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So my point is that the math needs to cap it. How that gets implemented in the game system is not limited to an explicit cap.
I agree that it is not limited to an explicit cap. Having limits on PC HP like in RuneQuest is just one solution.
And given its widespread implementation among non-D&D games it is one that works fairly well.
The whole reason I bring it up is that going to a RQ style HP model for OSR games is almost never talked about as a possible solution when hacking the OGL system.
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Of those, I know Shadownrun best. I don't think Hit Boxes directly compare to Hit Points as they're usually used. If you have 10 hit boxes, each box can be thought of as 10% of your health total. It's very clear that a very tough troll can take a lot more punishment than a very svelte (non-tough) elf. If the same hit is 4 boxes of damage to one person, but only 1 box of damage to another person, you're abstracting 'hit points' very differently to the standard conceit (a pile of survivable hits that are ablated by each incoming attack).
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You are not understanding my point then. I'm talking hit points the way they are used in the games I listed where I said they have a
more or less fixed total.
Of course there will be variation of HP between a PC troll vs a PC Elf. I shouldn't have had to spell that out; it's self-evident from the game examples I cited.
SR hit boxes, RQ hit points, Cyberpunk Life points = all HP by different names. The difference is that they all use the
HP = meat point model because what a PC has at the start of the game tends to not vary much during the course of play.
D&D has a rationalization for HP - yet even the way D&D does HP is very gamist, and gets downright nonsensical at high levels. The 100' jump, or lava walk done by PC's because they have the HP to survive it has been a classic joke/trope among players for decades now.
Most newbies these days thinks of HP = meat points. You can say that HP is representative of this or that but CRPG videogames have killed that perception, because they explicitly use them as meat points that go down as you take damage. And people have by and large accepted the conceit that more HP = 'superhero' style resilience to absorbing blows.