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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JohnSnow" data-source="post: 4102015" data-attributes="member: 32164">Nope. How long has it been since you read your First Edition Dungeon Master's Guide? I quote:I bolded the part about skill and luck. I also bolded the part about hit points as physical damage. I think that about covers it.Nonsense. A PC with 1 hit point is in no life threatening danger - unless he's attacked again. He is, for all intents and purposes, unimpaired and unhurt.Poison is a corner case. If the fighter is struck by a poisoned blade, it drew blood, but that doesn't mean the injury was serious. For example, if the high level fighter with 250 hit points takes 1 hp from a poisoned knife, he still has to make a save vs. poison. What's the equivalent of 1/250th of the 1st-level fighter's 12 hp? It's so far below 1 as to not count, which means it's a bit like pricking your finger on a rose bush.Given what I quoted from that DMG, are you still sure about that? Yes, hit points represent your "resistance to harm" and always have. But actual damage? Hardly.Well, I quoted the First Edition DMG above. Clearly, Gary felt that only the barest fraction of a character's hit points represented actual physical resistance to injury. And since the average damage of a sword hasn't changed since 1e, we must assume that characters today simply start with more "nonphysical hit points" than ever before. My Second Edition books aren't handy, but they followed 1e's lead. It seems to me that Fourth Edition is making the mechanics match the old explanation, rather than making the explanation match the mechanics, as 3e did.I freely acknowledge that 3e tried, to an extent, to force the "actual physical resistance to injury" interpretation of hit points. The result of that change of interpretation led to silliness like the Epic Level Handbook's "swimming in Lava" scenario. So if anything, 3e is the aberration.Or is it? How about some Third Edition quotes?So even 3e doesn't support the interpretation that hit points represent your ability to sustain physical damage. Otherwise, they wouldn't cease to matter when you're "helpless," as the coup de grace rules would lead one to believe.I think I've made my point as much as it's possible to make it. But hey, if you still think 4e is somehow fundamentally altering hit points, I guess I can't convince you otherwise. To me, it's finally making the rules match what the text has been saying for most of the history of the game.</blockquote>

Verification