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Fire emblem is beautifully elegant in its design simplicity.

D&D was never about simplicity. It was about creating the most consulted complex system possible filled with various subsystems that never truly worked cohesively.

The only edition that tried to streamline things got shot down for not being "D&D".

Like it or not, we are stuck with a silly backwards little game.

Jan 1, 2013 -- 2:15PM, Malph wrote:

Jan 1, 2013 -- 1:30PM, powerroleplayer wrote:

  Incidentally, "hit" requiring physical contact does not, in fact, result in everyone playing the black knight and walking around with a quiver of arrows imbedded in their chest, or finally succombing to a slow death by a thousand cuts.  Most non-heroes get extremely low HP because an arrow to the chest will kill you.  Heroes get more because their skill and luck allows them to turn arrows in the chest into grazes and knicks.  Those grazes and knicks then slow them down to the point where they can no longer dodge fast enough and they start getting more serious wounds - in exactly the same way that HP now goes from no contact-->knicks-->serious injury (just cutting off the first step).  But cutting off the first step makes the realism work a lot better, because we no longer have this huge mechanical cut off between "you have to expend resources to avoid getting hit" and "you don't have to expend resources to avoid getting hit" that has zero corresponding in-world cutoff, and because it becomes a lot easier to put your finger on a few resources that might actually be depleted by what just happened but wouldn't be depleted by a "miss."  I find that problematic, especially when you toss on other effects that make even less sense that they would have an effect on a hit that involves no contact.

The closest thing to HP actually making any kind of sense I've ever seen is this: http://www.thealexandrian.net/creations/misc/explaining-hit-points.html

You make a very decent argument.   Here's my best attempt at a retort 

Your argument seems to involve the following:

• A "hit" must include some type of contact that causes damage, even if that damage is very minor (a scratch).
• A "miss" means no contact was made, and therefore no damage was done whatsoever.
• Therefore, even if contact results in a non-significant amount of hit-points lost, it cannot be described as causing no damage.

Why I think this is incorrect:

• Your AC goes up when you wear heavy armor.
• This directly implies that a "miss" on a roll can often be interpreted as hitting the charcter wearing the heavy armor, but the armor negates damage.  Plate mail makes your AC go up, but actually makes dodging/avoiding blows more difficult, so this is more then "implies", it directly correlates that a "miss" will often mean contact was made but did no (or insignificant) damage to the armor-wearer.
• Therefore, a "miss" can sometimes be a hit, but cause no damage.
• Ergo, a "hit" can work the same way.  Bob the Fighter has 348 hit-points; he's hit for 5 points of damage; in-game this is seen as bouncing off his armor, parried, or any other manner which cinematically/story-wise/descriptively does not cause physical damage. 

This is why I personally view both AC and Hit-points as representing defenses.
If things were done using your reasoning, than armor would have no affect on AC, and rather would function as "absorbing" damage done to you after you're hit.

Requiring that a hit involve physical contact does not in any way mean I have to require a miss to involve no physical contact.  I have zero problem saying that a blow that bounces off my armor is a miss even if I have a problem with saying that a blow that didn't touch me is a hit.  When the poisoned dagger bounces off my armor, it makes perfect sense that it doesn't poison me, even though it made physical contact.  It also makes perfect sense that it does not require me to use up HP.  It's even not stretching the english language to the breaking point to say that a blow the bounces off my armor "hit my armor" but "missed me."  When the poisoned dagger misses me in such a way that for no apparent reason it uses up HP, and it uses up more HP because it's poisoned, it does not make perfect sense, or bear any relation to the typical meaning of the word "hit."

As to Wrecan, evey single one of those points is either nonsense, non-secutor, or already addressed in the part of the post you aren't quoting, so I'm just going to bow out of this one and let you keep on ranting with the OP. 

Jan 3, 2013 -- 12:49PM, powerroleplayer wrote:

 When the poisoned dagger misses me in such a way that for no apparent reason it uses up HP, and it uses up more HP because it's poisoned, it does not make perfect sense, or bear any relation to the typical meaning of the word "hit."  

It simply took more luck to assure some of that poison wasnt actually injected (... thats the term I am going with ). That drip of poison on your shirt sleeve has been hovering over an  open scratch you got earlier take ongoing hp loss.