How to describe HP loss in a credible way

[mcv]

setzer9999 wrote:

As I understand it, according to the devs, Earth is actually in the same universe as Golarion. What is it that makes Golarion full of magic, and not Earth?

Why do most commoners not become magical on a world so packed with magic that some become insanely magical? What is the trigger to becoming magical?

KutuluKultist pointed out that the world should be very different than it is if it was so full of magic. Why if Golarion is so full of magic are there any places that are mundane. A place that can give rise to demigods for no apparent reason, and where magic is so abundant and reliable would indeed seem to be a setting that would preclude people living in huts and thatched roof houses, and be one entirely made up of incredible superstructures with magical force-fields and teleportation. A world with so much magic shouldn't have any "commoners" at all. Right?

This reminds me a lot of Earthdawn. Earthdawn has sometimes been called "D&D done right" because it has similarly weird rules and mechanisms, but it explains them all instead of pretending it makes sense somehow. And the explanation is: it's magic. The entire world is full of magic. Every thing is magic. Everything has a magical pattern that defines it in astral space. And you can work those patterns to get stuff done.

In the world of Earthdawn, most people are mundane, but some, Adepts, manage to tap into that magic and learn to work it to improve their impact on the world. And how they do that depends on their view of the world. Every view represents a certain Discipline, and with it come all sort of abilities. Most people never become an Adept. Maybe they don't try hard enough, maybe they simply lack the talent, or some magical spark that awakens this in you.

And the world of Earthdawn is Earth. It's Earth 10,000 years ago (or actually it's the world of Shadorun 10,000 years ago, but that world also pretends to be our world). Magic waxes and wanes, and currently we're living at the end of a long magical low. In Shadowrun, magic starts to awaken again, in Earthdawn, magic was dropping after the last magical apocalypse (The Scourge) released otherworldly horrors into our world, until the magic level suddenly and inexplicably stabilized. High magic corrupts and weakens reality, but a bit of magic can awaken unbelievable abilities.

That's not Golarion of course, but it's a way to explain how stuff like damage and healing in a high fantasy world might not seem to make much sense to us mundanes.

Or you just accept that it makes no sense and play it anyway. That's what I do.

[setzer9999]

Now we're getting somewhere. These types of explanations, though not realistic, are explanations. I do not like the idea of it not making sense at all... it doesn't have to make real world physics sense, but it should make story sense.

I like these ideas of magical radiation and patterns. I think I also had an idea as to why not everything becomes hyper-magical that goes along with those explanations. Magical gravity. Magical things tend to gravitate toward one another, and not toward mundane things, causing areas with magic to pool, and to attract as if by instinct, creatures that already have magic. So, the magical get magicaller, and the mundane get mundaner.

Golarion has been visited and bothered by gods, demons, and such, so there are rifts into the material plane there which leaks this magic into the area, but even after it leaks, it pools into certain regions and creatures... it doesn't saturate 100% of the planet. Earth hasn't been bothered by other planes, so its mundane here.

Also, going back the T-rex issue, ALL T-rexes seem to become magical, whereas most humans do not. I guess an explanation for that is the stronger you are naturally, the more magic "likes" to pool with you, so I guess that is good enough.

One remaining issue though, is that a character that is above level 1, like 2 or 3, maybe even 4, might still bother with petty crime... but by the time a creature is level 5-7+, it seems pretty unlikely that they would still be a petty criminal... they should be the scourge of the region. Not sure how to reconcile that with published adventures...

[Adamantine Dragon]

setzer, the universe as we know it according to our most brilliant cosmologists and physicists is currently made up of 95% of "stuff that we just don't understand". That includes 3/4 of the universe being made of "dark energy" and 90% of what remains made of "dark matter".

What is "dark energy?" What is "dark matter"? Nobody knows.

Maybe it's magic. It certainly behaves oddly. Perhaps there are worlds infused with dark energy and dark matter and those worlds have such wildly different physical attributes that dragons can fly and energy can be pulled directly out of nothingness by adepts. The more dark energy and dark matter an area has, the more "magical" it is. Poor earth just happens to be in a galaxy that is very low in both quantities.

[Orthos]

setzer9999 wrote:

One remaining issue though, is that a character that is above level 1, like 2 or 3, maybe even 4, might still bother with petty crime... but by the time a creature is level 5-7+, it seems pretty unlikely that they would still be a petty criminal... they should be the scourge of the region. Not sure how to reconcile that with published adventures...

You're not going to. Published adventures are not written with your mindset of expectations in mind. Far from it if this thread and its predecessor are any indication.

You're going to either need to make massive edits to anything published, widen your suspension of disbelief a LOT from your current state, or simply not run published adventures and stick exclusively to homebrew material that matches up with your own expectations and understanding of the system.