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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5829360" data-attributes="member: 58197">Stop there a sec; I want to emphasize the difference between &quot;definition&quot; and &quot;terminology.&quot;The definition of hit points, the bit of the rulebook that tells you &quot;This is what hit points are,&quot; barely changed at all from 3E to 4E. Rephrasing aside, it was pretty much the same Hit Points Are Not Physical Toughness Paragraph that Gygax wrote back in 1E. And it supports the 4E approach to hit points quite well.The problem is that the names of things--&quot;attack,&quot; &quot;hit,&quot; &quot;damage,&quot; &quot;heal&quot;--do not support the 4E approach to hit points, and the names are much more important than the book definition. The book definition gets read once, if that. The names get used multiple times a session, every session, reinforcing their implied meaning every time.If I had to pick one single failure that I think really hurt 4E, it was not recognizing the vital importance of names.The problem is that you're talking about changing the definition, which few people read and fewer remember. I'm talking about the terminology. If hit point recovery is not healing, then every place the word &quot;heal&quot; is used for hit point recovery needs to be changed. And I don't see how that can be modular. You can't make the rulebook rewrite itself based on which optional rule is chosen.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5829360, member: 58197"] Stop there a sec; I want to emphasize the difference between "definition" and "terminology." The [B]definition[/B] of hit points, the bit of the rulebook that tells you "This is what hit points are," barely changed at all from 3E to 4E. Rephrasing aside, it was pretty much the same [I]Hit Points Are Not Physical Toughness Paragraph[/I] that Gygax wrote back in 1E. And it supports the 4E approach to hit points quite well. The problem is that the [B]names of things[/B]--"attack," "hit," "damage," "heal"--do not support the 4E approach to hit points, and the names are much more important than the book definition. The book definition gets read once, if that. The names get used multiple times a session, every session, reinforcing their implied meaning every time. If I had to pick one single failure that I think really hurt 4E, it was not recognizing the vital importance of names. The problem is that you're talking about changing the definition, which few people read and fewer remember. I'm talking about the terminology. If hit point recovery is not healing, then every place the word "heal" is used for hit point recovery needs to be changed. And I don't see how that can be modular. You can't make the rulebook rewrite itself based on which optional rule is chosen. [/QUOTE]

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