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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ridley's Cohort" data-source="post: 4102546" data-attributes="member: 545">Let's take a step further back...Hit points are an abstraction originally based on mass combat.A single figure on the battle mat is a "unit".  A unit might have been, back in the pre-Chainmail days, 100 or 1000 men -- it varied.Zero hit point means the unit is "ineffective".  Does that mean 100 (or 1000) men are dead?  No.  It means there are enough men are dead or wounded in that unit, particularly among the leaders, that this unit is no longer worth thinking about for the rest of the battle.That is why the various death and dying rules never made much sense when you got down to the nitty gritty details -- Gary borrowed these concepts from historical miniatures games where people did not really sweat about the details of what happened the day after the exciting battle was already over.  If the unit is no longer effective in this battle it is "dead" -- remove it from the field of battle, for the sake of convenience.In this context, rolling d6 for the hit points of a basic vanilla military unit seems somewhat reasonable.  Some units have men who will rise to the occasional when the leader has fallen.  Or not.  It is not necessarily predictable beforehand, until that moment of truth occurs.Furthermore, some rare units are battle-proven elites.  They might have 2d8 or 3d8 hit points -- these unit never run away ("die") early in a battle.  If 50 men fall the remaining 50 will fight even harder...to a point.Gygax recognized that one could push the envelope and use these same abstractions down at the single man level.Did the abstractions still make sense?  Yes and no.  For a game with a mishmash of pseudo-historical, mythic, and fantasy elements, it was not radically worse than its ancestors.  Anyone dare to argue that those historical miniatures rules Gary borrowed from were "realistic" in their own right?  Do not go there.Really who cares?  I honestly doubt Gary cared.  What was really important was...it worked.  Why waste time arguing when there was fun gaming to do?Hit points never really made sense.  Never.  Ever.This is a "functional" mechanic with an ad hoc definition fitted after the fact.  Does the mechanic make the game more interesting and fun?  Yes?  Then it is a "good" mechanic.Does the mechanic make exact literal sense from a realistic point of view?  I have ~150 board games and ~200 RPG books/supplements.  Do any of them really make sense?And if I cared greatly about that kind of thing, I would not be playing D&D.  I would be playing Harnmaster or Riddle or Steel instead.</blockquote>

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