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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6016505" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't know how much thought the designers of D&D's mundane classes have given to realism or even to what they did give thought.  I do know however that early on in D&D's history there was an assumption that D&D's classes could be used successfully to model a great many settings, including non-magical real world ones.  This is evident IMO by reading early Dragon magazine, or by examining the 1st DMG, or what is known about Gygax's actual campaigns (Robilar, for example, carried pistols).I would argue that this is true regardless of rules set.Which might be true, but I'm pretty sure I do know the reason that the designers choose to model heroism as being able to take many many hard shorts to go down anyway, and that is that they realized that any test based mechanic like, "Ordinary city-slickers might have a 1-in-20 chance of hitting, while he'd have a 19-in 20 chance of hitting.", would still leave the hero with a very very real chance of going down to any ordinary city-slicker.  By leaving in the narrative/power of plot protection of a large number of hit points, any bad luck in the game could be translated into a minor 'flesh wound' in the story - leaving the hero on his feet to win the vast majority of such fights.  And it is precisely because this logic is so sound that the 'hit point' mechanic rather than some sort of pure 'test' mechanic remains the most common one in gaming, and in computer gaming in particular. Yes, but I would press the argument that after extensive play testing, you would.  Besides which, it's not unusual for the D&D hero to have a 19 in 20 chance of hitting the mook, while the mook has but a 1 in 20 chance of hitting the hero.   This is part of how D&D defines heroic in addition to implementing hit points as a form of narrative control.I fully agree, but note that 'bravery' stands out as a trait that is irrelevant to fictional heroic protagonists as well.  Fictional heroic protagonists don't have to make 'bravery checks', and if we implemented 'bravery checks' they would fail for the same sort of reason as pure test mechanics fail - luck would overly define the narrative.  Rather than having hero that is always brave, we'd have one with a 1 in 20 chance of fleeing from the mook.   If you go back to D&D's roots, you can see this in the form of morale checks that monsters have to make, but which PC's are immune to.  And again, there are other good reasons for not having 'bravery checks', because as much as possible we want to avoid taking control of the character away from the player.In my DMing experience, I've found that bravery still remains very important to a D&D game even without a 'bravery check' mechanic, because very often the players themselves lose their nerve, or panic, or decide to throw down their shield and hope the monster eats the slower comrades first, and with often disasterous consequences.</blockquote>

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