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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6355278" data-attributes="member: 996">I haven't.  But it certainly happens to people.  Not just for a week but for /years/.  Psychological trauma.By the same token, if you're stabbed you might fully recover in a few weeks - or, you might have a lasting impairment for years due to a nerve being severed or scar tissue restricting freedom of movement or whatever.There's a /lot/ of things D&D hps don't remotely model well or accurately.   In fact, apart from plot armor, it's safe to say hps model /nothing/ accurately (probably part of Hussar's point, though I don't exactly agree with it).  But you can't say 7hps of damage model a stab wound any better than a psuedo-hit that affects morale, fatigue, divine favor or other non-physical rationalizations that EGG outlined in the 1e DMG in 1979. Again asked and answered (by EGG) in 1979:  a successful poison save represented a psuedo-hit with no actual wound to become envenomed. He wrote the rules, and there was no clear line between rules and commentary on rules in 1e AD&D.   If the mechanics didn't match his intent as stated in the DMG, in your judgement, 35 years later, maybe he didn't write them well enough /for you/ (it was still the early days of the hobby, afterall).  But it was also his intent that those using the rules (DMs, that is) wouldn't let them get in the way of the greater game, but use them as a starting point.  So if the rules 'broke your narrative,' you'd've just tweaked them or created a less fragile or more flexible narrative.  EGG's treatise on hps was apparently in response to people taking some sort of all-meat view of hps, then asserting that gaining hps with level was somehow 'impossible.'  So he offered a more flexible explanation than all-meat.  That /is/ an inconsistency - not that D&D rules haven't often been inconsistent.</blockquote>

Verification