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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7829927" data-attributes="member: 996">It's one of those bugs that's also a feature.On the modeling side, it gives us PC heroes who can consistently do at least one heroic thing:  fight on to the last.On the playability side, we really just have to consider the alternative:  The Death Spiral.  Once you start modeling wounds, being wounded saps your ability to both eliminate the opposition, and to avoid taking further wounds, and the balance of the combat you're just circling the bowl.So hps are simulataneous one of the worst and best things about D&D.  They're one of the few sacred cows that's actually darn good for balance & playability and help make the game better.  They provide a workable way for level scaling to be implemented, even under 5e BA.  Yet, they cause no end of problems with 'verisimilitude,' and, though their abstraction was thoroughly explained in painstaking detail 40 years ago, still somehow 'controversial.' So, yeah, sorry, just went off based on the title alone...what were you saying...IDK if that's the common response, but it's the one we got when the 1e DMG hit the shelves - that's that 40 years ago I was talking about.  And, it has the virtue of working, if you can dare to work with it...(…  OK, mostly working, "Cure Light Wounds" doesn't exactly make a lick of sense when it can bring a dying MU up to full health - obviously a very serious wound indeed - but fail to heal up a high-level fighter who has a tiny scratch.......but, even that has been solved since 4e, when surges made healing scale with your hp gain, so a Cure Light Wounds was 1/4 your hp, whether that was 5hps or 45, and even 5e has still kinda solved it, by conveniently eliminated the issue with the removal of the word "Light," making all Cure...Wounds spells simply Cure Wounds, scaling with level/slot if not exactly in lockstep with the recipients hps)  In the 5e PH sidebar on wounds, you start to show 'signs of wear' (that should be general enough for any creature) at 1/2 hps (in 4e it was formally a condition: "Bloodied' - it was announced by the DM, but then, much of 4e played best above-board), so you can gauge how close you are to finishing a monster pretty readily.That's a stylistic issue.  5e /does/ play rather well (best IMHO/X) with the DM keeping as much as possible behind the screen, but the DM still could have narrated reactions.  If the monster were resistant to fire, for instance, those attacks wouldn't seem to give it pause, whether they were doing visible damage to it yet or not, while if it were vulnerable, it'd be clearly bothered by them (like the Frankenstien monster - "rgggg  ahrrr FIRE BAD!" - or something).If you ignore the sidebar, and fail to narrate at all, as the only alternative to narrating severe physical wounds with every "hit."</blockquote>

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