D&D General D&D as a Game- On the Origin of Hit Points and Start of the Meat Debate

[coyote6]

Modern action movies actually seem to go with D&D falls; watch people jump from heights in the Fast & Furious movies, and walk away. John Wick. Any number of shows where someone dives/is thrown out a window or off a roof, lands on a car roof, smashing it spectacularly, and then slowly gets up, limps off, and is functionally fine in a scene or two.

Hit points, all the way. Hell, I think Fast & Furious, they survive higher falls as the movies go on (and they level up).

I like the Expanse RPG's damage rules. You get hit, damage is rolled; you subtract armor, then can spend Fortune to offset the damage, take the injured and/or wounded conditions to offset damage, and if there's any damage left, you are taken out of the encounter, and the attacker imposes a condition on you (for example, "dying").

When your luck literally runs out, combat is quite dangerous.

 

[MGibster]

The real problem is falls are unpredictable. Some people die from slipping on any icy sidewalk. Others can survive dropping thousands of feet. Having falls deal a random amount of damage and some people having "plot armor points" is a really easy way to handle stuff like this, IMO.

And that unpredictability applies to all sorts of damage. I remember reading about a criminal in San Francisco's China Town who sought police protection and offerd to turn state's evidence after his pals tried to murder him. One of them shot him right in the chest with a .45 automatic pistol where it hit one of his ribs, traveling along until it exited out his back. Dude ran away, not to a hospital, but straight to a police department.

Random damage roll I guess?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Modern action movies actually seem to go with D&D falls; watch people jump from heights in the Fast & Furious movies, and walk away. John Wick. Any number of shows where someone dives/is thrown out a window or off a roof, lands on a car roof, smashing it spectacularly, and then slowly gets up, limps off, and is functionally fine in a scene or two.

Hit points, all the way. Hell, I think Fast & Furious, they survive higher falls as the movies go on (and they level up).

I like the Expanse RPG's damage rules. You get hit, damage is rolled; you subtract armor, then can spend Fortune to offset the damage, take the injured and/or wounded conditions to offset damage, and if there's any damage left, you are taken out of the encounter, and the attacker imposes a condition on you (for example, "dying").

When your luck literally runs out, combat is quite dangerous.

The problem is the nomenclature. You would need to stop using terms like hit, miss, wound, injury, and heal. Even non-D&D games often use those words.

 

[Clint_L]

I think it is a testament to the genius of hit points that they have become so ubiquitous across gaming, despite 50 years of folks experimenting with other options.

 

[Minigiant]

I would argue the crux of the meat debate comes from falling damage. I think most people can go with the notion that the attack from a dragon was "avoided barely with a nasty nick" rather than "hit the fighter clean in the head and they shrugged it off". Even things like fireball, you can argue that its not a solid mass of fire, but a swirling mass of fire that "singed your eyebrows" rather than they "incinerated you".

Its a level of disbelief I think most people can get behind, especially in 4e/5e where healing is so fast. The idea of recovering "meat points" that quickly is really hard to swallow, but the notion of recovering "luck or stamina"...sure.

Falling damage is harder. The idea that a fighter can jump from a 100 foot cliff, land on a hard surface and "be totally fine", really strains the notion. That's the biggest area I see people balking.

Isn't this all due to the game resolving some things as HP damage instead of "Save or X" out of ease or laziness or love of dice rolling and never changing the mechanics even though people mention it's weird.

 

[Dausuul]

I would argue the crux of the meat debate comes from falling damage.

Falling damage is certainly one of the places that really highlights the problem, but I think the main issue is simply with the choice of names.

All of the terminology in the game pushes the Arnesonian meat interpretation of hit points, really really hard. When an attack is rolled, it either "hits" or "misses." When it hits, it inflicts "damage." Damage can be removed by "healing." If you take too much damage, you are "dying" or "dead." Et cetera.

You can talk about how hit points are abstract till you're blue in the face; the books can include paragraphs of turgid prose about how they're abstract; but the game itself is telling the players otherwise, every combat, every session, over and over and over.

 

[Maxperson]

Back in the late 80s or early 1990s, Palladium made a similar suggestion as yours when someone wrote in asking what to do about players taking advantage of the rules to do suicidal acts. Palladium's suggestion was to allow the damage to go directly to their hit points (bypassing their SDC which would normally absorb the damage first) or to rule that the character dies. Which seemed reasonable to me as I believe the default assumption is for all characters to avoid damage/death.

There's a scene in Rambo where he jumps off a fairly high cliff and he survives with minor injuries requiring stitches. It's somewhat believable because the branches on the pine trees between him and the ground serve to break his fall. Had it been a straight drop to the ground below, his survival would have been beyond incredulous. If a player is going to game the system by jumping off a bridge onto the rocky crags below I'm not going to roll the dice. But I'd warn them before the jumped.

To my mind, the Rambo scene would be some sort of special ability in order to work, and I also warn my players before they do something suicidal. They usually back off at that point.

My favorite what the hell scene was when Arnold dodged a nuclear blast in Predator by going over the side of a river bank or whatever kind of bank it was, because that will work!

 

[ezo]

Both things like falling damage and things like terminology are problems. Like others, I prefer terms like Vitality, etc.

 

[Minigiant]

Falling damage is certainly one of the places that really highlights the problem, but I think the main issue is simply with the choice of names.

All of the terminology in the game pushes the Arnesonian meat interpretation of hit points, really really hard. When an attack is rolled, it either "hits" or "misses." When it hits, it inflicts "damage." Damage can be removed by "healing." If you take too much damage, you are "dying" or "dead."

You can talk about how hit points are abstract till you're blue in the face; the books can include paragraphs of turgid prose about how they're abstract; but the game itself is telling the players otherwise, every combat, every session, over and over and over.

To me the issue is not hits, misses, damage.

It's "takes"

"The dwarf hits the orc with his battleaxe and the orc takes 10 damage"

This implies a more finality of the action. That every avenue to lessen the effect has be done. You take the damage.

"The dwarf hits the orc with his battleaxe and deals 10 damage.

This feels that the damage is now entering the system. The damage is dealt out and it's on the orc to handle it still.

 

[Charlaquin]

Or treat it like a Concentration thing: DC 10 or half the damage, whichever is higher. Make it a CON save or CON check if you don't want "experience via proficiency" to help...

A 50-foot fall would be DC 10 most likely, but occasionally higher. Advantage or disadvantage could depend on the landing surface.
IRL people survive a 50(ish)-foot fall about 50% of the time.

A 80-foot fall would be DC 14 or so on average. This would result in survival of 35%, which is much higher than the IRL odds of about 10%, but could work for a simple gaming system.

Ooh, I like that! I might use it.

The issue arises when DCs get super high, which easily could happen with very high falls. If the rule in D&D was a 20 always succeeds, then even the ridiculously high DCs could be made with just luck (the natural 20).

Well that doesn’t have to be the general rule, it could just be the case for falling specifically. But, it also might not even be necessary. If we assume a con check with no proficiency, the DC needs to be 26 or higher for the check to be actually impossible to pass, so that’s 52 damage, which is the mean result on 15d6. And even at the falling damage cap of 20d6 there’s still a nonzero chance of rolling less than 52 damage. So surviving a fall under this rule is always theoretically possible, though it does start getting extremely unlikely after somewhere around 120 feet. Seems reasonable enough to me.