use of powers, the rolling of dice, the subtraction of hit points from tallies - none of these is part of the gameworld.In the gameworld, none of the quantities you refer to here - the loss of N hit points to a power of xW - is observable or directly measurable to the inhabitants of the gameworld.No. In your own scenario, death is the result of the subsequent attack. If the final attack was a 1 hp hit from a thrown rock, it caused more observable damage than the loss of 20 hp to the 2W attack, because the rock killed its target, but (as you note) the 2W attack didn't even bloody the target.This is just one example that shows that damage does not correspond in any obvious way to anything within the gameworld. You can stipulate such a correspondence if you want to, of course, but no one is obliged to in order to have the gameworld be consistent.There need be no such reality. That there is such a reality is a premise of simulationist play, but not everyone begins their RPGing from such a premise.</blockquote>

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