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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Scurvy_Platypus" data-source="post: 4845938" data-attributes="member: 43283">I guess it sorta depends on what you think of Hit Points as being in the first place. There's a chunk of people (I've only run into them online) that feel Hit Points are some sort of abstraction, measuring all sorts of other stuff. A sort of mechanical "relevance" or ability to affect the story in some fashion; as you get closer to zero, your character's ability to affect the story (and participate in it) gets lower and lower.The way I've seen it run over the past couple of decades, Hit Points is another way of saying Damage Points; in other words, it really does reflect damage inflicted with the potential to eventually kill you. Given that clerics do the whole "Cure Light Wounds" thing, the Dragon Shaman healing aura, and other stuff like you can drink a potion to heal up, I tend to side with the Damage Point crowd myself.Of course, no matter which way you go, Hit Points are an abstraction, and you're going to get funny results if you take something from life, abstract it, and then try and model life using the abstraction. Much like translating English into Japanese and then trying to have another person translate that Japanese into English.In this particular case... I'd say it was Non-lethal damage. I've suffered 2nd/3rd degree burns, wrecked a motorcycle a couple of times, and had an accident with a rotary saw. And I've had to deal with animals biting and clawing me too. The biting/clawing stuff smarts at the time and can be nasty if it gets infected, the scope/scale of the damage is quite a bit less than the other stuff I've experienced.Of course, that doesn't mean I'd class being smacked by something like a bear to be Non-lethal too. Once you start getting to dog size, you're going to have to start being pretty careful.The whole raccoon thing... yeesh. People think they're cute and cuddly, but those suckers are no joke. I think a big decider in the whole "what kind of damage is it?" question is "what's the goal of the animal?" If the goal is to jack you up then past a certain size, an animal is probably going to do a pretty good job of it.On the other hand, if they're just trying to get away or make you stop doing whatever it is you're doing (like give a cat a pill or a bath), then the damage they inflict is going to tend to be not as serious.Of course, it's always possible that instead of Hit Points, you happen to operate on something more along the lines of the VP/WP damage model. I have to admit to having some fondness for that model myself.</blockquote>

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