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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMZ2112" data-source="post: 6147000" data-attributes="member: 78752">Two editions of D&D might hand wave hit points as being an abstraction, but all seven versions of the game only cause you to lose them when a physical event penetrates or bypasses your physical defenses.  By the RAW, you don't lose hit points to blocked blows that were simply exhausting or a strain to defend against, and you don't lose hit points to any kind of miss.That's a lot of hand waving.  Try having that conversation with a player sometime.  "You deflect the orc's hammer strike and it rebounds off your armor with a loud 'clang!'  You take 14 points of damage."  "Uh, what?"Enjoy the pitchforks and torches.Personally, I don't actually come down on either side of this issue, because for the reason I've put forward and for the reasons stated earlier in the thread, hit points are and have always been completely ambiguous.  And that has never impacted 99% of the community's enjoyment of the game.We don't have to solve this problem.  Hit points should continue to be ambiguous in D&D Next.  It's not hurting anyone.  It's not even exhausting or causing strain to anyone. D&D is a system that makes certain assumptions -- one of them is that being a high-level fighter allows you to absorb ludicrous quantities of physical abuse.  Another is that magical healing exists and at high levels can completely ameliorate such ludicrous abuse in an instant.  Eliminating these things is not as simple as a hand wave.  They're intertwined with each other and with dozens of other conceits that make D&D what it is.The purpose of D&D Next is to bring D&D back to baseline, not to turn the game into a dozen things it was never intended to be.  And for what it's worth, for my part, the warlord falls outside of D&D baseline.  The warlord is an attempt to hand wave several integral assumptions about the D&D universe, and it falls down on a number of counts.The warlord is essentially an in-game nod to the out-of-game absolutist opinion that hit points cannot be and are not meat.  A warlord character would never describe what he does as healing, but in order for his class to be a viable player choice, it has to be able to provide damage amelioration on a level with the cleric, which means that at high level he has to be able to help allies recover from spell attacks like Disintegrate, which do not fart around about exactly what they are doing to characters.  They are causing grievous bodily injury.  Even at low levels, the warlord has to be able to exhort his allies to get up following /greataxe criticals/.The cleric, in contrast, is not beholden to an absolutist view of the rules.  Whether the damage caused is bloody, fatiguing, or even just emotionally draining, the cleric's magic can deal with it.So the issue here is that the warlord isn't actually a much-needed non-magical healing option.  In order to mesh with the rest of the system, his abilities are /equivalent/ to magic, and flavoring them otherwise falls flat at worst, and at best it calls into question what the benefits of divine intervention are, exactly.  I mean, why kowtow to a power when you can just learn to shout your allies' wounds away?As near as I can tell, the only purpose the warlord really serves is to provide fuel to the fire of the argument over the nature of hit points.  If you don't want magical healing in your campaign, then you don't want clerics OR warlords -- neither class obeys the laws of physics and nature as we understand them.</blockquote>

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