NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 9178313" data-attributes="member: 996">In genre, even a major foe may fall to a single mortal wound, and, really, the whittling you see in D&D is uncommon, and usually happens to the hero, as a way of illustrating long battles, great bravery & fortitude, etc.  Take hp as very abstract (which, amusingly, some folks aren't willing to do) and it can still be OK:   all those hp-whittling hits just don't draw blood or even make contact.  But, at that point, really, why is magic an exception?  Heroes and important supporting cast and villains are plot-armored against magic, too, in genre. In TSR D&D, hit points and saving throws were separate forms of plot armor, high level characters (and their foes) had scads of hp, and good saving throws.  As you leveled, attacks got more likely to hit, but you needed more hits to whittle away the targets hp, while all-or-nothing saves got easier and easier to make -  ironically making powerful 'SoD' spells seem/feel ineffectual/frustrating. 3e came along and designed saving throws to fail on more like the same order as attacks hitting - enough to not be frustrating - but left in SoDs... and then save DCs got optimized... Not only could it turn the game into rocket tag, even when saves weren't that out of hand, the fact that all the hp damage contributed by the rest of the party essentially meant nothing when an SoD was failed tended to undercut the cooperative game, a bit.4e fixed that by having basically all attacks do hp damage, with any conditions on a hit, rather than having SoDs.5e didn't entirely unwind that solution, tho it brought back the 3e redundancy of magical attacks forcing saves that fail around as often as attacks hit, there's not much in the way of outright SoDs.</blockquote>

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