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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marius Delphus" data-source="post: 1301392" data-attributes="member: 447">Let's not forget the critical hit mechanic is an *abstraction* designed to reflect the fact that combatants sometimes get in blows more serious than usual. Let's also not forget that hit points themselves are an *abstraction* designed to reflect the fact that after a certain amount of unluck in combat, the unlucky combatant is going to be unable to continue. It's not the *game's* fault that a set of premises carried over from the real world lead to a strange logical result.That's right, it's the old "it's only a game" argument. Because, you know, it is.Creatures of the Construct, Elemental, Ooze, Plant, and Undead types are immune to critical hits, as are Swarm-subtype creatures. (I think I got 'em all.) We can safely assume, I think, that this passage serves to justify the immunities of all these creatures. Now, do we read this passage as requiring all three qualities or would one of the three suffice?I mean, if I'm a 10th-level oozemaster, for example, do I have no vital organs, no points of weakness, *and* no differentiation from one portion of the body to another? What if I'm a 10th-level elemental savant (Tome and Blood) and, though I started out a normal human, I have now acquired the elemental type? Surely undead creatures have *some* differentiation from one portion of the body to another... a zombie arm doesn't look much like a zombie torso; it has different/additional functions and is shaped all wrong, for starters. (Poor zombie, to be so picked on.) What about a humaniform construct: it has limbs and a head!If a creature needs less than all three of the relevant qualities to be immune to critical hits, what can we conclude about critical hits? If a creature needs all three qualities to be immune to critical hits, how do we make room for all the creatures that, arguably, do not have all three qualities but are immune to critical hits anyway?So where in the continuum between a stone golem through R2-D2 to Data do we add in vulnerability to critical hits? Do we? What makes the most sense?By the way, an ordinary tree is simply an *object*, not a creature of the Plant type, and its hit points represent how far away from being ruined it is, not how far away from being dead it is. So there's a further arbitrariness to tree hit points that is not present in creature hit points, which means it's even more okay to throw real-world assumptions out. That it is a living organism makes *no difference* to the game rules.So D&D characters *can* chop down trees, especially if the DM is generous and permits axes to do double damage to tree trunks. What a relief. And it gets better: if it's a large enough tree (one large enough to survive having its branches hacked off, for example), its branches might have separate hit point totals, which could be used to represent how close the branches are to being hacked off without ruining the tree itself.Now I'm going to eat this apple without worrying how much damage my bite attack is doing to it or how many hit points it has left.</blockquote>

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