Narrating Hit Points - no actual "damage"

[FrogReaver]

Fair enough.




I did say that.




Frankly, I've never seen it come up. I've never seen a PC reduced to zero HPs (especially if they've had to make one or two death saves) who didn't receive some kind of magical healing before taking a long rest (even if it's just as a defensive measure to keep the character on her feet while the group gets away to safety so they can rest).

Don't mistake my having never seen it for my saying it can't and doesn't happen. I'm sure it can and does happen. But, my experience at DM'ing 5e has been that a character who is reduced to zero HPs either dies within 2-3 rounds (either from damage or a combination of damage and failed death saves) or gets some kind of magical healing before getting to a place where a rest can be taken.

I do think that is the typical experience. Magic healing typically brings the PC above 0 hp either before or right after the fight. It's rare in 4+ player games to not have that happen. I suppose in such situations that consideration is kind moot. If you are nearly certain magical healing will take place then narrate the wound however you want.

I think in lower player games it can more often as sometimes it's more important to kill the ogre before he kills me even if my friend is down because if I stop and try to get him up the ogre may just kill both of us. It may be that the only PC with magical healing is the one he knocked unconscious as well.

 

[MechaPilot]

I do think that is the typical experience. Magic healing typically brings the PC above 0 hp either before or right after the fight. It's rare in 4+ player games to not have that happen. I suppose in such situations that consideration is kind moot. If you are nearly certain magical healing will take place then narrate the wound however you want.

I think in lower player games it can more often as sometimes it's more important to kill the ogre before he kills me even if my friend is down because if I stop and try to get him up the ogre may just kill both of us. It may be that the only PC with magical healing is the one he knocked unconscious as well.

In a game with fewer players I can see greater potential for that situation occurring. My group has typically been between 4-6 players, with a short spike where I had 8 players. Also, I do let PCs administer a healing potion to an unconscious ally as an action (it usually takes the character's entire round though, as they have to move to their ally, use their object interaction to get the potion out and unstopper it, and then use an action to administer it), which I'm certain plays a role in this as well.

If that situation did come up at my table, my first inclination as to a ruling would be that the character has lingering pain into the next day, and I would describe it when I feel it would be appropriate to interject it into the game.

 

[Li Shenron]

Hit points support two of the three most common pillars of gameplay very well...

Very well put

Recently, reading "The Monsters Know" blog got me thinking if part of the problem with HPs and simulation has to do with pretty much everyone's habit of playing combat encounters to the death. Of course there are cases of the PCs retreating from a fight going downhill, and (more rarely) of the monsters fleeing, but IMXP this happens quite late i.e. when they are pretty close to 0 HP. If you use the morale rules, monsters should flee already when down to only 50%, however this is only a chance. I wonder if reality would suggest that anyone would possibly like to flee from a battle already before that point.

Just thinking out loud here... but maybe if combats were less frequently played to the death and more often resolved with fleeing, surrender or capture, the whole problem with the lack of realism in healing all your HP loss overnight would be somewhat lessened.

 

[Dausuul]

The count was for how much time passed since you were dropped. Not how much time passed since the round of your first death save. If you are dropped on round 1 and finish your last death save on round 6 then that's 6 rounds not 5.

You act on round 1, and something drops you on your turn.
On your turn on round 2, it has been 1 round since you were dropped.
On your turn on round 3, it has been 2 rounds.
Ditto 4 and 5.
On your turn on round 6, it has been 5 rounds.

Thus, you lose a maximum of 5 rounds before you know if you live or die.

 

[Celebrim]

Very well put

Recently, reading "The Monsters Know" blog got me thinking if part of the problem with HPs and simulation has to do with pretty much everyone's habit of playing combat encounters to the death. Of course there are cases of the PCs retreating from a fight going downhill, and (more rarely) of the monsters fleeing, but IMXP this happens quite late i.e. when they are pretty close to 0 HP. If you use the morale rules, monsters should flee already when down to only 50%, however this is only a chance. I wonder if reality would suggest that anyone would possibly like to flee from a battle already before that point.

Just thinking out loud here... but maybe if combats were less frequently played to the death and more often resolved with fleeing, surrender or capture, the whole problem with the lack of realism in healing all your HP loss overnight would be somewhat lessened.

I think there are a bundle of problems. Not having monsters fight to the death is harder than you might think. In real ancient warfare, the majority of fatalities were inflicted usually during the 'rout' portion of the fight. That is, the two sides would engage until one side's morale would fail, and then the side with the failing morale would rout and during the rout phase they'd be overrun by cavalry and run down and basically mass stabbed in the back by the winning side. Part of what made the Greek Phalanx so devastating wasn't just superior weaponry, but superior military discipline - the Greeks didn't rout. And there are plenty of examples in the real world of individuals and units not routing and fighting to the death, either from fanaticism or discipline or sheer personal tenacity. Indeed, most military traditions are about instilling this willingness to fight to the death into its elite soldiery through some sort of process, precisely because if your unit doesn't rout the enemy will tend to do so. I could go through a lot of real world examples, but it would invariably get political. Suffice to say, I think the truth of that statement will be born out in the investigations of the interested student, and as a hopefully non-political example consider how the "beserker" concept reoccurs through almost all tribal and animistic cultures.

A morale check system or any other system that makes this random suffers the same problems with respect to fulfilling gamist goals as random wound systems. The game becomes too unpredictable to design challenges well. If you design the encounter with orcs on the assumption that they'll rout at some point, then it takes a larger number of orcs to challenge a given party than normal. But, if this group doesn't rout at the expected point, then the PC party will have to, with the attendant risk of being the one that will suffer disproportionately large casualties during the rout phase. To avoid this, you'd need basically 'hit points for morale' so that groups would rout at a somewhat predictable point. I've never seen a system implement this.

The reason you rarely see PC's fleeing is mostly because fleeing rarely helps. Fleeing is complex and usually involves giving your opponent multiple unanswered attacks. In most cases, the PC's are more likely to survive by standing their ground and hoping the dice break their way than they are by fleeing. In many cases, the PC's are facing beasts that are much faster than they are and so fleeing isn't really even an option. Even if they theoretically could retreat, in many cases an organized retreat involves sacrificing part of the force to let the rest get away and that's just not a very attractive option. In order to retreat successfully, a PC party has to be tactically prepared for a retreat and that requires a level of skill and system mastery that is late in coming. Finally, from a metagame perspective, PC's rarely retreat because they have an assumption that most encounters are 'fair' and the odds are in their favor. In order for a retreat to be successful, you have to begin the process several rounds before it becomes necessary. But D&D combats are usually really short in terms of the number of rounds involved, and so typically you only see retreat either at first contact - "There is no way we can take on that!" - or when it is already too late.

I think you are right that as long as most of the PC's hit points remain at the end of the night, you can plausibly suspend disbelief that all those minor cuts and scrapes and bruises, even if they aren't healed per se are at healed up enough that with a night's rest they are no longer really issues. It wouldn't be perfect, because it still doesn't exactly simulate our own experiences with injury, but it would lessen the problem. However, changing the way we narrate combat would not solve the whole of the problem, because you'd still have problems with character's dropped to death's door by injuries right as rain the next morning. Fundamentally, while our experience with injury and pain allows us to suspend disbelief regarding the idea that most injuries and pain can be ignored rather quickly, nonetheless our experience remains that quite often they cannot and our injuries continue to be a source of pain and debilitation for a long time. We've all had experiences of going to bed and waking up to find the injury more severe, tender, sore and debilitating in the morning. We've all experienced loss of functionality of some sort because of injuries we've received, so if you don't model that at all then it becomes very obvious that 'it's just a game' pretty much all the time.

That said, I've never really seen a game willing to model injury realistically, and most attempts I've seen at realism (Role Master and Dwarf Fortress come to mind) in fact produce non-realistic narratives that are arguably no more realistic in the narrative than what a good DM would produce with narration taking cues from D&D's hit point system and quite possibly a lot less. For all the fact that Dwarf Fortress models the body down to the level of thickness of tissue, in point of fact the narratives produced by Dwarf Fortress combats hew closer to the ridiculously comic end of the spectrum than they do to gritty realism. They are filled with implausible absurdities and repetitive silliness. Realistic injuries don't just involve tangible locations and lingering effects, but the really critical effects of injury are always shock, blood loss and organ damage. Plus, realistic injuries would spend a lot of time with infection and septic shock and all the stuff that kills you hours or days after the fight is over. Dwarf fortress does do this, but not in any way that ultimately feels realistic. Nor does realism really support the trope, "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" that most adventure gaming wants to support by way of mechanical character development and advancement.

In short, I don't think there is a system for recording injury that happily supports more different aesthetics of play than some sort of hit point system. While hit points are never going to be "realistic", you can make nods toward realism by various tweaks of the system and I think no one has ever produced a realistic system that is fun in tabletop play anyway for the reasons I outlined in the my prior post.

 

[Li Shenron]

I think there are a bundle of problems. Not having monsters fight to the death is harder than you might think. In real ancient warfare, the majority of fatalities were inflicted usually during the 'rout' portion of the fight. That is, the two sides would engage until one side's morale would fail, and then the side with the failing morale would rout and during the rout phase they'd be overrun by cavalry and run down and basically mass stabbed in the back by the winning side. Part of what made the Greek Phalanx so devastating wasn't just superior weaponry, but superior military discipline - the Greeks didn't rout. And there are plenty of examples in the real world of individuals and units not routing and fighting to the death, either from fanaticism or discipline or sheer personal tenacity. Indeed, most military traditions are about instilling this willingness to fight to the death into its elite soldiery through some sort of process, precisely because if your unit doesn't rout the enemy will tend to do so. I could go through a lot of real world examples, but it would invariably get political. Suffice to say, I think the truth of that statement will be born out in the investigations of the interested student, and as a hopefully non-political example consider how the "beserker" concept reoccurs through almost all tribal and animistic cultures.

All this applies only when you are fighting a military organized group, which normally implies intelligent humanoid creatures. It depends on the type of campaign you like to run, but the majority of monsters in the MM are not.

The blog I mentioned does explain how many creatures are compelled to fight to the death by fanaticism or unnatural compulsion (e.g. undead, who by the way are already dead), while for many others survival is paramount.

The question I raise is that IMXP the majority of DMs run all monsters fighting to the death by default, and the majority of players won't even think about retreating from a fight, but not because they understand that retreating is difficult... rather, because they assume they must either win every combat they couldn't avoid or gloriously die trying (and let's face it, most players just like fighting more than escape or avoidance!). The discussion probably requires to treat PCs and monsters somewhat separately.

In addition, I was wondering if a key part of the question is when it would make sense to retreat. One reason why retreating (from a D&D combat, not from a real-life battle) is difficult, might also be that by the time it even comes to the players minds, it's already too late and fleeing might result in just granting lots of free attacks to the opponents (but notice here how the idea that the opponents will invariably choose to pursue and take advantage of those attacks kind of implies that we're still stuck imagining a military-like situation that it's true only in some cases). But if we switch the focus to the monsters, it suddenly makes more sense that many of them would actually retreat quite early.

The crux of the problem is that probably most of us DMs don't take the time to consider the purposes of those involved in a combat. Survival is a primary purpose for the majority of creatures, minus undead (they're already dead), fiends et al (they can't really die), and fanatics (they might believe it's actually convenient to die). Mostly everyone else won't want to die. Proportions of the two categories within a campaign can vary a lot, but at least let's recognize that both camps exist. But then there is also the purpose of why the creatures are in a fight in the first place: whether they are hunting for food, defending their territory, or wanting something else can affect their retreat choice. For example, I don't think a tiger would attack the PCs thinking they are food, unless the tiger pretty much assumed (mistakenly, of course) that they would be an easy prey (predators don't target difficult preys!), so what's it going to do when it realizes that the PCs can fight back? Actually, it might even make sense for predator monsters to flee as soon as they take any damage, or at least any solid hit.

A morale check system or any other system that makes this random suffers the same problems with respect to fulfilling gamist goals as random wound systems. The game becomes too unpredictable to design challenges well. If you design the encounter with orcs on the assumption that they'll rout at some point, then it takes a larger number of orcs to challenge a given party than normal. But, if this group doesn't rout at the expected point, then the PC party will have to, with the attendant risk of being the one that will suffer disproportionately large casualties during the rout phase. To avoid this, you'd need basically 'hit points for morale' so that groups would rout at a somewhat predictable point. I've never seen a system implement this.

I don't like morale checks either, precisely because of what you say, and despite my fondness for randomness. I think it's better to think if and when the monsters would retreat.

 

[Celebrim]

All this applies only when you are fighting a military organized group, which normally implies intelligent humanoid creatures. It depends on the type of campaign you like to run, but the majority of monsters in the MM are not.

Rather than argue about this my advice to you is to try it. Put your ideas into practice, observe the results for about 10 or 20 years, and then get back to me.

In addition, I was wondering if a key part of the question is when it would make sense to retreat. One reason why retreating (from a D&D combat, not from a real-life battle) is difficult, might also be that by the time it even comes to the players minds, it's already too late and fleeing might result in just granting lots of free attacks to the opponents (but notice here how the idea that the opponents will invariably choose to pursue and take advantage of those attacks kind of implies that we're still stuck imagining a military-like situation that it's true only in some cases). But if we switch the focus to the monsters, it suddenly makes more sense that many of them would actually retreat quite early.

This is a confusing jumble of sentences. At the beginning of the idea you are focusing on whether or not a monster which is winning a fight would be motivated to pursue a fleeing PC. But just a few sentences later you are offering a conclusion that monsters would retreat quite early. You offer nothing to support the conclusion and at the same time offer nothing to support the thesis.

In fact, if a monster is winning and it had a motivation to fight in the first place then the monster will almost certainly pursue if only to deter the intruders from being a further threat. The only time a monster that is winning logically isn't going to pursue is when it can't or when its motivation was entirely to defend it's lair. For example, if the monster was motivated by hunger, well the food is getting away. If the monster is undead, it's probably motivated by some sort of unnatural hatred of life. If the monster was motivated by greed, well the treasure is getting away And so forth. As a practical matter, the reason I suggest that a PC party that flees is simply giving a monster free hits is because that's how it works in play if you pursue a 'realistic' or 'naturalistic' approach. It has nothing at all to do with assuming all monsters are part of an organized military.

Sure, if the PC's plan for retreat very well, maybe they can do it. But planning for retreat is a very advanced skill and not everyone who is playing D&D is or even wants to be a tactical mastermind because that isn't why they RP.

The crux of the problem is that probably most of us DMs don't take the time to consider the purposes of those involved in a combat.

No, the crux of the problem is that even if you do consider casual realism or a naturalistic feel, retreat still isn't a very viable option generally (from a casual realistic perspective) and it's a particularly problematic option under the D&D rules specifically. Retreat isn't easy. The US Marines for example don't even teach it because successfully disengaging is harder and more dangerous than attacking, which is the same lesson PC's will learn if they try both tactics. Not only is retreat difficult, but the short durations of D&D combats and the fact that armored humans and dwarfs and so forth are probably the slowest things in D&D means that in D&D in particular the rules are stacked against you.

Monsters are generally much more capable of retreating than the PC's are, in that monsters often have movement modes (flying, swimming, burrowing, ethereal, etc.) the PC's don't and are typically faster than the PC's and yet even if you as a DM try to simulate monsters retreating it rarely actually works or is any sort of a rational decision for the monster or a satisfying way to run the combat. One reason for that is PC's tend to dominate ranged combat, and monsters are generally unable to get out of range of the PC's for 2-3 rounds - which is as long as a D&D combat usually runs anyway. In other words, retreating a monster except in situations where you've stacked the deck in the monster's favor with some sort of gimmick and planned for the retreat, rarely works and feels like to everyone involved the monster just giving up and trying to lose. And once again, just as to pull off a retreat successfully requires tactical mastery by the PCs, retreating an NPC successfully requires tactical mastery by the DM that not all DMs have.

I don't like morale checks either, precisely because of what you say, and despite my fondness for randomness. I think it's better to think if and when the monsters would retreat.

That's what I prefer to do as well, but I'm just trying to explain that even if you do think about whether monsters would retreat, parlay, surrender, cower or what not it turns out that that advice is not particularly applicable. So much advice I see written about how to play an RPG is based on theory crafting rather than, "This worked for me for years." There are lots of things I've tried over the years to make the game "more realistic" that just doesn't work in the long run. Naturalistic encounters tend to result in a lot of non-encounter encounters that become ho hum after the third or fourth time. There is only so long and so much you can do to make, "You see a X. It's not interested in eating you." interesting. There is only so much value retreating monsters that fail their morale can add, especially if the monster then doesn't turn into some other sort of encounter. Turning combats into RP opportunities is great. Turning combats into chases is great. Turning combats into boring combats is not great.

 

[Li Shenron]

You offer nothing to support the conclusion and at the same time offer nothing to support the thesis.

What conclusion?

In fact, if a monster is winning and it had a motivation to fight in the first place then the monster will almost certainly pursue if only to deter the intruders from being a further threat.

I am not really sure. When the monster initiated the fight then yes, because it presumably had a purpose (as you mentioned: hunger, greed, sport or something more complicated if intelligent): even in these cases a pursue wouldn't necessary be unlimited, it could very likely stop once it kills one for food or once it acquires what he's greed about, ignoring the rest. When the monster is attacked by the PCs, once the threat is no more its main purpose (survival) is fulfilled, it won't necessarily pursue even if winning. If it has something else to defend other than itself, I actually think it would not pursue at all (would a group of guards leave their post to pursue?).

I tend to see the discussion more from the point of view of the monsters, because as a DM I am not going to tell the players what they should do, so when talking about fleeing/retreat I have in mind the monsters doing so. The tiger example I brought up, was actually in my mind meant as a random encounter, so that the PCs don't have any special motivation of their own for truly killing it. I think that most typically a DM would just have the tiger (or whatever) fight to the death. But wouldn't it make sense that the tiger attacked the PCs for food? And then after being wounded (not much problem here narrating the HP loss of a random encounter monster as real wounds) the predator would probably realize its mistake and run for its life.

Anyway, we ended up over-discussing something that was not my main intention... fleeing was just one but not the only combat outcome alternative to a fight-to-the-death that I wanted to consider, there are also for example voluntary surrender, forced capture (e.g. with restraining) and truce/parley (the latter in case no side is clearly winning). Not that the D&D combat rules supports these options very well unfortunately, especially the last one, but my original idea was just to think whether trying to use some alternatives to have less than 100% combats to the death (and consequently also PCs less frequently dropping unconscious) could help mitigate the narrative problems of HP... mainly because combat would then be less frequently fatal.

 

[Celebrim]

What conclusion?

The thesis that the key problem with retreating is not thinking about retreat correctly, and the unrelated conclusion that the monsters have good motivation to retreat early.

I am not really sure. When the monster initiated the fight then yes, because it presumably had a purpose (as you mentioned: hunger, greed, sport or something more complicated if intelligent): even in these cases a pursue wouldn't necessary be unlimited, it could very likely stop once it kills one for food or once it acquires what he's greed about, ignoring the rest.

Well sure, but you are arguing into my point rather than out of it. One of the PC's getting eaten so that the others might escape is not a tactically or socially desirable outcome. It is in fact the logical result of choosing to retreat, which is one of the reasons players don't choose to retreat very often. In my experience, really skilled parties would rather risk TPK than retreat in a situation where one or more of the PCs aren't going to make it. That's because the vast majority of deaths in D&D occur when party cohesion breaks down and the party stops acting as a unit.

The vast majority of PC deaths in my current campaign have occurred as a result of an ill considered decision to retreat and the party getting pulled down in the rout phase. Yes, the ghouls will stop chasing you when they have carcasses to feast on, or the hellhounds can be distracted by pulling down the slower members of the party, but this is not a tactically sound solution. (The players are getting better. They are learning that if you think you might want to retreat you have to prepare for that ahead of time and not expect that you can retreat just by running away.)

When the monster is attacked by the PCs, once the threat is no more its main purpose (survival) is fulfilled, it won't necessarily pursue even if winning. If it has something else to defend other than itself, I actually think it would not pursue at all (would a group of guards leave their post to pursue?).

Put it into practice and see how it works. It's rare in my games that monsters that the PC's are in combat with have the main purpose survival unless the PC's have invaded the monsters lair and the PCs have the intention of fighting to the death.

Animals generally stop being a problem for a PC party somewhere around 2nd or 3rd level. PC's are rarely in combat with anything that has 'flight' more as its response to danger than 'fight', so combats with antelope are for example pretty rare. Watch some nature videos though, of say lions fighting cape buffalo or lions fighting warthogs or lions fighting elephants. Even in the case of a warthog, while pursuit isn't unlimited, if the warthog gets the upper hand it won't immediately break off pursuit. It's motivation here is survival, but part of that survival mindset is teaching a lesson to the predator not to try that ever again.

But this is vanishingly rare. D&D combats are usually over quickly. Even with a "dumb" animal, it's not like there is a long gap in D&D between, "Oh I got hurt." and "Oh I'm dead." And even if you try to exploit that gap, in the round or two it takes to retreat it's dead from missile fire. PC's very much will pursue anything to dead for a variety of reasons both in game and out of game (they fear being cheated out of XP for example). It's very rare for any monster I decide will rationally retreat at this point to actually get away. More usually, if its something like orcs or velociraptors that attack in a group, a couple might survive the decision to pick a fight with the PCs for the same reason some of the PC's might get away if the whole group routs.

It's not that attempts to retreat don't occur it's that they don't work and the intention to retreat doesn't stop injuries from being severe. I mean, it's not that unusual for a retreat to include some PC's unconscious body being slung over some larger PC's shoulder (or mount).

Heck yes guards will pursue. Not only will they pursue, they'll raise a hue and cry to organize a larger pursuit. You try in the real world assaulting a police officer or some such and see how tenaciously they'll pursue you. Rationally there is a cost to "letting them get away" that is the same reason the warthog pursues the young lioness that thought it easy prey, or the mother elephant keeps charging an intruder that got too close to its young even though the intruder is already retreating. You have a motivation to survive but part of that motivation is making sure nothing jumps you in the future. You at the very least want to put the fear of you in the thing, and vengeance is not a purely human motivation. I'm sure there are exceptions, and oath bound outsiders sworn to protect a lair would be an example of something that literally can't leave to pursue, but those are exceptions.

And speaking of which, generally my players tend to use the logic, "If we could retreat successfully, we could probably also kite the monster successfully."

The tiger example I brought up, was actually in my mind meant as a random encounter, so that the PCs don't have any special motivation of their own for truly killing it. I think that most typically a DM would just have the tiger (or whatever) fight to the death. But wouldn't it make sense that the tiger attacked the PCs for food? And then after being wounded (not much problem here narrating the HP loss of a random encounter monster as real wounds) the predator would probably realize its mistake and run for its life.

Sure. But a "tiger" is a rare encounter that isn't really relevant after about 3rd level. And if I wanted to justify a tiger fighting to the death, I'd just have the tiger be a mother tiger with cubs hidden nearby that she refused to abandon. That would be a far more interesting encounter than "A tiger attacks a large armed party but ooops it got in over its head." My advice would be to just not have encounters like that since they don't really fufill any particular aesthetic of play that the players might have - it's not challenge, it feels forced and unrealistic, and it offers no narrative scope. But mommy tiger defending her cubs is a challenge, feels justified, and offers narrative scope, "Look tiger kittens...Oh, she was just defending her cubs.... Aren't they cute." and even RP opportunity assuming you can speak with tigers, "Oh.... she just thinks we are a danger to her cubs!" "I want to eat you" doesn't leave much in the way of RP opportunity anyway.

Nor do I see what this point has to do with the topic that started your line of thought, which is can we use retreat as a means of justifying the PC's being healed fully the next day. Are we trying to justify the tiger as being fully healed the next day?

Basically I'm saying I had these thoughts 30 years ago, and after 30 years I no longer consider 'retreat' a functional solution to much anything for either PCs or NPCs (except turning planned combat encounters into planned chase encounters or visa versa). Aside from the fact that a vast swath of monsters don't retreat or can't as a matter of practice retreat, it's very gimmicky, hard to pull off, and doesn't add much to the game. It's best to just avoid having encounters where the monster has only a small motivation to enter combat, unless that small motivation is used as a justification for turning a boring combat encounter into something more interesting.