Hit Points and Posting
Hit points are an abstraction. They simply tell a player when a character can no longer continue to fight...or do anything else really. They wrap up physical hardiness, heroic awesomeness, hard-won experience and the will to fight all up into one nice, neat number.
The question then becomes, how do we represent this in our written fiction? Making every loss of hit points be a small wound just seems a bit silly. After all, if two guys are hacking at each other with large, sharp objects, they aren't going to die The Death of a Thousand Cuts. They are going to go largely uninjured until one of them makes a serious mistake and then that person is going to die from a big, nasty wound. Unfortunately if we view hit points as always being physical damage then that doesn't happen in fights except at really low levels.
Here's the way I see it. Hit points are a resource you spend in order to NOT die. If you have 30 hit points and an opponent "hits" you with a greatsword for 10 points of damage, the 10 points represents the amount of resources you have to spend to be not dead (or unconscious). You can describe that however you like. I might describe it as a very near miss that leaves me winded and off balance and it scares me. Notice that I didn't describe taking a physical wound. I just describe losing part of my ability to continue the fight.
So, if you hit something with your weapon and then I don't put it being physically hurt in the written fiction, don't be concerned. The bad guy still took hit point damage. If I do describe physical damage, that's fine too. It doesn't actually mean anything more mechanically than the other way. It's all the same.
This message was last edited by the GM at 18:37, Thu 22 Aug 2013.