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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5828188" data-attributes="member: 58197">Terminology is important. If my character is "hit" by an "attack" inflicting "damage" which costs me "hit points," and the way I recover those hit points is to "heal," I expect to see a ballpark resemblance between what the words mean in English and what they mean in the game. I am not on board with any system* that claims "hit" mostly means "miss" and "damage" means "you didn't get hurt but now you're tired" and "heal" means "take a five-minute break."My customary way of narrating combat is that every attack which inflicts hit point damage causes physical injury, but how serious the injury depends on the ratio of damage dealt to target's hit points. If a monster claws you for 10 points of damage, and your normal max is 15 hit points, you got torn up pretty bad. If your max is 100, you took a grazing cut but nothing serious. If your max is 5, your guts are in a pile on the floor and you're bleeding to death. Sure, natural healing is unrealistically fast, but the difference is of a  magnitude I can live with--a week or two instead of a month or six. It still has the effect of causing problems that persist beyond a single night's rest.There are other cases where this approach gets a bit strained, but in general it's pretty good at reconciling game terminology, the Hit Points Are Not Physical Toughness Paragraph, and the actual (pre-4E) hit point mechanics. 4E threw a big wrench in the works and I've never quite managed to fix it to my satisfaction. I would be much happier with the 4E system if they'd taken the trouble to overhaul the terminology when they changed the mechanics.[size=-2]*At this point, somebody will probably go into one of the older editions and find a version of the Hit Points Are Not Physical Toughness Paragraph which suggests that loss of hit points can mean a near miss. So let me state up front that no, I am not on board with that version of the Paragraph, no matter what edition it's in. In the edition wars, I'm a mercenary--I fight for whatever edition offers me the rule I like best for the topic at hand.[/size]</blockquote>

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