Scary situations that aren't

Prakriti said:

Realistically, falling damage should just be a percentage of your maximum HP. After a certain point, falling should always be lethal no matter your size, Constitution, level, or hit points.

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Give up the "HP as Meat" ghost. It's never made sense as anything other than "plot armor".

Consider this thought exercise: Goofus hits Gallant for 3 HP of damage.
Now narrate it.

If you're treating them as meat, you need to know the target's max/current HP, unless you're going to have people wandering around with grievous wounds that somehow also don't come with any of the real world debilitating effects. It gets even worse with magical healing, where if you describe a 4HP wound as a scratch on a high level fighter but intestines spelling out of a 4hp peasant. Wow... so Cure Light Wounds can basically stuff a peon's guts back in but not a similarly dangerous wound to a high level character?

If you assume that every creature in the world only has 1 HP and the rest represent skill at blocking, parrying, dodging, feinting, etc. HP makes more sense. As a combat drags on and contestants become tired, they become less skill at the methods of avoiding or mitigating damage.

The final blow then takes them like a knockout in boxing. Actually wounds only occur when a creature is reduced to making death saves.

Environmental damage such as falling cannot be mitigated as easily by skill.

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Another situation that is scary that isn't: drowning. Characters can hold their breath for ridiculous amounts of time in the game. At minimum 5 rounds. At the high end, 60 rounds. Given how far characters can swim in a round drowning isn't much of a threat.

Additionally, there isn't any consideration for the type of activities taken while holding one's breath. Someone swimming all out versus someone floating peacefully are treated identically.

WaterRabbit said:

If you assume that every creature in the world only has 1 HP and the rest represent skill at blocking, parrying, dodging, feinting, etc. HP makes more sense. As a combat drags on and contestants become tired, they become less skill at the methods of avoiding or mitigating damage.

The final blow then takes them like a knockout in boxing. Actually wounds only occur when a creature is reduced to making death saves.

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That only makes sense if you assume anything with HP can be felled by a single blow. While it might be a reasonable assumption for puny humans (although I would argue that point, as well), it doesn't even begin to cover something like a dire bear or kraken.

Nevertheless, the most common situation which fails to be scary is combat, because an orc with a giant axe can only do so much to your massive pile of HP, and you know with absolutely certainty that nothing they do to you will be more than a minor inconvenience. In order to fix that, the obvious solution is to make damage more than a minor inconvenience.

OverlordOcelot said:

In another thread, someone mentioned the idea of a monster destroying the PC's supply wagon during a desert trek, and pointed out that being trapped in the desert with no food or water was a really scary situation. I've also heard people talk about being stranded on partially wrecked ship with no water. But while such a disaster would be devastating for real people, a typical adventuring party is only going to be mildly inconvenienced, not in danger of death. All you need is a single character with a single level of cleric or druid to cast Create Water and you can have 10 gallons of water per day using just a first level spell slot (more using a higher level slot or more castings). A druid or ranger can cast Goodberry to provide food each day, or the party can carry along corpses and use ritually cast purify food and drink from the cleric to get rid of any rotting, without even dealing with survival skills. So a thing that's supposed to be a life and death situation that forces 'now we have to find the destination or die' downgrades to 'now we have to prepare two spells and use 1 or 2 slots a day to deal with the problem' when actually put to adventurers. The only way to really make players worry about thirst is to either contrive a party with no cleric/druid casters or disable some normal first level spells (anti-magic, 'the gods won't grant that spell'), which aren't really satisfying - I can't really think of a good way to make this one work that doesn't involve arbitrarily turning off basic abilities.

What are some other situations people have run into that should be scary but can actually be readily dealt with by PCs? And are there any non-cheesy ways to make the situation actually seem 'real-world' dangerous instead of mildly inconvenient?

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The 1st-level create or destroy water spell creates said 10 gallons of water within range in an open container or as rain. To get the full 10 gallons you do need to have a 10 gallon container, rig a contraption to catch the rain, or cast it multiple times in smaller containers.

In the purple worm scenario, I'd assume any container of that size would be on a pack animal leaving perhaps only a few smaller water skins for filling.

For comparison, the 3rd level create food and water does specify multiple containers or on the ground so that some sort of natural stone sink could be used. And it also creates food.

Either way, any time the party needs to expend slots to deal with this stuff, it's less slots for bless, healing and the like. The DM is placing strain on the party. It doesn't always have to be killing PCs or reducing them to single digit hit points.

Personally, I like treating hp as a resource that a character must spend to stay alive.

If you receive damage, you fall unconscious and are dying. To avoid that, you must spend hp - in equal amount as damage dealt - to stay up and fighting. I leave the task of describing damage to the player; whatever they imagine that makes their character still standing (assuming the still have at least 1 hp) is fine with me.

You avoided the blow in extremis? Cool

Your armor took the blunt of the blow? Cool

The arrow pinned your hat to the tree? Cool

You took that sword in the guts and kept going? Cool

You're just stupidly lucky? Cool

Plot armor is just that - plot armor - ( [MENTION=2445]WaterRabbit[/MENTION] is right; plot armor is improperly used here. Still, I stand by the essence of my post) but regardless of the narrative you come up with, if you took 15 damage, you're 15 points closer to death. And perhaps poisoned. Or grappled. Or shocked out of a reaction. Until that plot armor wears too thin. The rules are easy to follow; make the story you like for your character that goes with them.

Laurefindel said:

Plot armor is just that

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Sorry, but HP are not "Plot Armor". They are an abstraction of damage and perhaps a poor one, but they are definitely not plot armor.

Plot armor is immunity from death because they character is so integral to the story that their death would derail it. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotArmor

Saelorn said:

That only makes sense if you assume anything with HP can be felled by a single blow. While it might be a reasonable assumption for puny humans (although I would argue that point, as well), it doesn't even begin to cover something like a dire bear or kraken.

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Character durability is generally represented by two methods: All or Nothing (ie, HP character completely fine until they run out) and Death Spiral (each increment of damage causes a degradation in character abilities). Or sometimes a mix of the two.

The reason I look at HP as a method to mitigate damage through combat exhaustion is that if one were to model "real" combat, any wound can potentially take someone out of the fight. Getting hit with a weapon is a traumatic experience that someone just doesn't take lightly. Even if a person survives, they are looking at a long term recuperation.

In predator versus prey situations, it is never a fair fight. Predators always have the advantage. Even a minor wound that impacts their ability to hunt is deadly since they then risk starvation.

So the best survival strategy for any fight is to not get hit. It doesn't matter if the receiver is a bear, kraken, or puny human. Thus my assumption that all creatures (not objects) have only 1 hp and that rest represent the creatures' ability to negate the damage. If you want to model a bear or a kraken, then DR or DT in combination with HP works better. If all dragons could ignore 25 points of damage per hit then they would be formidable in the sense you are talking about.

The problem is that this model doesn't well represent damage that is catastrophic in nature that cannot be mitigated by the character's/creature's skill -- like falling damage or being dunked in acid etc. Those things can be modeled but at an increase cost of complexity to the combat. However, most people prefer the abstract simplicity of D&D instead of a game like GURPS which can model these scenarios.

OverlordOcelot said:

All you need is a single character with a single level of cleric or druid to cast Create Water and you can have 10 gallons of water per day using just a first level spell slot (more using a higher level slot or more castings).

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Better hope you have a clean barrel in which to store those 10 gallons. The spell doesn't create a container. And it's ONE container - unlike the 3rd level spell.

Edit: Heh - read-ahead mode was OFF

WaterRabbit said:

The reason I look at HP as a method to mitigate damage through combat exhaustion is that if one were to model "real" combat, any wound can potentially take someone out of the fight. Getting hit with a weapon is a traumatic experience that someone just doesn't take lightly. Even if a person survives, they are looking at a long term recuperation.

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As I understand it, if someone survives a blow and can still fight back, then the wound won't seriously impede them in the short term. If the wound they take is so bad that it would impede them, then they're probably out of the fight. All-or-nothing is actually a pretty good way of looking at someone, in terms of combat efficacy. A high-level character who has been hit but isn't out of the fight, would be just like any real-life person who has been hit but isn't out of the fight.

I realize that it's an imperfect model, and it's probably just a matter of picking which inaccuracy is easier to accept, but the idea that everyone and everything drops from the first real impact is simply ridiculous to me. People (and animals) can survive amazing amounts of trauma without being seriously affected, even if they often fail to do so. If you had to pick one way or the other, I'll take the warrior who can survive a dozen blows as being much more realistic than the one who is incapable of suffering a non-fatal injury.

Saelorn said:

As I understand it, if someone survives a blow and can still fight back, then the wound won't seriously impede them in the short term. If the wound they take is so bad that it would impede them, then they're probably out of the fight. All-or-nothing is actually a pretty good way of looking at someone, in terms of combat efficacy. A high-level character who has been hit but isn't out of the fight, would be just like any real-life person who has been hit but isn't out of the fight.

I realize that it's an imperfect model, and it's probably just a matter of picking which inaccuracy is easier to accept, but the idea that everyone and everything drops from the first real impact is simply ridiculous to me. People (and animals) can survive amazing amounts of trauma without being seriously affected, even if they often fail to do so. If you had to pick one way or the other, I'll take the warrior who can survive a dozen blows as being much more realistic than the one who is incapable of suffering a non-fatal injury.

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When I was in the 8th grade, we were playing 500 and my buddy was hitting baseballs in to the outfield. He hit one ball but a fellow classmate was standing behind him, too close and got hit by the bat in the face - on the Back-swing - not even the full force of the swing. He was out cold, lost several teeth and was bleeding everywhere.

My classmate was a low level commoner.

If a 10th level fighter got hit by the exact same swing, he would have seen it coming and moved in the last second and only gotten a glancing blow in the shoulder.

That's how I reconcile hit points.

Elfcrusher said:

It would be funny to spring that on your party. Half of the orcs they thought they had killed pass their death saves and eventually wake up.

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I do this occasionally enough that my players will sometimes make sure some NPCs are dead before moving on to the next enemy.
Or having the shaman heal enemies behind the lines. That's a fun one too.