General MMO gameplay musing... What if you just started out with a decent pool. So barehanded it takes a grizzly bear about 1 minute or something to kill an unarmored human. That's how tough you'll ever be as a human. Other races vary. But you can get armor and skills and counter abilities. Armor has the effect of increasing the capacity for reducing or even completely nullifying damage to the body. Though what the body doesn't absorb, the armor does. So you are level one. You are wanna be a knight. You have a sword and some basic armor. You are good enough to swing your sword left and right and chop downwards with two hands and not fall down. You might be a bit weak at first but you'll get stronger. Fast forward some time. You have swung around your sword for a couple of months. You are quite fit. You even use it one handed now and carry a shield too. Over all you are much stronger and your armor is better now too. But if you take that armor and sword away, a bear will still kill you in about a minute because no human is strong enough to wrestle a bear to the ground. But with the sword and armor, you might be able to at least run the bear off and if comes at you wrong and you stab it right, you might even kill it. What's the down side of not having an increasingly large hp pool? I know the benefit is that you could still make a grizzly bear a worthwhile encounter even against a highly skilled fighter under the right circumstances. Even armor clad they can still knock the hell out of you. It might even still kill you if you make the wrong decisions.
