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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9610385" data-attributes="member: 4937">If pizzas are round, why are doghouses made of pancakes?Certainly that's one way to describe them, but the focus is not on the narrative needs of the story, but the simulation of a more skilled or powerful heroes.  Consider that 1e AD&D is not a skill-based system, so when we consider something like an improved saving throw versus Death Magic, we are looking at a skill in abstraction.  Gygax says, "You can be using any number of heroic skills/abilities to evade Death Magic, but the net outcome is that the more skillful hero is better at evading Death Magic."  So while it isn't wrong to see hit points or saving throws as plot armor, they are also and at the same time a simulation of the in-world concept that the hero is special in something other than a narrative sense.  They have more willpower, more grit, more luck, more favor of the gods, more knowledge of the arcane arts, more skill with a blade, or are just hardy beyond the ken of ordinary men.  Whatever combination of skills concretely explains why they parry aside the killing blow and take a scratch instead, or leap away from the blast at the last moment to a place of comparative shelter, or however they evade in the story is being simulated by improved hit points and saving throws.I don't even understand how you think the questions you raise are problematic to the description I just provided.  If anything, if it were true that saving throws and hit points were plot armor in some form, then it would I think only reinforce and prove my point that everyone is trying to emulate heroic fiction.  And if your point is that heroes don't die of diphtheria in heroic fiction, then I think you are missing my point, which is that they aren't crushed by rolling boulder traps or eaten by dinosaurs either.  And if your character is slain by orc arrows despite heroically hewing down scores of his enemies, well maybe he wasn't ever the protagonist anyway.  The point is that if the hero can be tested by fighting a dragon, then you can also test whether a hero can heroically overcome crossing a desert waste, and if it is a test then potential heroes can fail either one.  It's not necessarily the case that if you can slay the dragon that the desert waste is an easier test.  Sam can vanquish Shelob, but he doesn't have the strength to do more than cross the ash choked wastes of Mordor with no hope of return.  Why is this hard to understand?  Why should we expect Man against Nature to be a trivial test of the heroic?</blockquote>

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