Hit Points - Why were they designed to be incoherent?

[Li Shenron]

I get the feeling that all these problems stem originally from a need to explain why player characters' Hit Points increase with experience/level.

If Hit Points didn't increase, there would be no problem. We would just think they really are the ability to withstand physical injuries. Slow natural healing and fast magical healing would work fine with no further explanations.

But maybe we want Hit Points to increase, because we do want to think that an experienced, high-level character would be relatively less threatened by an axe or a wolf's bite, than how he used to be when he was lower-level.

So how about giving the whole topic a spin: flush all the metaphysical interpretation of Hit Points, let them be more or less (some door left opened for corner cases) fully physical, but then let's describe weapon damage as partly metaphysical.

Weapon damage doesn't change by level. If it does in some edition (damage bonus per level?), it can still be thought as character's ability to target where it hurts more. But we can say that the d10 damage from that axe is fully physical for a low-level character (to which d10 can be a deadly blow) because he's got no other way to withstand weapon damage that just taking it, while for a high-level character (which equate to a lesser % of his true health) only some of those damage points really hurt his body, while the others are "absorbed" by a variety of skills (technical experience at receiving/dodging blows, luck, whatever...).

To make this work I presume that magical healing at least would need to scale by level too... what do you think?

 

[TrueSpade]

My players and I just maximize the HD's. Like a Succubus has 6d8 so we just read it as 6 x 8 (+ their constitution of course).

Saves time, and the wizard will never have more HP than the fighters (unless for some odd reason his Constitution score is through the roof ).

 

[Celebrim]

Why is luck, skill, divine favor or magic tied to the biological healing process?

Why should it be tied to the biological healing process? Why isn't it tied merely to the passing of time?

So far as I can tell, your argument can be summarized as, "It's not realistic for you to be able to heal your luck or divine favor by allowing time to pass." Are you claiming to know what is realistic for the recovery process of metaphysical traits?

However, that magic or divine grace is not as helpful you if you have gone to 0 hit points or less unless it is very powerful. The character is automatically in a coma for a bit even if they gain positive hit points, and more devastatingly, they simply can not function and must rest for a week, even if they were brought to maximum hit points. The only thing they can do is stumble out of the dungeon and find a bed to collapse into.

I'm walking through all of this because I just have to ask, why were hit points envisioned this way? Why stress the metaphysical when it came to absorbing damage, but when it came to recovery it was slanted towards the physical?

ERrr.... because if you've been reduced to zero or less hit points, we've crossed a threshold beyond which we are no longer assuming that the majority of the damage is metaphysical but in fact very significant physical trauma has occurred. Earlier attacks were transmuted at the cost of metaphysical reserves into minor cuts and bruises, but the one that reduced you to zero or less hit points occurred when you had depleted these metaphysical reserves and it literally ran you through. Until the traumatic wound heals, you can't at all be expected to restore your vitality.

Take your typical shooter today and how the health bar works is that if you take too much damage in a short period of time then you could die, but if you are able to duck, hide or generally pull yourself out of the line of fire you'll get your health back and can then rejoin the battle. This approach isn't realistic. If you get shot in real life you're pretty much shut down due to pain, bleeding and shock. However conceptually it emulates the metaphysical a bit more.

So you are claiming to know what is realistic for metaphysical traits.

Look, there are a lot of things I could say in response to this, but basically you've got it all wrong. Hit points don't regenerate faster in shooter video games because they are attempting to emulate the metaphysical in a deeper way or out of any sense of realism. Hit points recover faster in a video game because shooter video games generally occur in real time and a real time period of a week where you couldn't play would be fairly unpopular. However, RPGs generally don't have real time pacing, but instead occur in a flexible 'game time' where in one minute of time in the real world can represent a single second of game time or several years of game time. As a result, in a game there is relatively little cost to the players in proposing, "We wait a week for Bill to heal." This proposal in many cases can be resolved in just a few seconds of real time, while a whole week passes in the game.

You'll note that many computer RPGs also have this concept of flexible game time. Some even have explicit 'rest' buttons that allow your party to skip ahead over long periods of game time in a short amount of real time.

So having some of those alternatives out there now, why weren't these ideas being used or considered back in the 1970s? Why wasn't there a “second wind” or say after five minutes of rest you'd regain half of your hit points, or any other metric where at least a portion of the metaphysical hit points could quickly come back to a character?

I wasn't there but I would guess its because the designers didn't think it would make for a very fun or appealing game where rapid healing occurred not necessarily in short spans of real time, but in short spans of game time. The early gamers were coming to the game from a War Gaming background and highly prized the notions of 'playing well' and 'game mastery'. Concepts like experience points and hit points and treasure were markers of how well you were playing the game. For you to be 'rewarded' by the rapid recovery of hit points without expending in game resources (like time or spells) would have felt to them like cheapening the system and dumbing down the game.

 

[Water Bob]

I've been mulling over the nature of hit points lately. One thing that keeps cropping up is the issue of their “incoherence.”

Hit Points are not incoherent. They are abstract. They're an abstract measure of the damage done to a character or creature.

D&D, and therefore roleplaying, has it roots in wargaming. What happened in wargaming? A figure would represent a unit or many units. A figure could represent, say, a squadron of tanks, or a maybe a platoon of foot soldiers.

Many of the wargaming rules worked like this: A figure can take two hits. The first hit means that the figure is wounded and at half strength. The second hit destroys the unit completely--it is taken off the battlefield.

Turns may be 8 hours long--or even some other unit of time, including multiple days (one month turns on very large scale combat maps are not uncommong).



So.... you can see how this idea was easily translated to characters in the RPG. A unit (which is a character or creature) can take a number of points of damage until it is destroyed.

In the wargame, maybe foot soldiers could take up to two hits, as I described above. And, maybe tanks could take up to eight hits.

Translate that to the RPG: Instead of a 37mm main gun on a Panzer III tank rolling damage up up to 8 hits on its target, this translated over to a longsword doing 1d8 damage on an enemy character or creature.

Instead of the combat round being 8 hours or even a month long, it became 1 minute long (and, later, 6 seconds long).

And, just like two figures of tanks coming to face-to-face contact on the battlefield, with dice thrown to represent what happened in that massive tank battle where two squadrons of tanks went after each other, the D&D combat round is also abstract, not representing specific melee hits.

The attack/defense/damage system in D&D is very much akin to two figures on the Axis & Allies gameboard coming together with dice thrown to represent the overall outcome.

When a tank squadron is hit, and 6 of the units 8 "health" points are destroyed, we don't define excactly what each hit measures. All that is important is that, during that 4 hour combat round, the tank squadron was nearly destroyed and is now operating at about one third of is normal peak performance.

Many times, in a wargame, there were no negative effects to losing health points of a unit. The points only measured how much total damage the unit could take.

In the case of the tank squadron, the unit would operate the same as the units with 8 health points--it's just that THIS tank squadron can only take two more points of damage before being destroyed.

Abstract.

That's exactly the case with a D&D character. There are no ill effects to taking HP damage other than it gets the character close to zero and unconsciousness/death.



So, really, hit points aren't really that hard to understand. They're an abstract measurement of how hard it is to kill a character or creature.

Remember, each attack doesn't represent an actual blow or swing, either. The attack throw is an abstract method, like hit points, for showing how likely a unit (character) is of placing damage on its foes.

In D&D, when a single attack throw is made in a one minute combat round (or even a six second combat round), the dice throw doesn't measure a single attack. It doesn't measure any attacks. It just represents how likely that character is of placing damage on his foes--a character with a high attack modifier is highly likely to damage his foes.



So, if an attack in D&D is successful, this could really mean that a single blow found a spot on a foe. Or, it could mean that a few, even several, seperate blows found home and damaged the foe.

It's abstract measurement.

Let's say a fighter has 25 HP. If attacked and 6 hit points are removed, all this means is that something happened that made the target less capable of withstanding damage.

Maybe the enemy landed a small cut. Maybe the enemy landed zero attacks, but the fighter is starting to get winded. Maybe the enemy landed a 11 hits during the combat round, but none of them were lethal.

There's a lot of permutations.

And, we really don't care. All we need to know is when the character drops--and that will be when the character reaches 0 HP.

 

[Aehrlon]

Quite Simply, Hit Points are easy to use and work. There have been a host of arguments/discussions over the years on this very topic. I don't recall where (perhaps the 1E DMG) but I seem to remember Gary Gygax wrote even back then that HP only represented significant injuries when you were down to your last handful of them. Also, healing was much slower back in those days... and Trolls were feared, even by a LV 7 party. Clerics were definitely needed to have a successful adventuring party. In newer Editions, less so. I'll risk going slightly off topic on HP & recovery & a little about Clerics:

As Hit Points are an abstract term, especially when you have more & more of them, I would advocate for something I’ll call “After Battle Recovery”, LOL just a working title.


The way it could work, after a combat is over, you can choose to ‘Recover’ 1d12 HP +1 per Character Level (or whatever your Hit Die is; using a Barbarian character as an example). Add a d12 every 4 Character Levels (so 2d12+5 at LV 5, 3d12+9 at LV 9, etc). This die would be based on your Class Hit Dice: d12 for a Barbarian, d10 for a Fighter/Paladin, d8 for Cleric, d6 for a Rogue & so on, with each class getting a minimum of 3 'Recoveries'. Sure, this means more 'Recovery' for fightery types but they usually sustain more punishment & being naturally tougher, would be able to shake off such 'battle fatigue' easier. But other classes get Recoveries too, just fewer of them and not for as many HP.


Furthermore, you reduce the type of dice used for each subsequent combat, representing a declining ability to endure battle fatigue, cuts & bruises, general wear and tear of your body. After the next combat your Barbarian only gets d10s… 3rd combat, d8, etc. By the 5th combat, the Barbarian is down to 4-sided dice and not regaining much at all, even at higher levels. a Fighter would get 4 such Recoveries (d10, d8, d6, d4). A Rogue only 3 (d6, d6, d4). Then you would have to camp and rest to reset your “Recovery” cycle (& it would make sense that you get some healing for camping/resting, of course, say 1HP/LV + CON bonus). This whole idea differs from 4E Healing Surges in a few ways. First of, you get less Recoveries than you would Healing Surges. Also, Healing Surges or for 1/4 of your total HP; my idea is for less and further declines each time until your last Recovery is used. And it's more than likely that my idea for Recoveries while useful, wouldn't get you back up to full HP very often... part of the idea.


Adventuring parties that had a Cleric among them would certainly fare better, be able to get healed DURING a battle (via Spells) and wouldn’t have to camp as often. AND maybe a Cleric could augment your “After Battle Recovery” by adding an extra die to another's Recovery 3 times/day + WIS modifier, representing "Being under the care of a Healer". Just my 2CP. WotC, feel free to use this idea, heheh. I'm planning on using it in future 3.5 and/or Pathfinder games.


Another benefit: getting to use d12s & those other oft neglected dice!!

 

[Greenfield]

The original question of this thread is based on an invalid presumption: Hit points weren't "designed" to be anything. They weren't designed at all.

They evolved from the concept of unit wound points in a miniatures game.

They were never, as far as I know, fully conceptualized by the original designers. They didn't take the "classic" questions into account when developing them, Classic questions such as, "If hit points represent the ability to take a punch, to minimize damage, why is the high level fighter harder to heal than the low level Magic User?" Or, "If hit points represent luck, or some sort of 'magic force field', why do poisoned weapons work? I mean, if you aren't actually taking the damage, just wearing down your luck/force field, how did the poison get delivered?"

Every explanation has at least one such similar flaw. So the best thing to do is to just accept the concept, flaws and all. However it got to be the way it is, it works sort of okay most of the time, kinda. Live with it.

 

[Aehrlon]

Good points all... moving forward into the 5th Edition/D&D Next, maybe they should be renamed TP (Toughness Points) as we all know you are in trouble when your TP is running low. When you're out of TP, sadly, all that's left is a cardboard roll; ZING! Hope for a friendly ally to lend you a few squares... or a benevolent janitor (AKA Cleric) to give you a whole new roll...

All joking aside, Toughness Points would be a more accurate term to reflect what is being eroded. As your Toughness declines, you become weaker and weaker. Toward the end of your reserve, you're likely wounded, bleeding, out of breath, on your last leg and such. You need healing/restorative (and/or rest) to Recover your Toughness and be ready for the next challenge.

 

[Water Bob]

Good points all... moving forward into the 5th Edition/D&D Next, maybe they should be renamed TP (Toughness Points) as we all know you are in trouble when your TP is running low.

Or...Trouble Points...

It took me a long time to come around, but upon extended analysis of the game and playing it for decades, hit points really are good method to use in the game.

I don't think that hit points should be changed. I think that the DMG should have a page devoted to describing what hit points represent and their abstract application to the game.

It's not the mechanic that needs to be changed, it's the way the mechanic is explained.

 

[Aehrlon]

have to agree; if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It has works so far, I don't anticipate D&D Next to do away with them anytime soon. We'll see what the playtest has to offer in a few weeks...

 

[Dordledum]

Good points all... moving forward into the 5th Edition/D&D Next, maybe they should be renamed TP (Toughness Points) as we all know you are in trouble when your TP is running low.

Don't see any argument to rename them. "Hit Points" vs "Toughness points"? We all know you are in trouble when the amount of hits you can take is running low, sounds similar to me.

The term "Hit point" is also D&D staple, changing it would only sow confusion. And gamers would keep calling them hitpoints anyway.

just my 2 cts.