How many hit points do you have?

In your D&D game, how much does a character know about his own hit points (his total, how much d


I'm A Banana

Potassium-Rich
Hussar said:
You actually think that the character knows these things? I certainly would never think that someone sticking a sword in my chest wouldn't kill me. What I do know, as a high level character, is that I can avoid the clumsy blows of the low level opponent. Fair enough. But, I know that regardless of how many HP I have.

Well, you're not a fantasy hero. And that 1d8 sword guy isn't sticking a sword through the chest of the 100 HP fantasy hero. At best, he's gonna leave a mark *trying* to stick a sword through the hero's chest.

I don't see it as "avoid the blows," (that's a distinction between a hit and a miss), I see it as the skill to turn a lunge for the heart into a scrape that leaves a mark (a hit, but not for significant damage).

Hussar said:
Exactly. This is precisely what I'm saying. But the character is in no way aware of this is he?

Yeah, for me, he basically is. My 100 HP fantasy hero knows a typical guard with a longsword isn't going to be able to kill him in a single blow, even if he manages to get a lucky hit in. Heck, the guard might even know that. The skill is apparent.

Hussar said:
Wow, I never, ever think like that. My characters are afraid of getting stabbed at all times. I would never look at it from that perspective. Heck, "I'm a big fantasy hero" is, to me, so meta that it's completely out of character, AFAIC. Conan doesn't think to himself, "Well, I'm the protagonist of this story, so nothing can kill me", so, why would my fantasy character.

In fact, I'm trying to think of a fantasy hero who actually would think that way and I'm really drawing a blank.

Yeah, different things wreck the verisimilitude in different ways for different people. I've got no problem with the high-level 100 HP hero knowing that after he's slain armies of goblins, steadings of giants, caves full of trolls, alien aberrations from beyond the world, and a dragon or twenty that some dude in an alleyway isn't going to be able to kill him with a single lucky sword blow. That feels real to me: this guy knows danger, he knows adventure, what putting his life at risk looks like. This isn't that. "I've taken dumps with more risk to my life than this, friend."

I'd compare it to how you might know you can read the word "verisimilitude." You've seen words, you know language, you know what sounds letters make, and how to string them together. You've also got experience on D&D message boards, so you've likely seen the term before. You're skilled at reading, so you know you can probably read and understand that word. A D&D adventurer is that skilled at risking his life: he knows what he can handle fairly intuitively.

It's not that they know they're fictional protagonists, it's that they know they live in a world of danger and magic and adventure, and they know what they have faced before and may be able to handle again/in the future. They have an expertise about risk that you or I would lack in the same way that you have an expertise about reading that a typical fantasy hero would probably lack. ;)

That feels a lot more real to me than pretending that 96 of my 100 HP's don't exist, that my professional adventurer with a long career is frightened by some dude in an alley with a sword, that he thinks that this is exactly as likely to kill him as a red dragon. I can't get into that dude's mind. So playing like that is less fun for me.

Though, you know, if I played that guy in a system where 1 hit was lethal, but a high-level character was given 99 "dodge points" or something, that could make sense to me. It's just not the vibe I get from the HP system.
 
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Arguably D&D has more advanced medicine than the modern world by a wide margin.

The relevant contention I was addressing was the two-fold bit on this:

Originally Posted by Saelorn
I wish I had better statistics on this, but I'm * pretty sure that most normal people don't die when they get hit with a sword. In game terms, it's just a low damage roll (1-4 on the d6), but ** whenever they release data on terror attacks or actual combats, you always get a lot more people who are just wounded rather than killed.

This is invoking the real world physiology and psychology of traumatic injuries. The first contention is incorrect. People do typically die when they are struck with a sword a single time (especially in the periods relevant to their usage). Whether it be due to vasovagal response, blood pressure loss triggering unconsciousness, or being rendered lame and the feedback response. The second contention is considering the current era only instead of comparing it to, say the American Civil War and WWI. There have been considerable studies about the rise of the ratio of maimed, wounded and incapacitated - due to what I cited upthread - versus casualties in modern warfare.

But to your point (which wasn't addressing the real world contentions I was disputing), including powerful magical rituals and spells, yes, I would say that post-injury treatment in your classic high fantasy setting is certainly advanced and much more available than your classic dark age or middle age. Whether it is prolific enough to exceed modern medicine (in terms of total number of lives saved), I'm not so sure about that. Is a few miracles more impressive than 100 lives saved due to penicillin or proper triage? I guess that depends on who you ask.

Maybe so. But there are also stories of people keeping on despite unimaginably horrific injuries - Hugh Glass comes to mind for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Glass or the infamous 1986 FBI bloodbath http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout. Maybe some people just have more hits points than we do.

Interesting (and I've certainly played through some pretty terrible injuries myself) but aberrant and not illustrative of standard trauma implications while in the middle of a martial contest (warfare or sport). If a tough guy gets his calf or achilles torn by greater than 50 %, he is effectively lame. If his bicep tendon/muscle or labram tears, he can't wield a weapon/shield/implement with any level of effectiveness. If his blood pressure drops dramatically in a few short moments, he will lose consciousness. Death will follow shortly thereafter where he either bleeds out or is killed (in warfare).

But again, as I'm sure you know by now, I don't use HP to model trauma nor the restoration of trauma. They are entirely insufficient to the task and we've had (and are having) dozens of threads disputing their base intentions/functionality as a facilitator of TTRPG play. Further, as I'm sure you know as well, I'm not interested in simulating process in my play. I'm interested in emulating genre. My D&D is a lot closer to Indiana Jones than it is Band of Brothers. So I'm not disputing any of this on the grounds of "what should be for D&D". I'm just disputing on the basis of their framing by the user (in the invocation of real world physiology and psychology when it comes to in-situ, field trauma) and then the subsequent, erroneous extrapolation about the D&D HP model being coherent with those ideas.
 

Celebrim

Legend
Interesting (and I've certainly played through some pretty terrible injuries myself) but aberrant and not illustrative of standard trauma implications while in the middle of a martial contest (warfare or sport). If a tough guy gets his calf or achilles torn by greater than 50 %, he is effectively lame. If his bicep tendon/muscle or labram tears, he can't wield a weapon/shield/implement with any level of effectiveness. If his blood pressure drops dramatically in a few short moments, he will lose consciousness. Death will follow shortly thereafter where he either bleeds out or is killed (in warfare).

While being stabbed with a sword was generally debilitating and lethal in earlier eras, generally not in the time frame of mere seconds. People stabbed would take minutes, hours or even months to die depending what actually killed them. The main things that D&D doesn't model about injuries that are relevant here are blood loss and infection. If we really want to be realistic, we are going to have to start modelling all those secondary effects of injury that are really what kills you. Sure, if someone put a warsword in someones belly button point up and lifted, the resulting loss of blood as thier insides gushed all over you would kill them pretty fast. But that's not how hit points work. Hit points don't suggest and have never suggested that you are able to endure multiple disembowelments and decapitations.

Sure, cases like that are somewhat rare. But they aren't as rare as you'd indicate. If bleeding stablizes, a person can endure pain and traumatic injury far beyond what people would expect. I watched my brother win the state wrestling championship with his shoulder torn out of its socket. I have a great-grand uncle that owned a bank in Texas, and got in a feud with his neighbors the dry cleaners and challenged them to go out into the street to settle it. He did. They did - but three dry cleaning brothers came out with rifles. They shot him six times and he still killed the three of them with pistols, and then lived for three months before the infection killed him. If you look at stories of warfare you'll find innumerable examples of persons with multiple serious wounds performing heroic actions - numerous persons winning purple hearts and medals for bravery with the same action. In ancient warfare, beserk and fanatical warriors would take what would probably be lethal wounds and keep fighting for minutes.

On a casually realistic level, the relative rarity of such things is easily explained. Most persons are 1st level commoners or the like with just 2-4 hit points. They can't evade or endure weapon blows. Some people have both high constitution to endure multiple blows, and also the experience to evade them. A character that's say a 3rd level fighter with a 15 Con - far above an average person - has both greater ability to endure injury (my brother could keep wrestling with his shoulder dislocated because his deltoid was so strong, he benched over 450lb at the time, it kept his arm immobilzed) and greater ability to evade injury by slipping otherwise telling blows.

You put me in the ring with a professional boxer, it will be one punch and I'll be on the floor. But you put that same boxer up against another professional boxer, and they'll pound each other until they look like hamburger meat. Then at some point in the fight, too weary to remain wary, half-blinded by swelling, and with reflexes dulled by pain, one of them will do exactly what I did in the hypothetical fight - stay still or move into a punch they didn't see coming - and it will be lights out for them too. That's the casual realism of the hit point model.

It's not intended to be perfectly realistic. But the range of outcomes it produces largely overlaps the expecations of casual narration. There are plenty of edge cases where it is clear it doesn't work really well - it doesn't really know what to do with arrows, and commoners vs. housecats or housecats vs mice are problems, for example - but largely the narration we can produce from D&D is plausible.

My D&D is a lot closer to Indiana Jones than it is Band of Brothers....

If there is any character in fiction who could easily be simulated with hit points, it's got to be Indy. I can understand lots of objection to the idea that hit points don't model 16th century reality very well were most death involves slow painful bleeding out from torso injuries, lungs filling with blood, and death by gangreen - but as far as modelling an action movie where the hero can endure traumatic experience after traumatic experience while not slowing down and only ending up with scrapes and bruises, hit points do very very well.

I think you are exagerrating the problems in casual realism produced by hit points. So long as character level is low they produce a pretty decent narrative. If you really wanted to make them more realistic, bleeding rules, shock, and infection could be added to the mixture. In general I find that going that route generates relatively unfun book keeping, death spirals, and so forth while having relatively minor impacts if you've got a cleric hanging around to close wounds and cure disease when the adrenalyn wears off. If character level is high, then the character ceases to be related to some ordinary rael person, and becomes a stand in for heroes of fiction. Rambo can jump from the cliff and fall 100' with a reasonable expectation of only minor injury. John McClane can be punched, shot, and get glass in his feet and still perform olympic atheletic feats. And that's before we even hit 'high level' D&D with its Achilles and Heracles level heroes.
 
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Aenghus

Explorer
I've seen attempts to hide the hp totals of PCs in games before, and personally I thought the experiments were failures that didn't really work and made lots of work for the players and especially the referee. Either people got super cautious with their PCs, or they abandoned all caution and their PCs died a lot. And in most games the referee will give some indication as to your health level.

Frankly, I find the question "How many hit points does that PC/ NPC/ Monster have?" to be a more interesting question. Can a player or PC find out by any way other than killing them? Risk assessment is very important for decision making, and I've seen a huge variety of opinions on the topic on all points of the spectrum from "you know nothing" to "you know everything".

I have visions of a mad wizard/scientist experimenting on identical siblings of various different levels to discover the mystery of hit points.

(I'm not intending to threadcrap here, let me know if this is too off topic.)
 

billd91

Not your screen monkey (he/him)
But, this isn't anything the PC is doing. Unless you believe that my wizard is a better melee fighter than a trained warrior. The explanation that has been around for so long is that the target with lots of hit points will never suffer a strong blow. A strong blow doesn't change depending on what I'm stabbing. A strong blow is a strong blow. The difference is that I will never actually LAND a strong blow on a high HP target.

Of course it's something the PC is doing. His experience and skill enable him to redirect hits from life-ending thrusts to the vitals to nicks, grazes, bruises, and other less lethal injuries. The strong attack doesn't change, but whether or not it's a strong blow (i.e. whether the effect when it lands is strong) depends partly on the defensive skill or toughness of the target. Moreover, when those hit points have been worn down, the target becomes more unable to protect himself, then those strong attacks become stronger and stronger blows.

From the 1e DMG said:
Consider a character who is a 10th level fighter with an 18 constitution. This character would have an average of 5% hit points per die, plus a constitution bonus of 4 hit points, per level, or 95 hit points! Each hit scored upon the character does only o small amount of actual physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment.

None of this is a new idea. I can't avoid the feeling that you're being deliberately obtuse in this discussion.
 

Celebrim

Legend
But, the reason that those stories are famous is because they are the outliers, not the norm. Yes, there are examples of people suffering horrific injury and keeping on going.

Where I'm drawing a blank is the individual who does it twice. Unlike a D&D PC, who suffers horrific injury on a virtually daily basis, the examples you want to point to are generally things that happen once in a lifetime.

The PC's in my game have been in scores of combats in the 100 days 'in a combat zone' that constitute the game thus far. Rarely do they suffer truly traumatic or horrific injury - being dropped blow 0 hit points. That situation is called 'bleeding out', and the players joke with each other over who has bleed out the most and who has been the closest to death. That has generally happened only 1 or 2 times to each character.

But quite literally, the only reason that they aren't all dead is heroic combat ability isn't the only super power they have. They also have in the party characters who can close wounds, knit flesh, and restore blood with a touch. The party would never be able to keep this up otherwise. Even the ones that come out of the fight without views of their insides or some such, are still a mass of minor injuries, cuts and bruises that would take them at least days or weaks to heal naturally.

Take away that supernatural healing, and yeah, adding recovery time from this level of injury would mean the campaign would be not 100 game days in to it, but 300 or 500. And generally speaking, anyone actually mangled would be in big trouble. Without magic - without changing the rules of the universe - no character would have survived this long.

The difference is that I will never actually LAND a strong blow on a high HP target.

I don't want this to degenerate into a damage on a miss thread, but there is a range of outcomes between landing a strong blow and a miss. Boxers don't cause most blows to miss. They slip most blows. The blow lands, and it was thrown with force by a skilled combatant, but the target evades the full force of the blow both by pulling back and by slipping to the side so that only a fraction of the force is imparted. The same thing applies to a knife. It's better to evade the knife, that's what AC is for, but if you can't avoid being hit, then at least be hit by as little of the blade as possible. Once you add armor to the equation to help you slip blows, then its perfectly plausible that what might have run you through the chest - what would have gone right through the breastplate of a less wary warrior - becomes only a prick, a bruise or a scratch.

You actually think that the character knows these things? I certainly would never think that someone sticking a sword in my chest wouldn't kill me.

The hero doesn't think he can survive a sword through the breast. He thinks that that even if they opponent gets through his gaurd, even if the swing isn't clumsy, he's going to slip the blow so that it is only glancing and at most he'll get a scratch.

Exactly. This is precisely what I'm saying. But the character is in no way aware of this is he?

The high level character comes up to the low level gaurd. The high level character is feeling good. He knows he's got this fight.

The high level character comes up against the low level gaurd. He's bleeding from a half dozen minor wounds, he's got blood leaking into his eyes, his muscles are burning, he's light headed from blood loss, his knee is feeling about 85%, he knows he's going to lift his leather jerkin off tonight and find his torso a mass of purple wounds, and he thinks... I'm in trouble. I need to get out of these fights before one of these jokers gets lucky and kills me.

Conan doesn't think to himself, "Well, I'm the protagonist of this story, so nothing can kill me", so, why would my fantasy character.

Conan is one cocky confident SOB, and with good reason. I'm sure he doesn't say, "I'm the protagonist of this story", but he is also well aware of his panther like reflexes and speed, and the fact that he's killed lots and lots of people before and the guy standing before him with a shaky sword isn't any more special than the last 20 were.
 

This is invoking the real world physiology and psychology of traumatic injuries. The first contention is incorrect. People do typically die when they are struck with a sword a single time (especially in the periods relevant to their usage). Whether it be due to vasovagal response, blood pressure loss triggering unconsciousness, or being rendered lame and the feedback response. The second contention is considering the current era only instead of comparing it to, say the American Civil War and WWI. There have been considerable studies about the rise of the ratio of maimed, wounded and incapacitated - due to what I cited upthread - versus casualties in modern warfare.
I don't know that much about getting stabbed with a sword in the real world. It doesn't seem right that someone would keel over and stop fighting upon getting stabbed once, unless it was a really solid stab right through the torso or some other vital organ was hit.

But on some level, it doesn't really matter how it would work in real life. My knowledge of how swords work in limited to books, movies, and video games, as well as some light re-enactment with wooden weapons. If the game has someone keel over at the first stab, then whether or not it is realistic is secondary to whether or not I feel that it's realistic, where my feelings on the matter are set by Hollywood.
 

Hussar

Legend
Quote Originally Posted by From the 1e DMG
Consider a character who is a 10th level fighter with an 18 constitution. This character would have an average of 5% hit points per die, plus a constitution bonus of 4 hit points, per level, or 95 hit points! Each hit scored upon the character does only o small amount of actual physical harm - the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the right moment.


Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ny-hit-points-do-you-have/page5#ixzz2zBiEFhk3

So, HP allow the fighter to avoid the attack. IOW, an 8 HP blow isn't always the same. Sure, the high level character is dodging and avoiding. And that's the point. The "hits" that he takes are different. He never gets hit with a strong blow until that last one. So, yeah, he knows he's better than that guard. Fair enough.

But, to me, if the character is cognisant of his actual HP, it runs into OOTS world thinking. "Oh, well, he's got a longbow pointed at me, totally got the drop on me, but, I've got 100 HP, so, I run the 500 feet to close to him and attack him because I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he cannot kill me."

Or, "Hey, they've got a ballista. Isn't that cute. I charge."

Or, "I know a 60 foot fall can't even hurt me, so, I jump off a six storey cliff."

So on and so forth. It's just not what I would think my character is thinking.
 

But, to me, if the character is cognisant of his actual HP, it runs into OOTS world thinking. "Oh, well, he's got a longbow pointed at me, totally got the drop on me, but, I've got 100 HP, so, I run the 500 feet to close to him and attack him because I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, he cannot kill me."
I don't know if this is the best example of what you're getting at. With 500 feet between you, I think you would be able to trust in your reflexes to dodge an incoming arrow when you can see it coming. Wouldn't it make more sense to complain about the crossbow pointed at your back, from a distance of three inches? That's the shot that I'd have difficulty avoiding.
 

S

Sunseeker

Guest
Which, all too obviously, just begs to be narrated as:

"You invoke your Combat Awareness, and around you little red-green bars shimmer into view above each of your foes. With each successful strike, the proportion of red in that opponent's bar increases."

Lanefan

I try not to be snarky with my players, which honestly that's how that comes off sounding. If something states that my character gains specific knowledge, they gain specific knowledge. If the ability did not say they gained specific knowledge, I wouldn't give them specifics. I think it's rather rude to give vague information when the game instructs otherwise.

That said, I don't like the ability, but I went with it as it's not detrimental to the game overall, just to the temporary immersion.

Of course, if "damage" was measured in more RP terms, ie: An attack "injures" the target, a successful follow-up attack moves that up to "seriously injured" and then "wounded" and "crippled" and so on (which frankly might be a cool system), I would have less trouble with an ability to gave a player specific knowledge, because the knowledge itsself is not specific.
 

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