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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7841025" data-attributes="member: 4937">To put it simply, it is a measure of how hard something is to kill.It doesn't explain why something might be hard to kill. If that thing is a Brontosaurus, the mass of the creature is a fairly large part of why one might think it ought to be hard to kill, and in turn why you might assign to a Brontosaurus a large number of hit points. If that thing is Conan or John Carter, then there are a number of other reasons why you might think it hard to kill, be it agility, cunning, skill, luck, or hardiness and so assign Conan or John Cater a large number of hit points. But the system doesn't really care.This only starts to go awry when someone starts defining the hit point in a concrete manner, and says that the hit point is some simple concrete thing rather than saying its the mechanical implementation of any number of different reasons why something should be hard to kill. This is why the two sides of the &quot;meat&quot; and &quot;not meat&quot; argument are both wrong.The only really baffling thing is how often this keeps coming up.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 7841025, member: 4937"] To put it simply, it is a measure of how hard something is to kill. It doesn't explain why something might be hard to kill. If that thing is a Brontosaurus, the mass of the creature is a fairly large part of why one might think it ought to be hard to kill, and in turn why you might assign to a Brontosaurus a large number of hit points. If that thing is Conan or John Carter, then there are a number of other reasons why you might think it hard to kill, be it agility, cunning, skill, luck, or hardiness and so assign Conan or John Cater a large number of hit points. But the system doesn't really care. This only starts to go awry when someone starts defining the hit point in a concrete manner, and says that the hit point is some simple concrete thing rather than saying its the mechanical implementation of any number of different reasons why something should be hard to kill. This is why the two sides of the "meat" and "not meat" argument are both wrong. The only really baffling thing is how often this keeps coming up. [/QUOTE]

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