Quote from: Zalman on April 02, 2022, 11:11:19 AM

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on April 01, 2022, 11:06:47 AM

Quote from: Zalman on April 01, 2022, 10:41:58 AM

Quote from: Neoplatonist1 on March 31, 2022, 11:47:47 AM
I would say the Rasputin example is absurd. That's not the type of game I'm interested in, which is why I run a realistic system.

This made me laugh. You run a "realistic" system to avoid the sort of "unrealistic" examples that actually happen in real life. OK!

Care to clarify? Who shrugs off a throat slitting?

Rasputin -- the person being discussed -- is literally a real life example of someone who "shrugged off" being shot is the chest, stabbed in the abdomen, and downing a 5x dose of poison. That's who.

It's more logical to assume that the man's killers exaggerated his resilience to try and mythologize why he was killed (e.g. must have been involved with demonic entities) or boost their own legends (e.g. "The men who killed the unkillable Rasputin") than this story actually happened.

If you search Wikipedia there's a photo of Rasputin's body with a bullet wound to the head. Note that one should always assume information on Wikipedia is untrue, and this photograph could be anyone and we'd never know the difference. But it is a lot more logical to assume he got shot, died, and someone made up a story.

Well I mean Rasputin survived many assasination attempts. That doesn't mean he took a blade to the chin while fighting 20 orcs and kept kicking.

A bullet has actually a low % chance of killing a person with proper medical attention. Doesn't mean that person isn't on the ground clenched in pain.

I see hit points are out of fashion? Well, I agree they don't work too well as 'damage simulation', but then they were never meant to simulate actual bodily damage at all. What they simulate is that heroic 'near miss' leading to a dramatic thrust, slash or blow that finishes the character to a burst of music on screen. Gary Gygax had said that in print.

There are other ways of managing health but all of them are more complicated and none any better because they bog down players with book-keeping. Gygax chose to simplify things in an abstract way because it was easier, allowed more fun in the game, and was compatible with heroism we see in stories, film, and tv, where all too often characters serve a dramatic purpose rather than worrying about whether a guy pummelled for ten minutes could stand up, clench his jaw, and thoroughly defeat his opponent in ten seconds.