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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5827891" data-attributes="member: 58197">It's a very legitimate question and worth discussing.The purpose of hit points is to be limited but reliable protection versus death. As long as you have a decent amount of hit points left, your character is safe from being wiped out by a single lucky hit. However, that protection is exhaustible, so you can still die if you get in over your head. D&D expects player characters to get in a lot of fights, and the hit point system is a nice way to balance "PCs should live longer than half a session" against "PCs should not be invulnerable."What this means is you need to have enough hit points that one hit can't kill you. For many people, this introduces believability issues, since in real life one hit can quite easily be fatal. Those issues get worse as characters advance and their hp increase*; as others have noted, you get to the point where fighters routinely take dozens of stab wounds without going down. Gary Gygax addressed those issues with the very first Hit Points Are Not Physical Toughness Paragraph. Every edition includes a version of this paragraph somewhere in the core rulebooks, and every edition except 4E totally ignores it throughout the rest of the system.I do think that every hit which deals damage should be narrated as connecting, for a whole bunch of reasons--for example, many attacks have "rider" effects such as poison or weakness, and those don't make any sense if the attack didn't inflict some kind of injury. But an attack which inflicts 10 points of damage has to be narrated differently depending on the target's hit point total. To the high-level fighter with 100 hit points, it's a grazing cut. To the apprentice wizard with 5 hit points, it's a critical and possibly mortal wound.Myself, I would like to see D&D move to a wound/vit system where "physical toughness" and "defensive skill" are split out into their own pools. It addresses this concern as well as several others. I don't expect it to be the default system in 5E, but perhaps it can be an optional module in the core.[SIZE=-2]*The need for hit points to increase with level is a separate issue. There are reasons why I think it's a good idea, but I won't get into that just now.[/SIZE]</blockquote>

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