L&L 5/21 - Hit Points, Our Old Friend

[technoextreme]

I have a lot of direct experience with concussions actually. But it wasn't clear to me from your original post that they were what you had in mind. And even so, I don't think it warrants name calling on either side.

There were multiple injuries that I was thinking of. Concussions were the obvious one though if one were incredibly unlucky you can just flat out die from cardiac arrhythmia from such an event which has been documented to happen and is actually a pretty common way for young kids who play sports to die. That is particularly why it was such an insane example.

 

[GSHamster]

I wonder what this says about cleric healing.

1. This Hit Dice stuff is entirely outside combat.
2. Mearls said they want parties without Clerics to be viable.

Do you think that means that Cleric combat healing will be weaker than previous editions? I'm not really sure that those two ideas can be reconciled with strong combat healing.

 

[Tovec]

Just random thoughts.

Lasting damage is a quite different thing. And that is something D&D definitely does not model well, at all.

This is kind of the point I was making about non-lethal a little earlier on, but it applies to HP as well. I think with the dawn of a new edition they COULD and more importantly SHOULD define HP well for once. I'm not saying they should radically change how HP work or anything, or use alternate systems. But they could use different methods of how HP are gained, recovered and spent based on a deeper understanding of what they are, if they bothered putting the time into it.

Part of this is defining the issues with previous editions; why something worked or didn't work. This inspection should go beyond the mechanic but delve into the idea and concept and why those things worked or didn't work. It needs to look at the other mechanics that go along with it and why they work or don't work.

I'm currently working on my own system and I decided early on that I didn't want HP bloat of 3e and 4e. Having 100 HP and surviving falling off cliffs didn't interest me. How did I remedy this? I took a look at how characters got HP in the first place, what the parts of HP represented toward the total and then how to scale them to achieve the numbers I wanted.
I decided in the end to go with a very very different approach to classic 3e (and I assume from what we'll end up with in 5e). I'm using HP total to be full HD + CON mod + Level. That is it. Weapons, variants, crits, optional rules and most importantly damage all reflect this shift. I could institute what is being suggested by Mike Mearls, and give my fighters their HD (or HD*LVL) every day to heal up for free, but I don't find it necessary. The 3.5 version (for which I am using the OGL) specifies that characters get their level or HD per day works fine for natural healing and for my games it makes much more sense.

I think that if they did something similar, and re-examined the root concepts, that they would end up with a superior system instead of giving us the same assumed stats (to gain HP) as before with a new natural healing system.

And critting gets even more meaningless when(using Pathfinder here) a Fighter can crit on a 10 or less.

How do you crit on a 10 in PF?

No moping about in bed for days. No magical healing potions (just a few ibuprofen), and she's up and moving about and working, and way more worried about her appearance than she is about anything else.


EDIT - And if she was a higher level fighter, or had some martial arts training, she could maybe have rolled with it, and minimized that damage a lot further (perhaps even having no damage at all).


EDIT 2 - All this, just to note that lower-level characters bouncing back to full HP faster than trained warriors makes a sort of sense. Less damage is required to hurt them, so there's less damage that needs to be healed.

First, ibuprofen effectively IS healing potions, at least for "pain" damage.
Second, your first edit talks about reducing damage, not changing the meaning of damage. It is a mechanic related to damage reduction instead of HP.
Third, for your second edit, I've always understood HP to be less about "bouncing back" to normal and more about bouncing back to a healthy. On the first count, yes full HP would be important. On the second count "back to normal" one could assume 1 HP, or 10, or bloodied or full or anywhere in between to be "healthy". Only with Bloodied do you have the distinction that someone is unhealthy below 1/2 HP.

 

[Mercutio01]

There were multiple injuries that I was thinking of. Concussions were the obvious one though if one were incredibly unlucky you can just flat out die from cardiac arrhythmia from such an event which has been documented to happen and is actually a pretty common way for young kids who play sports to die. That is particularly why it was such an insane example.

And none of those is the norm.

Look, if your ONLY grievance with what I said was the pro-boxer, then take that particular piece out of the pie. Imagine little level 1 Joe Schmoe just getting knocked out by Jim Jerk. Compare how quickly Joe recovers to how quickly Rocky Balboa recovers after ten rounds with Apollo Creed. First, Joe's fight is over in 10 seconds or so when he was actually knocked unconscious. But he gets up in a few minutes and then goes about his day a little dazed. He's probably fully recovered by tomorrow. Second, imagine big level 10 Rocky Balboa whose fight lasted 10 rounds of 3 minutes each (30 minutes of fighting!), but who was not knocked out. He is rather loopy and takes a lot longer to get back to even normal life.

Who took more punishment and who recovered faster? Not the same guy.

Second, your first edit talks about reducing damage, not changing the meaning of damage. It is a mechanic related to damage reduction instead of HP.

We could argue about that, especially considering how HP could mean physical damage or luck. A martial artist (higher level human), can't really take more damage, but he's more nimble, and thus doesn't take damage. So it could be damage reduction, or it could just be that he's a higher level, and therefore 10 damage to my wife means something very different than 10 damage to a karateka.

The ibuprofen wasn't for pain. It was for reducing the swelling. Again, her concern was more cosmetic ("I look like a Klingon") than it was pain or healing.

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

My wife fell off her bike on Saturday (literally, just this past weekend). Knocked herself out. Has bruises and cuts on her face, and big bags under her eyes. Landed face first on the concrete. No concussion (went to the doctor to make sure). Other than the bruises, you'd never know. Arguably, a face-first fall into concrete at 10mph from 5 ft up is similar to the damage from one hit from a boxer.

And when I say this is a true story, I mean it literally.

No moping about in bed for days. No magical healing potions (just a few ibuprofen), and she's up and moving about and working, and way more worried about her appearance than she is about anything else.


EDIT - And if she was a higher level fighter, or had some martial arts training, she could maybe have rolled with it, and minimized that damage a lot further (perhaps even having no damage at all).

Congrats, your wife is extremely, extremely lucky. I have had people fall off barstools or fall in the bathtub that have fractured cervical vertebrae and given themselves subdural hematomas or subarachnoid hemorrhages. I recently took care of someone that was in a fight that was knocked out. Massive subdural, epidural, and subarachnoid hemorrhages that put him nearly on his deathbed if not for the quick intervention of a neurosurgeon. Your wife suffered soft tissue damage (a boxer would have too) from her collision. She probably didn't black out for very long, perhaps a second or two, which can cause damage, but probably did not. Boxers have to be knocked out for ten for a knockout (or hit the mat three times, but they don't actually have to be unconscious). Being a fighter doesn't make you immune to damage. Honestly, the better fighters are the ones that avoid the big hits, not the ones standing after taking them.

A loss of consciousness is always a bad thing. Just it does not result in permanent damage in some cases does not mean it isn't dangerous. Look at the number of boxers, hockey players, football players, and professional wrestlers with frequent concussions and blows that suffer permanent debilitation years after their injuries. There is a direct correlation between blows to the head and dementia later in life. Don't even get me started on the effects of severe alcohol intoxication (which results in LOC) and permanent brain effects.

And D&D LOCs are frequently the result blood loss, blunt force trauma, or exposure to excessive heat and fire. LOC by any one of these can result in hypovolemic shock, organ failure and death. The neat thing about 4E's death saving throws was that you had to fail three. There are four classes of hypovolemic shock. Preceeding the first failed saving throw, you are in class one shock. Failing that saving, you progress into class two shock. Failing a second save, you progress into class three shock. Finally, after failing a third save you progress into class four shock, which is referred to as irreversible shock, which often progresses to death. Just a little tidbit I always found neat. Of course, a person can't generally stabilize out of class two, three, or four shock without intervention.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

The more pure you make a hit point system, the more problematic any kind of critical is. It's a bit of specifics in an otherwise abstract system. We tend to get them anyway, because people like the idea of criticals. But there is only so far you can go, before you are fundamentally messing up what makes hit points work in the first place. You've got more room than you do with something like, say, called shots, but not infinite room

Having an attack roll and then a separate damage roll is already a huge concession. If you hit with a long sword, and you roll a 7 or 8 on the damage die, you "hit hard". A pure system would define maximum roll as "critical" and perhaps throw a modest rider effect on that, instead of making it dependent upon the accuracy of the hit. Or if you want to move away from an abstract hit point system towards something where criticals make more sense, the damage would be nigh constant as a base, but move up according to accuracy, with "critical" being defined as the upper end.

All of the above is, of course, ignoring any aesthetic preference for occasional spikes in damage that are signficantly felt. However, if that is all you want, you can probably work out something better with open ended dice or a "damage multiplier" roll applied to a base accuracy from the attack roll, instead of a separate damage roll.

People want different things, but arguments that "criticals" ought to be X because "that's what criticals should feel like," aren't really arguments at all, but a back hand appeal to shared preference.

 

[Mercutio01]

<snip>

Right. If you're going to recover, you will likely recover faster when there is less damage than when there is more damage.

And repeated injuries take longer to heal.

It all goes to bolster my argument that natural healing should take longer to heal a higher level character fully than it would take to heal a lower level character. That's all I was trying to argue with the boxer metaphor. It wasn't really meant to get into all the crap it has become. It was just an example of a low HP character bouncing back from 0 HP to full health in comparison to a high HP character bouncing back from 0 HP to full health - all assuming only natural healing and not magic.

 

[nnms]

It's a type of pacing mechanic, for supporting a steady change in the overall campaign situation (assuming the GM is using the published MMs/MVs, you start out fighting goblins and end up fighting Lolth), and for supporting the gradual increase in power complexity.

Absolutely. And I don't want that in 5E. Or at the very least, I'd want a module that talks about designing monsters and challenges based on their characteristics rather than the PC's current abilities (as well as optional rules to explain the best way to excise the pacing mechanic bonuses from the PCs). I'd settle for that.

Although Mearls also says that hit points reflect energy, experience, luck and cosmic significance. And I don't think any ratios were specified.

Yep. What I'm happy about is that he didn't talk about hit points being a reflection of the average damage output of the PCs or a mathematical formula that doesn't take the monster's characteristics into account beyond picking one of six monster roles.

I would be pretty surprised if D&dnext doesn't include plenty of high hp monsters of modest physical size (just as AD&D does, with its high level NPCs, its succubi with higher hit points than oxen, etc).

I need to take another look at the AD&D/2E monster manual, but I think high HP non large monsters were largely those of a more mythological or supernatural bent.

*the total average value of a PC's HD will be approximately equal to half his/her total hp value (assuming a figter has 1 HD per level, a 1d10 HD giving an average of 5.5 hp per HD, and 10 hp per level);

Part of me hopes that it is not just full HP of your hit die each level. I'd like to see the power level much flatter both in terms of character HP and monster HP & defenses. I really wouldn't mind HP being max and first level and roll after that. But it just really sucks getting a 1 on that very important roll.

Assuming I haven't missed anything, rapid progression through combat encounters will require magical healing (as per some versions of pre-4e D&D), or alternatively combat encounters will do much less damage, so that healing to (near-)full between encounters won't be necessary (as per some other versions of pre-4e D&D).

Pre-3e D&D had early access to great AC. With a decent money roll or the ability to survive a good solid delve, any fighter could get their hands on good armour relatively quickly. And if you use the terrain to block people getting to your squishies, you could have entire combats where the PCs don't take any damage. In the BECMI game I'm playing in, it's a regular event that combat involves all the monsters dead and maybe one hero damaged. But we do have more than half the party in plate & shield.

This doesn't particularly enthuse me. It doesn't outrage me either. (Except for the possibility that recovery is quicker for the weak low-level types than for the buff high-level types. That's always been stupid, and will be stupid if part of D&Dnext.)

If you get back all your HD with a sleep, then the rate of non magical recovery will be the same for everyone (barring low rolls representing more serious injuries).

What struck me is that apparently there will be no more recovery from unconsciousness without magical intervention,

Where was this addressed? I think you may be making an assumption.

As for the second part, D&D has always had "push through injury" in that you fight at 100% ouput if you are at 10 HP or at 1 HP.

 

[CasvalRemDeikun]

Right. If you're going to recover, you will likely recover faster when there is less damage than when there is more damage.

And repeated injuries take longer to heal.

It all goes to bolster my argument that natural healing should take longer to heal a higher level character fully than it would take to heal a lower level character. That's all I was trying to argue with the boxer metaphor. It wasn't really meant to get into all the crap it has become. It was just an example of a low HP character bouncing back from 0 HP to full health in comparison to a high HP character bouncing back from 0 HP to full health - all assuming only natural healing and not magic.

Well, that all depends. They are talking about flattening out hit points and what not, so potentially, 10 hp of damage could be a mortal wound no matter what level you are. It also is possible that what constitutes 10 hp of damage for a first level character might not be the same as what constitutes 10 hp for a tenth level character.

Honestly, I have never cared for HP as a unit measure of how much damage a character has suffered. It was video gamey before there were video games. What does losing half your HP mean? Did you get stabbed in the gut, because pretty sure you are going to die from that (especially if you keep fighting). Arrow to the chest? Dead. Hammer blow to the head? Deadsies. I like HP as more of a measure of fatigue. You dodged that blow, or your armor kept you from being stabbed, but you can't keep rolling or jumping out of the way of stuff forever.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

And D&D LOCs are frequently the result blood loss, blunt force trauma, or exposure to excessive heat and fire. LOC by any one of these can result in hypovolemic shock, organ failure and death. The neat thing about 4E's death saving throws was that you had to fail three. There are four classes of hypovolemic shock. Preceeding the first failed saving throw, you are in class one shock. Failing that saving, you progress into class two shock. Failing a second save, you progress into class three shock. Finally, after failing a third save you progress into class four shock, which is referred to as irreversible shock, which often progresses to death. Just a little tidbit I always found neat. Of course, a person can't generally stabilize out of class two, three, or four shock without intervention.

Awsome... I will never look at death saves again.


And this whole thread now reminds me of archer "going unconscious is really bad"