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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 6356647" data-attributes="member: 22779">Unarmored combatants get hit by greataxes all the time in D&D though.  Or are you now saying that a "hit" is not necessarily a physical impact?One cracked rib is hardly as serious an injury as four though.  We should be comparing 4 relatively minor wounds of equal severity (since HP damage doesn't get worse as we lose HP - does it?  Do we take a more serious wound if we've already taken previous wounds, even if the HP loss is the same) to a single, very serious wound.  Compare four fractured ribs to a five inch deep stab wound.  After all, our 30 point wound is enough to kill a horse, so it should be considerably more severe than a 6 point wound, shouldn't it?See, this is my point.  The black box abstraction of D&D combat doesn't actually tell us the answer to any of this.  Not even a hint.  We really have no idea what a 20 point wound looks like.  We don't even know what a 1 HP wound looks like.  It's when we try to reify the abstraction, to make it real, that it falls apart.  A model, virtually any model, would tell us some of these answers.  Distinguishing between types of damage is a granularity issue, really, because it doesn't really matter what killed you, you're still dead.  But, we cannot even definitively say if a hit really makes physical contact or not.  Thus the whole Damage on a Miss thing.  To be fair, we also can't definitively state if a miss is a complete miss or just a non-damaging strike or something else.The mechanics simply don't tell us this.  I just can't understand why you and others are claiming that the mechanics do tell us these things.  At best, at the very edge of things, you might have circumstantial evidence - the character was poisoned, so, he must have been injected somehow, but, then, even that's not necessarily true.  Maybe some of the poison flew off the weapon and into the target's mouth.  Maybe the weapon wiped some poison off on the target, dealing no damage, but, when the character touched the spot, he became poisoned through the open wounds on his hand.  I don't know.  But, the point is, neither do you.</blockquote>

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