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<blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 7841513" data-attributes="member: 6777737">Hit points made a lot more sense to me after I played a bit of Warhammer. In that game, every normal figure has 1 hit point. Every hit you deal, if it beats the toughness and armor of the defender, kills a figure. Heroes, and some other figures, are special in that they might get extra hit points: 2 or 3 hit points. Also, heroes can make friendly figures take a hit for them if they're adjacent (the so-called &quot;Look out, sir!&quot; rule).This means, conceptually, that everything has 1 hit point and every weapon deals 1 damage.Because D&amp;D is smaller scale, the low detail of tabletop wargames feels a bit coarse. The idea in D&amp;D was to take that scheme and add some dice to it for variety. Instead of having 1 hit point, you had 1 hit die and instead of weapons dealing 1 damage, they dealt 1 die of damage. d8 was the &quot;good&quot; hit point and weapon die size. Now you see how the system builds from there. d6 Hit Dice are a bit worse than a soldier, and d6 weapons are a bit behind the average weapon. d4 is much worse, while d10 or d12 are much better, etc.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Bacon Bits, post: 7841513, member: 6777737"] Hit points made a lot more sense to me after I played a bit of Warhammer. In that game, every normal figure has 1 hit point. Every hit you deal, if it beats the toughness and armor of the defender, kills a figure. Heroes, and some other figures, are special in that they might get extra hit points: 2 or 3 hit points. Also, heroes can make friendly figures take a hit for them if they're adjacent (the so-called "Look out, sir!" rule). This means, conceptually, that everything has 1 hit point and every weapon deals 1 damage. Because D&D is smaller scale, the low detail of tabletop wargames feels a bit coarse. The idea in D&D was to take that scheme and add some dice to it for variety. Instead of having 1 hit point, you had 1 hit [I]die[/I] and instead of weapons dealing 1 damage, they dealt 1 [I]die[/I] of damage. d8 was the "good" hit point and weapon die size. Now you see how the system builds from there. d6 Hit Dice are a bit worse than a soldier, and d6 weapons are a bit behind the average weapon. d4 is much worse, while d10 or d12 are much better, etc. [/QUOTE]

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