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Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 3865544" data-attributes="member: 32164">I'd disagree with that - sorta.Things like poison that requires you to do HP damage to take effect implies that hit points do, in fact, model physical injury. What they do not do is model the degree of physical injury. You haven't lost half of your "life energy" when your hit points are down by half. You've lost half of your ability to avoid serious injury.And to me, that's what hit points represent - your ability to avoid serious injury when you get hit. They're a "heroic buffer" to serious injury that represents grit, toughness, determination, divine destiny, and pure f'ing luck.D&D is not a realistic game. It never tries to be. It's a game intended to model heroic fiction. And in heroic fiction, the hero is never down until he's actually DEAD. He might seem to be down, but you never know whether this really is his "last stand" or whether he's going to recover and win. There's a lot of good cinematic examples of characters "getting better" for no reason...Emmet pulling off his head bandage in Silverado (which ought to be required viewing for D&D players).Inigo recovering after taking a knife to the gut in The Princess Bride.Darth Vader, who's nearly dead when he goes down in Jedi recovering and chucking the Emperor down the shaft.John McClane in Die Hard - too many times to count.Aragorn in the film version of The Two Towers - over a cliff and recovers.And countless others.The way I see it, a character can be at "full hit points" but still sporting visible injuries. They could also have lost hit points but be "uninjured." The point is that the injuries are just not life threatening, for whatever reason: they stopped bleeding (either on their own or they were treated), they missed all major organs, they didn't sever any tendons, etc. As long as no poison is involved, a character can have lost hit points without ever taking a cut. And all poison requires is a superficial scratch (so that it at least makes sense).Very similar injuries could turn out to be minor (a clean cut, or stops bleeding on its own), severe (it severs a muscle or tendon, or the bleeding has to be stopped with treatment), or deadly (it gets infected, gives the character tetanus, goes gangrenous, or the bleeding just can't be stopped).You can determine that all damage is of the first type, but it makes more sense to me to only decide that after the fact. Think of hit points as a storytelling aid and they make much more sense. They're a seemingly simulationist element that only make sense when you look at them in a narrativist way.And, viewed from that perspective, there's nothing wrong with nonmagical healing, morale boosts that give you extra hit points, abilities like second wind, or even reserve points. They're just gamist elements that enable story.</blockquote>

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