Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 6861997" data-attributes="member: 87792">Hit points are what players use to quantify the "injuries" their characters suffer. Pre-4e these injuries don't even have the cosmetic effect of injuries in an action movie other than a momentary loss of concentration. There is no distraction caused by the injury long term. It doesn't make you any slower, less able to focus, or less able to do ... anything ... except take more hits. A PC on one hit point out of a hundred is almost exactly as capable as the same PC on full hit points. I don't know if you've ever been wounded in your life, but I can assure you that that isn't the way it works even under action movie physics.If I try assuming that hit points are a physics model rather than a gamist construct in editions before 4e I end up in the position where every inhabitant of the D&D world has their own personal magical force field. And cure wounds, far from doing what it says on the tin, simply recharges this force field that might let a few trivial scratches through. Also this force field after a few levels will e.g. temporarily from thousand degree Celsius or 2000 Farenheight temperatures (the approximate melting points of copper, silver, and gold, which are all explicitly melted by the fireball spell in AD&D and 3.X)4e is better this way due to healing surges - that there's a difference between a fresh wound (you're down hit points) and an old wound where you've had time to bandage yourself (you're down surges). And 5e keeps some of that.But ultimately in order to even try to use D&D as any sort of physics model I need to not just check all the assumptions I'd make because I know things about both the real world and common fictional universes - I need to check them at the door. I need to sit down with all the books I mean to use, in detail, and work from the ground up exactly what sort of universe this ends up with. Because it behaves very little like either this universe or cinematic/mythological ones. I consider this overhead ridiculous for an RPG that doesn't state this upfront.Edit: And yes, Dwarf Fortress is a better model of an understandable or observable reality than trying to assume that the rules of D&D of any edition correspond to a physics model.</blockquote>

Verification