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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sacrosanct" data-source="post: 7829869" data-attributes="member: 15700">Some of the discussion from other threads, and my gaming session last Sunday, has had me thinking about this a little more, and why it's problematic.We all know HP are abstract.  And we know that a certain suspense of disbelief has to happen.  And when we ask, "Why are you at full fighting power from 100 hp down to 1 hp, but then suddenly lose everything, and if you lose 99% of your hp, it make no sense to heal all of it after 8 hours?" the common response is "because HP aren't meat, and all those hits you took aren't real hits, they are just grazing attacks that might not have hit you directly."Well, there's another big problem with that.  One that I as a player encountered last Sunday, and the sleep thread reminded me of just now.  I.e., unless loss of hp actually does have a narrative effect (the DM describing the wounds from each attack), and there is no difference from the PC's perspective to guess how close they are to beating the creature, it has a significant detrimental effect to the players.  In the sleep thread, it impacts whether or not the wizard will use that spell slot to end a battle.  if they have no idea roughly how worn down the target is, they are more hesitant to use it.  In my example last Sunday, I had first used magic missile.  The DM pretty much narrated nothing with each attack people did, and when I asked, it was "it hits the creature."  I was sure the creature had a resistance to something (it did, it was a gray ooze), but my magic missile, firebolt, and other PCs' attacks were all narrated the same so I had no idea what worked better than another. So it seems like a paradox of sorts.  HP are not just meat or fighting capability, but if you don't act like they are meat in the game, it has a negative affect to game play.  <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="🤷‍♂️" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f937-2642.png" title="Man shrugging    :man_shrugging:" data-shortname=":man_shrugging:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" /></blockquote>

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