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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Andor" data-source="post: 6350802" data-attributes="member: 1879">Do you know precisely what has happened? No.You know that someone hit someone with a weapon, as that was the attempt being modeled by the system.You know that blood was drawn (if it was a s/p weapon.) Some will argue that you cannot know that blood was drawn as HP are abstract, which might be true except that you can paint them into a corner. Frex a blowgun dart does 1 or 1-2 points of damage. And each and every hit with a blowgun dart is capable of administering an injectable poison, if and only if the dart actually does damage. A barbarian with DR 2 can be shot so full of darts he looks like a hedgehog, but he will never have to make a poison save. Ergo a 1hp hit from a blowgun dart indicates that the dart penetrated into the bloodstream. We now know that 1hp of damage is at very least the equivalent of a pinprick. It cannot be a near miss whatever some say. So there we have a mechanical link between hp loss and physical effects.You could, if you were an evil scientist in a D&D world, explore this rigorously by chaining a bunch of people to posts and having your ninjas blowgun them to death while you record the events.You would rapidly discover mean hp totals for the base population, and whatever tougher figures you could find. "Interesting, Thorvold the Belligerent required 78 darts to be knocked unconcious, my god that's four times as many as his horse!" If you were fantasy Himmler you could probably derive the entire damage system by weapon as well as hp by class and level.Ergo, HP mean something concrete within the gameworld of D&D. It's not something we understand well, because our reality doesn't work that way. But can the people inside a D&D world perceive the existence of HP? Yes, yes they can. Actually for an extreme example of this there is always <a href="http://www.erfworld.com/" target="_blank">Erfworld</a> where HP totals are explicit and actually viewable by others inside the world. Indeed they are probably well aware of other implications of the HP system, for example it's impossible to accidently beat someone to death with your fists. Doing lethal damage (depending on  the edition) requires deliberate effort. So Houdini would not have died from that punch to the gut unless his assailant was a monk attempting to assainate him. Which now that I think about it should imply that D&D worlders are even quicker to use their fists to resolve disputes than real world people, but beating someone to death might just stir up a lynch mob....Like I said, thinking about this stuff is fun. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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