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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4102982" data-attributes="member: 5143">That's the thing...as long as they are kept as an abstraction then all that happened was a bunch of game mechanics.Every see a movie where the hero gets shot?  Everyone gasps, the woman who loves him starts crying.  It's hopeless now, he's lying there bleeding and not moving.  The woman runs over and holds him and yells "No!!"...but he doesn't move.  The bad guy laughs, gloats for a while, and then turns to shoot his friend as well.  Then suddenly, from behind him the hero who was shot appears and tackles him from behind.  He was apparently shot in the shoulder and it hasn't affected him that much other than he went down and looked like he was dead for a while to provide an appropriate moment of tension in the story.This is exactly how I picture it working in 4e.  Sometimes you go down and you die.  However, if you are lucky, you get up and it turns out you weren't hurt that bad after all.  If one of your friends runs over to you says "You can't die on me...not now!" then it ALSO turns out it wasn't so bad after all.The idea is to keep the game mechanics completely separate from the narrative.  The PLAYER knows that he had already failed 2 death saved and managed to roll a natural 20 which restored him to 25% of his health.  However, according to the narrative, the character was never in any danger of dying since he didn't receive a lethal wound.  This allows the game rules to retroactively change the narrative.  Based on whether the third death save was a natural 20 or was a failure, that determines how nasty the hit the character took 3 rounds ago.</blockquote>

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