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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6005793" data-attributes="member: 42582">The point is that you can know that if you take another hit you will die (if you have 1 hp left and the assailant is a storm giant), or that no matter how far you fall you will never die (if you have 121 hp left, given that maximum falling damage is 120 hp). And furthermore, as  [MENTION=57948]triqui[/MENTION] has pointed out, this information is vitally relevant to many play decisions.The player, in many situations, knows that the damage will be 11+ - for example, if the PC jumps over a cliff of more than 100', or if the attack is from a giant wielding a two-handed weapon.You can contrive such situations - for example, where the PC has 1 hp left and the minimum damage is 1. My point is that there are many situations where the PC has X hp left, and the minimum damage is greater than X (or X+9 for 3E, or X+3 for AD&D 1st ed, etc), and many situations also where the PC has Y hp left, and the maximum damage is less than Y. And the player can know those maxima or minima, and hence can know what the PC cannot know.Falling is an obvious source of such situations.But there are many others. If my PC has 20 hp left, and a single militia member is pointing a crossbow at me, I know my PC can't die from that shot (max damage will be something like 6 or 8 or 10, depending on precise edition). The PC can't know that.And if my PC has 1 hp left, and is about to be breathed on by an ancient red dragon, I know that my PC will be unconscious, probably dead, after that breath, whereas the PC can't know that, given that s/he miraculously survived the earlier breath still conscious!Even for those who run hit points as meat, this is still pretty weird - becaue the meat is hacked away completely predictably like lengths of a plank of wood being sawed off.Yes. That shows that you all have the same preferences - you don't mind hit points, but you don't like encounter powers. But it doesn't tell us that there is any deep difference between those two mechanics other than that you like (or at least put up with) one and not the other. A perfectly viable explanation, for example, might be familiarity.But there is no reason to think that they have much in common besides being "metagame mechanics that were new to D&D with 4e".</blockquote>

Verification