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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6728222" data-attributes="member: 996">This part of your post is spot-on.  There's an ridiculous disagreement over what hps mean, even though they don't actually mean anything specific.Not really.  You can draw that line where you like.  Lava? you landed on a rock floating the lava.  Long fall onto sharp rocks?  You caught a branch on the way down, slowed your fall, and landed between the rocks.  Envenomed weapons - the 1979 DMG addressed that one directly: on a successful poison save, the loss of hps didn't result in an actual wound, so no venom, no effect (Save: negates).   Hit points were always very abstract, to impose a specific narrative on them, at any point, can cause problems.  Even that got weird.  If Rognar got hit for 10 points of damage  out of 100, he's barely hurt at all.   OTOH, if Rognar's twin brother, Rangor, with identical stats but 0 exp, got hit for 1hp of damage out of 10, that's an identically-damaging wound, proportionally.  They could each have a scratch.  But, Rognar's scratch can't be healed completely by Cure Light Wounds, while Rangor's would be a waste of the spell, which can heal up to 7 more wounds like it with a good roll, and will heal fairly quickly anyway.  Non-proportional healing was always a major sticking point, even with magic.4e, ironically, fixed that, since surge-based healing was proportional, even as...That's one extreme, yes....That's another.  Both are familiar tropes from fiction.  The character who is seemingly killed, but turns out to be OK, the one horribly wounded but it turns out "It looked worse than it was."  Cliches, really, and genre-appropriate ones - if you're into narrating the game to more detail than the mechanics cover.If you're not in that habbit, there's no issue.  Anything that brings you closer to defeat in combat reduces your hp total, anything that brings you back further away from defeat restores those hps, no matter how different.  So a spell that makes wounds disappear or a well-tied bandage can restore hps you lost to psychic or illusory damage that caused no physical damage whatsoever, and a moment's reprieve to 'catch your second wind' can restore hit points inflicted by a sharp pointy weapon, even if there was an actual wound and the wound is still there, bleeding and untreated.    Not formally.  But then, neither did 4e - edition warriors looking for ways to attack and defend 4e came up with all that silliness.  D&D just had hps, ways to lose them, and ways to get them back, with no tightly-coupled narrative, at all.That's still what it has.</blockquote>

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