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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6146744" data-attributes="member: 2067">Had a game once where a barbarian plummeted at terminal velocity into magma, and swam out and killed a few salamanders while his skin peeled off. Superstitious, you know, so he didn't want magical healing. Fine in a week (high CON, 3e, mid-level, possibly involving a magic item re-fluffed as an inherent part of the character, IIRC). Heck yeah. You think this is about realism for me? I invite you to read the paragraph above and then get back to me on that.This is about psychology. It's the same thing that goes into SAN loss in a CoC game, or pulls from the Jenga tower in a Dread game. It is about the creeping presence of the reaper breathing down your throat at all times, the reminder that each kobold you fight is one little step closer to an impending demise. Not up everyone's ally, but up mine, and certainly well within the spirit of a huge chunk of the history of D&D. Only, like the first ~20 pages of the thread point out, you don't need a whole class if all you really want is the non-magical spike healing and the "inspiring leader" character type.I don't know about you, but I'm not a level 12 barbarian in a fantasy world of dragons and orcs. It's believable enough to me that a fantasy hero could. Call me a weirdo, but I don't like my character's status as a big dang hero contingent on some pushy jerk reminding me of it twice every five minutes. I also don't like my character to be deluded and panicky. So that don't work for me personally. First, everyone's suspension of disbelief is selective. This shouldn't be news.Second, you're being overly literal. HP is meat, but 1 hp doesn't represent a descrete poundage of bodyflesh or anything. This isn't some sort of strict simulation of mass. Rather, when you get HP when you level up, it represents turning a significant blow into a less significant blow. A hit that goes deep at level 1 goes less deep at level 2, and at level 20 it's more of a scratch or a knick or the tip of your ear coming off or something. Works fine.That would matter if I were appealing to some authority to insist that my version of HP is THE CORRECT VERSION, but I'm not. Or maybe if I gave half a baboon rump what kind of justification the authors gave. I'm just asserting that it's a way people play the game, and a way people have always played the game, with the partial exception of 4e, because 4e's mechanics worked against that playstyle, because 4e wanted to include non-magical spike healing, and non-magical spike healing only really works with HP-as-not-meat. This isn't a controversial statement. Inspirational healing doesn't work with HP-as-meat, and HP-as-meat doesn't work with inspirational healing. Only one e of the game has had inspirational healing, so, aside from that, HP-as-meat has worked fine.I don't really see much of a problem there. Perhaps if you want to be very specific about spell name semantics ("This wound isn't light, it's moderate! And this wound is critical! And why is curing my critical wounds getting rid of my light wounds?"), but my games haven't treated spells much like actual in-world objects as much as they are descriptions of events in the world. IE: the cleric doesn't cast cure moderate wounds, the cleric says a prayer of healing and channels her deity's energy into the wound. Possible partial exception of the wizard, there. Because you're a fantasy hero."Kinds of wounds" isn't a distinction the HP system makes. Vaguely, a hit that takes a bigger % of your HP is harder than a hit that takes a smaller %. Or, a hit that gets you closer to 0 is a bigger hit than a hit when you're at full. But specificity isn't something I'm interested in. And either way, when the cleric says a healing prayer over you, it actually removes some of your wounds of various kinds.</blockquote>

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