Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7843694" data-attributes="member: 996">Yeah, that's part of one sentence out of a long treatise that's trying to explain that hit points aren't just physical damage, so, no, contrary to contemporaneous mockery, your character does not swell to giant proportions as a consequence of gaining hps.On the preceding page, under Poison Saves, he also explains that, when a PC makes a successful poison save vs an insinuative poison, there's no wound, not even a scratch.I theory, in 1e, if you were, say, fighting a Purple Worm, and it hit you every round with the stinger, but not the bite, and you made your save every single round, but it finally dropped you to zero hps, you'd be dying without a mark on you. No subsequent edition has re-defined hps, in fact, 1e and 2e /barely/ even tried to define them, resting on the 1e DMGs laurels, as it were.  2e has one extremely vague, quite straightforward sentence on the topic, for instance - as befits a settled issue, I suppose.Once again, you're stating only part of the ideas put forth in the 1e DMG, an incomplete summary that loses quiet a bit.  Not just less serious but no wound at all was a very real possibility. And it could have been skill, or luck, or divine favor, or a preternatural "sixth sense" - or combinations thereof - or quite possibly other things, the door was not exactly slammed shut.It was a long, treatise, again, and it threw out all kinds of ideas.Abandoned is very much the wrong word, the idea that hps were mostly non-physical, but also a little bit physical, at times, was retained - it was just made more consistent on the mechanics side.  4e added a definite point at which (minor) wounds start occurring:  the Bloodied condition at half-hps.  5e removed the condition, but put the same concept in a sidebar about DM narration of hp loss - so, at the DM's option, you could go back to taking no wounds at all until you were dying, or get scratched up a bit from the first wound that did a non-trivial % of your max hps, just at the whim of the DM rather than the dice.4e & 5e get away with a more consistent conceptual treatment of hps because they've largely eliminated poison save-or-die attacks, so there's not the strong need for the poison save to represent a 'pseudo-hit,' as we used to say back in the day.   More significantly, in terms of the driving force behind the edition warring that resurrected the hp controversy, this time with Defenders of the One True Way of D&D on the opposite side of the argument (back to insisting that hit points must be all-physical, exactly like those mocking the concept of gaining HD with level back in the 70s), 4e stayed with the concept of hit points when introducing new mechanics like self-healing 'surges' as a PC resource and inspiration as healing for the warlord, removing the niche protection that magical healing had formerly 'enjoyed' (and removing the 'healing burden' from the cleric, eliminating the band-aid/heal-bot stereotype) and also making longer adventuring days more plausible.TL;DR:  Ultimately, the way hps work - as a highly abstract mechanic rating the creature's abiltiy to stand up to the deadly threats of combat & adventuring, that cannot be adequately conceptualized as merely physical durability, alone - has stayed constant through all editions.</blockquote>

Verification