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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6317672" data-attributes="member: 42582">Your objection to   [MENTION=6775806]Der-Rage[/MENTION]'s broken leg label was that there were no mechanics for resolving it.But now you're saying that a "cosmetic limp" is sufficient.I don't see how those two positions are consistent. I have never had a broken leg, but I have been on crutches more than once for soft-tissue damage to my knee and ankle. That sort of injury does not cause a merely cosmetic limp, and it does not heal of its own accord in a week or two. Hit points aren't a mechanic that resolves the recovery of a broken leg. They're not even a proxy for such a mechanic. I mean, with the fighter's Second Wind on the 5e character sheet, you could stipulate that s/he has a "cosmetic limp" even though all his/her hit points have recovered. If it's purely cosmetic, you can treat it however you like.This is kind of weird because it makes a broken leg potentially fatal for nearly everyone in the world (who in any edition of D&D typically have a modest single-digit number of hit points), whereas in fact suffering a broken leg is not in and of itself generally fatal, and probably won't even cause you to pass out from pain unless you really insist on walking on it.My intuition is that in a combat involving mace and warhammers, broken bones would be reasonably common. Given how easily it is to tear ligaments, tendons etc jogging, or making sharp turns in ball sports, I suspect that those sorts of soft-tissue injuries would also be quite common, as a result of trying to manoeuvre and dodge.I am happy to play a heroic game in which such injuries don't occur to the PCs - like Conan or Aragorn, for instance, they never suffer these severe injuries. And a hit point system is a good way of achieving this. But to project it onto the gameworld as a whole - so that, for instance, when armies of NPCs clash no one ever suffers a debilitating but non-fatal wound - turns the gameworld from something I can recognise and make sense of to something too removed from reality to be worth engaging with.In 4e the hit point and hit point recovery rules don't distinguish between PCs and NPCs except in one respect - most NPCs don't have access to second wind as an encounter power. But stipulating, as GM, that a group of dwarven NPCs suffered various debilitating injuries in a fight with hobgoblins has nothing to do with the hit point and healing rules.(And for the reasons I've already stated, I cannot accept that the hit point and hit point recovery rules are any sort of extension of "natural law within the game world". The gameworld is, more or less, the same as our natural world as far as human proclivity to injury is concerned. Real world wars leave large numbers of people injured in ways that can't be healed by a week or three of rest. The game world is no different - it's just that the PCs will never be instances of such people, because attempts to injure them are resolved using the hit point rules.)I noticed as soon as I read my AD&D PHB, which had a 7th level spell - Regenerate - that was separate from the Cure Wounds line of spells, plus a separate spell for curing blindness, but no way within its action resolution mechanics for inflicting such injuries other than via very magical items. (Whereas the real world has many people maimed and/or blinded by injury without every having suffered an attack from a sword of sharpness or a staff of withering.)Also, as  [MENTION=18]Ruin Explorer[/MENTION] has noted, there were the long discussions in both the PHB and DMG explaining that hit points are a type of "plot point" abstraction. (Page 34 of the PHB talks about "combat skill, luck (bestowed by supernatural forces), and magical forces." Page 82 of the DMG talks about "skill in combat and similar life-or-death situations, the "sixth sense" which warns the individual of some otherwise unforeseen events, sheer luck, and the fantastic provisions of magical protections and/or divine protection. . . . the immeasurable areas which involve the sixth sense and luck (fitness) . . . exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability . . . physical and metaphysical." Page 112 of the DMG talks about "the aid supplied by supernatural forces.")</blockquote>

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