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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DMZ2112" data-source="post: 6147890" data-attributes="member: 78752">If an attack requires a to-hit roll or a saving throw, then it is penetrating or bypassing defenses.  If I recall correctly, psionics in AD&D1 only gave the target a chance to defend if he was also a psionic, but I chalk that up to truly unforgivably bad game design and you should too.I also realize this description excludes most iterations of Magic Missile from the category, but I consider magic missile to be a defense of my point rather than a contradiction.  From the d20 SRD: "A missile of magical energy darts forth from your fingertip and strikes its target."  The operative word here being "strikes."It doesn't miss.  It isn't deflected.  You eat that damage.To reiterate my opinion, because I think it's getting lost, I am not in support of an interpretation of hit points that considers them to be entirely meat.  My position is that the rule is ambiguous and should remain ambiguous, because the crunch of the game says they are meat while the fluff says they are more broad in definition and this has always been.Further to that, the cleric does not require specificity in hit point definition, and the warlord does, thus the warlord should never have been introduced to the canon.I think the loss of large quantities of skin, muscle, and bone is sufficiently traumatic to call that possibility into question, yes.Again, I'm not arguing that it has to ALL be meat.  Maybe only half of it is meat damage.  But in order to go toe-to-toe with the cleric in terms of healing, the warlord needs to be able to ameliorate ALL of that damage.  The cleric can do this, because it does not matter to the cleric whether the hit points in question are meat or fatigue.  The warlord, by definition, can only deal with the fatigue.  So the warlord only functions equivalently to a cleric in an environment where no hit point loss is meat.  That is not a concession I am willing to make.Ah, but to quote Jack Sparrow, "We've established my proposal as sound in principle. Now, we're just haggling over price."  Two days does seem short, but the game has always agreed that the dungeon master has the right to set healing rates in his own campaign, based on his own perceptions of challenge.You are right; this comes down to where we see the logical disconnect.  You see it between two days of bedrest and weeks of bedrest.  I see it between, "Rub some dirt on it, you pansy," and hedge-magic nursing for two days.</blockquote>

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