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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 2665393" data-attributes="member: 32740">See, now I always thought the problem was that because of how hit points were defined and used D&D did not (could not!) model debilitation.  As someone already said it's the "fine, fine, fine, DEAD" phenomenon.  Sort of goes along with "Save or DIE".  That, I have long assumed, is what the -10 thing is about - it's a means to get away from the insanely binary situation of either living and being entirely functional at 1 hp and being utterly, permanently dead at 0 hp.Back in the day (1E) it was a welcome rule because one of the common complaints was (and sometimes still is) that it was so difficult to survive 1st level, or even the first few levels when PC hit points just didn't seem to be up to task of keeping PC's alive through those initial challenges.  Again, as people have already indicated it becomes almost irrelevant at higher levels - but then the nature of what hit points are really representing changes as well as you increase in level.  1 hit point means something quite different to a PC with only 10 hp than it does to a PC with 100.  Higher level PC's also have a vastly greater variety of things like ways to heal damage, the means to overcome death by resurrection, the ability to survive longer in a high damage environment (thus to recognize and avoid/reduce danger before getting too close to 0 hp), and so on.Works fine for me and always has, though I have to confess that as a DM I have that nagging sense that PC's are cheating if they live after I've "killed" them by putting them to 0 or lower.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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