Hriston
Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)
This isn’t another thread about hit points. It’s about how to describe an injury when an event has occurred in the fiction that would indicate that an injury has resulted.
D&D characters get hurt. We know this because sometimes they die, which is the worst kind of getting hurt.
Yet, except perhaps in some special cases, there is no mechanical output of the core game short of death that says a character is injured.
Sure, there’s the suggestion that a character is described as “bloodied” when below half maximum hit points, having received small cuts and scratches, but there is no mechanical effect of being “bloodied”.
There’s also the suggestion that a character that drops to 0 hit points, and thus incurs the Unconscious condition, is described as having received a “wound”, but again the wound is mere color. The Unconscious condition doesn’t entail a wound and can be as ephemeral as rolling a 20 on your first death save. If you received a wound when dropping to 0, for example, the wound doesn’t miraculously heal if you roll a 20 on one of your death saves. At least, I should hope not.
So given that there’s no mechanical output of the core game, short of death, that would require the narration of an injury, what are the responsibilities of the DM and the other players to describe injuries as having taken place?
In my games, this is part of describing your character.
An injury belonging to a character isn’t part of the environment unless that character is also part of the environment, so it doesn’t necessarily fall to the DM to describe the injury.
I let each player describe their character as injured or not due to any injurious circumstance or the lack thereof. If an event is established as having occurred that suggests an injury may have resulted, I might invite the player to describe how their character is affected, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
Likewise, when it comes to describing healing of injuries as having taken place, if it’s an injury sustained by a PC, I leave that up to the player.
Doing it this way, I find that description of injuries and the healing thereof fall within the genre conventions agreed upon by the table.
D&D characters get hurt. We know this because sometimes they die, which is the worst kind of getting hurt.
Yet, except perhaps in some special cases, there is no mechanical output of the core game short of death that says a character is injured.
Sure, there’s the suggestion that a character is described as “bloodied” when below half maximum hit points, having received small cuts and scratches, but there is no mechanical effect of being “bloodied”.
There’s also the suggestion that a character that drops to 0 hit points, and thus incurs the Unconscious condition, is described as having received a “wound”, but again the wound is mere color. The Unconscious condition doesn’t entail a wound and can be as ephemeral as rolling a 20 on your first death save. If you received a wound when dropping to 0, for example, the wound doesn’t miraculously heal if you roll a 20 on one of your death saves. At least, I should hope not.
So given that there’s no mechanical output of the core game, short of death, that would require the narration of an injury, what are the responsibilities of the DM and the other players to describe injuries as having taken place?
In my games, this is part of describing your character.
An injury belonging to a character isn’t part of the environment unless that character is also part of the environment, so it doesn’t necessarily fall to the DM to describe the injury.
I let each player describe their character as injured or not due to any injurious circumstance or the lack thereof. If an event is established as having occurred that suggests an injury may have resulted, I might invite the player to describe how their character is affected, but that’s as far as I’ll go.
Likewise, when it comes to describing healing of injuries as having taken place, if it’s an injury sustained by a PC, I leave that up to the player.
Doing it this way, I find that description of injuries and the healing thereof fall within the genre conventions agreed upon by the table.
Last edited: