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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6318202" data-attributes="member: 42582">See, this isn't true in AD&D (both psionic attacks and illusions such as phantasmal killer can deal hp damage).  This may have influenced my perspective.My problem with this is that there is no such thing as "a 1 hp wound". Sometimes a 1 hp wound is neglible (eg drop from 10 to 9 hp). Sometimes it is fatal or near-fatal (eg drop from 1 hp to 0 hp). In this respect, a human being taking injury is very different to (say) sanding  down a block of wood with sandpaper.The thing is, that's not a broken leg. Something that brings you closer to death in the immediate term, but doesn't impede your performance and can be shrugged off with a few days' rest, is not a broken leg. It's more like exhaustion and/or resignation.In AD&D, at least, Cure Blindness is a 3rd level spell, hence not available until a cleric reaches 5th level.And by your own measure of adequacy, what you say doesn't seem right, because according to the rules the PCs would heal from that blindness in 4 weeks even without magic. And in the meantime they suffer no penalties to their vision. Saying that a blind person is modelled by low hit points, and that it would be inconvenient to actually model their blindness and so we just let that character keep on seeing things normally, is not an abstraction. It's a nonsense.I still assert that, if you are happy to treat the injury as purely cosmetic then convalescence can be also. On this approach (which I personally don't like, but you seemed to advocate it upthread) the fighter who use second wind still has a broken leg and the resulting cosmetic limp - you just wouldn't model it because that would be too inconvenient.If the PCs in my 4e game had broken legs, then they would need Remove Afliction to heal them magically.As it happens, though, they are lucky enough not to suffer broken legs. (Because the action resolution rules don't allow for it.)Huh? What's observable, in game, is that the PCs are very lucky, and also are always at the centre of the action. And consequently they are powerful. That doesn't strike me as ridiculous  - it's an inevitable feature of a character-focused heroic adventure story.LFK is correct about the "can" issue - the PCs can but they don't.A parallel - it makes sense for a PC to come up with a plan to mug an victim in the privy, but the reverse couldn't work in any campaign I've played, because only once in 30 years of GMing has a player ever narrated a PC going to the toilet. (In <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?309950-Actual-play-my-first-quot-social-only-quot-session" target="_blank">this skill challenge</a>.The issue of fairness and bias is relevant to gameplay. But it's not relevant to me deciding what happens in a fight between some dwarven and hobgoblin NPCs! Nor was the outcome there unknown - I knew what I wanted, namely, a dwarven patrol that had been badly beaten up in an encounter with hobgoblin scouts, but had managed to retreat in good order.There is nothing inconsistent about broken legs happening only as a result of non-dice-rolling narration. It is not an inconsistent rule - it is quite easily stated, and easily applied. And it does not produce an inconsistent gameworld - people in the gameworld suffer broken limbs when and only when they fall or are struck in such a way as to break limbs. The PCs are obviously rather lucky - because they never suffer such falls or blows - but that is not inconsistent."Resolve" here is ambiguous. In the gameworld, the fight between the dwarves and hobgolbins resolved in the way any fight does - the participants in the fight girded their loins, drew their swords and went to it.In the real world, the fight didn't have to be resolved, because it wasn't an episode of play. It was a stipulated situation to provide background and context for an actual episode of play (namely, an angel of Moradin sending a group of the dwarves to find the dwarven fighter/cleric PC so he could help them).In classic D&D (B/X and Gygax's AD&Dcertainly, but I think Cook's AD&D also) monsters and NPCs are governed by morale rules that PCs are not. And monsters have % chances to pursue fleeing opponents, and also rules for giving up pursuit, which do not govern PCs. There is a reaction table to determine the response of monsters and NPCs to encounters, whereas players get to choose how their PCs respond. EtcThe game has always had action resolution mechanics that apply differently to PCs and NPCs, because they recognlse that the PCs have a special significance as being the vehicle by which players engage the game.</blockquote>

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