Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 9340400" data-attributes="member: 6877472">Basically Gary realized that saying hit points are meat would end up being pretty ridiculous when one sword hit kills a 0-level normal human and it takes 9 or 10 sword hits to kill a higher level Fighter.  However, this did not stop him from having the Sword of Wounding cause bleeding wounds or having a Sword of Sharpness lop people's arms off!D&D as he saw it was not realistic, and was not a simulation, and he did believe in actual physical wounds occurring- in extraordinary circumstances (I mean, by all accounts, he hated "critical hits" with a passion), but they were the exception, not the norm.  The 2e DMG has a nice explanation of the problems of hit points = meat; by the time you're 5th level you'll be missing noses, ears, hands, maybe a leg, and have multiple debilitating injuries as the result of regular combat.Simply put, yes, actual wounding does happen (however...), and there is some meat in hit points (though it should be pointed out that a Sword of Sharpness doesn't inflict additional meat damage by lopping off a leg- I once saw a guy do like 4 damage with a severing strike and we were all scratching our heads trying to figure out how that even works).D&D also neatly sidesteps blood loss save for very specific circumstances.  Which is the key.  Hit points are only meat when a game element specifically makes them meat; your normal hits in combat do not do this.That's why the game doesn't say people hit by a fireball have horrible third-degree burns and lose Charisma points, for example.Some people want that in the game.  They may play that way!  But that's not how the game is written.This isn't an admonishment; if you want to play a grittier D&D game, have at it, though I really think other combat systems like Runequest, GURPS, or Rolemaster might tackle this better than D&D does.Now when people say that their preference is the default, despite all the text written to the contrary, and they look for validation in the gray areas of the game...Ahem.  And suddenly I realize that just about every D&D argument has people doing just that at one point or another.  Myself included.</blockquote>

Verification