In the heat of battle, is hit point loss a wound?

[Jan van Leyden]

As the fighting ability of a PC is a binary affair (either in full fighting condition or down), HP-loss doesn't mean physical injury IMHO.

For me a PC should only take one or two serious blows to go down: the blow which sends him to 0 or less HP and perhaps another one shortly before that telling blow, which should serve as a warning. In pre-4e versions I'd narrate a strike which brings a PC to one-digit HPs as such a first blow.

4e's "bloodied" serves a similar purpose, but, as it doesn't have any consequences, I re-engineer it in the narrative context: It's the first time the PC really feels the extra effort necessary to avoid being hit. May be his shield arm tingles or hurts from blocking the blow or he's got a stitch from his awkward jump to the side.

 

[Campbell]

Why choose? Right now I'm playing in a 6th level AD&D game that pretty much embraces the hp as meat space narrative and its great gonzo fun. My dwarf fighter is pretty much a super hero. He is almost impervious to poison, and puny mages have no effect on him. I've also run 4e games with all martial PCs where I completely embraced the meta aspects of hp and all the PCs were mortal. Sometimes you want something in between the extremes. Why not have a game that provides the tools for groups to decide for themselves. That means its okay for things like warlords, damage on misses, etc. to be completely optional mechanics. Plus nothing says that narration between adventurers and monsters needs to be consistent. The ogre could be a big bag of meat while the lithe fighter deftly dodges attacks and eventually wears out leaving an opening for the ogre to smash him to pieces.

 

[delericho]

Strictly IMC:

Hit points represent a combination of many things: simple physical toughness, skill, luck, divine provenance, script immunity...

The loss of hit points represents some whittling away at all of these things. But, in particular, the loss of even 1 hit points represents some measure of physical injury - even if it is as little as a paper cut.

This is quite important, since it makes it clear how poison and the like work - if the character is able to reduce the damage to 0, he isn't affected, but if even 1 hp damage remains then there is at least a nick for the poison to enter his system.

That said, greater damage doesn't necessarily mean a greater injury - whether as a raw number ("the ogre hits for 20 damage!") or as a percentage of the target's total ("oh no, I've only got 100 hp left!").

The only wound I narrate as being particularly bad is one that kills a character outright - so if a PC gets dropped straight to -10, then he gets beheaded, run through, or otherwise suitably terminated. Otherwise, they'll be bruised or battered, or bleeding from a dozen cuts. But even the blow that takes them below 0 merely reflects the cumulative effect of several things, not necessarily a single particularly nasty blow.

(The problems with this abstraction are, of course, twofold: there are those cases where a character's raw toughness shouldn't be able to save them and skill doesn't apply (though luck, divine provenance, and script immunity always do); and the cure light wounds spell, and the like, don't scale right. I deal with that by not worrying about it.)

Oh, and FWIW: I'm not a big fan of Fighters doing damage on a miss, either. Though depending on the specifics of the situation I may well accept it - and it's not an automatic deal-breaker for me in any case.

 

[Li Shenron]

Physical damage is the most natural way to see it, every casual gamer spontaneously sees HP loss as wounds. It is only when a more experience gamer patronizes the casual gamers in the group about this topic, and suggests to reason more about it, that people starts complicating the interpreration.

5e has a more explicit definition of HP damage as non-wounds until negative HP, so I'll try to make the effort of seeing them more like this from now on.

 

[VannATLC]

This is why 4e moved diseased and poisons to event tracks, for the most part, and its probably my favourite method of dealing with them.

 

[slobo777]

In any case, physical wounds are the main outcome measure of combat and should be explicitly tracked in some fashion.

Any major wound from damage - a bleeding gash, a broken bone, a severed muscle or tendon, concussion etc - is badly represented by hit points. These things would most likely take a combatant out of a fight, or at the very least penalise them.

As a "measure" of wounds, I have always taken "over 0 = not seriously wounded" and "0 or less = seriously or fatally wounded". As such, it is an outcome for the fight - whether or not you are seriously injured at all - and what hit points represent for me is the journey to that outcome.

One thing is for certain, a figure such as "10 hit points" does not represent the same thing to different targets, or in different circumstances where it is applied.

Everything else under discussion is really the *degree* to which that is true in each play style. Some people like a bit of grit and gore, some people like cinematic everything's "just a flesh wound" until the drama of death.

Because it's a game, and follows game mechanic rules, not simulated medical science, both sides to interpretation have their problems when it comes to believability.

Definitely using the word "hit" in a purely game mechanic sense, and having to separate it from its obvious non-rule meaning is not a winning formula for quite a few posters. I'm ok with it, and my group though, so that's the way we're heading . . .

 

[billd91]

Strictly IMC:

Hit points represent a combination of many things: simple physical toughness, skill, luck, divine provenance, script immunity...

The loss of hit points represents some whittling away at all of these things. But, in particular, the loss of even 1 hit points represents some measure of physical injury - even if it is as little as a paper cut.

This is quite important, since it makes it clear how poison and the like work - if the character is able to reduce the damage to 0, he isn't affected, but if even 1 hp damage remains then there is at least a nick for the poison to enter his system.

That said, greater damage doesn't necessarily mean a greater injury - whether as a raw number ("the ogre hits for 20 damage!") or as a percentage of the target's total ("oh no, I've only got 100 hp left!").

The only wound I narrate as being particularly bad is one that kills a character outright - so if a PC gets dropped straight to -10, then he gets beheaded, run through, or otherwise suitably terminated. Otherwise, they'll be bruised or battered, or bleeding from a dozen cuts. But even the blow that takes them below 0 merely reflects the cumulative effect of several things, not necessarily a single particularly nasty blow.

(The problems with this abstraction are, of course, twofold: there are those cases where a character's raw toughness shouldn't be able to save them and skill doesn't apply (though luck, divine provenance, and script immunity always do); and the cure light wounds spell, and the like, don't scale right. I deal with that by not worrying about it.)

Oh, and FWIW: I'm not a big fan of Fighters doing damage on a miss, either. Though depending on the specifics of the situation I may well accept it - and it's not an automatic deal-breaker for me in any case.

I would XP this post if I could. It pretty much describes my preferences in the matter as well.

 

[tuxgeo]

If a PC goes down in a fight, there was probably some physical damage in there somewhere, but the physical damage doesn't have to be the first, the middle, or the last chunk of HP loss in the fight. The PC might have received a severe cut early but kept fighting through sheer adrenaline, then later collapsed due to exhaustion and fright.

Short version: Hit Points are abstract, so there is no point in trying to determine (and "rule") which hit points were which kind of damage, and which other hit points were which other kind of damage.
Individually, Hit Points don't "represent" anything in particular.

 

[Gadget]

"Hit points measure the degree of Script Immunity of a character."

Hit Point represent ANYTHING which means that the character should not die and can continue fighting or acting; lack of Hit Point means means that the character should would fall over. It screen time is over!

A character have many hit point if the spectator believe they are important to the story and expect them not to give up easily. If a character is important to the story, it have more Hit Point then an unimportant one.

Blood or not, wound or not is not important to Script Immunity.

Quoted for truth. Ablative Script Immunity. However you want to define that in game, this is what it boils down to.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

Logically it has to be luck/endurance first. The damage endured by a high level PC is crazy otherwise. Unfortunately that screws up combat descriptions. I once tried "The orc's arrow narrowly misses your head, doing 4 points of damage." The players hated this approach so I stopped using it.

Logically it also has to be cut/scrape first. "You take 4 points of damage from the spider's poison" requires a physical puncture even if you're at full hit points.

I really dislike hit points.