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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7881384" data-attributes="member: 29398">The game rules ARE the setting! They have to be, otherwise all you've got is an inconsistent mess.Joe the farmboy heals like a peasant one night but the next day takes up a sword and starts adventuring, so the next night Joe the adventurer heals like an adventurer.  Which means that yes, something about Joe changes the moment he leaves the farm.OK, let's say he's a retired PC.  (not that it should matter in the least!)Also, don't forget that not all adventurers are PCs!  There's party NPCs, other adventuring parties (be they friend, foe or neither), etc., etc.As a game purely in the game-first sense, perhaps; but I've got a computer if that's what I want.  As a device for producing both a setting and a fiction consistent with itself this aspect of the system barely works at all (in any edition; though 4e-5e are a bit worse than the rest).Whether it comes up in the run of play or not is absolutely irrelevant; it's still going on in the background...or at least for the sake of consistency and believability the players have to think it is; and the easiest way to achieve that is to make it so.True, though as h.p. are always what you lose when something hurts you one would think they'd also be the go-to mechanism to represent injury.</blockquote>