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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 7840988" data-attributes="member: 6787503">To  answer this question, you have to go back 48 years to 1971, the date of publication of D&D‘s predecessor, Chainmail. Chainmail is primarily a set of rules for resolving large-scale medieval battles, and, as such, it’s primary combat-resolution mechanic answers two basic questions, which are: After one minute of melee combat, did your opponent kill any of your men, and did you kill any of your opponent’s men? Getting to the kills without a lot of extraneous fiddling around is key to speed of play in this type of game.The basic play loop, then, as it relates to melee combat, is as follows: the fictional positioning is established that melee is occurring between two or more units through use of figures on a play surface, which triggers the use of the fortune mechanic. Again, in its most basic form, this involves the participants rolling a number of d6s (up to 4) for each unit depending on the relative troop-types of both the attacking and defending units. Sixes (and, in some cases, fours and fives) rolled are “hits” and count as kills, which makes sense given that a solid blow from a sword or some other lethal weapon is likely to result in the target’s death. Thus, it is established that, in the fictional battle, some number of men have been killed.Flash forward to 1974, D&D is a set of rules for playing a fantasy hero in an ongoing campaign. Survivability of the individual figure becomes an issue, and an additional fortune mechanic, hit points, is appended onto Chainmail’s combat resolution mechanic. On a hit, instead of the fiction resulting in the target being killed outright, further mechanics are triggered: a d6 is rolled (damage), and the total is subtracted from the target’s hit points. Then, if the target has any hit points left, the resulting fiction is that the target wasn’t killed, and only if all the target’s hit points are taken away does the fiction result in the target being killed. Thus, hit points interpose themselves between a “hit” and a kill.The question being answered by the resolution mechanic in both systems is the same: Does the attack kill? I think hit points, as a mechanic, causes an issue when, on a hit, the “to hit” roll is made to feed directly into the fiction without first completing the resolution mechanic by rolling damage and comparing the total to the target’s hit points. Only then has it been resolved if the target was killed or not.</blockquote>

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