D&D General If you could put D&D into any other non middle ages genre, what would it be?

robus · Jun 22, 2019

Oofta said:
So let me get this straight. HP works for flying arrows, being cut to bits or run through by a sword, bludgeoned by maces, ripped to shreds by dragons bigger than a city bus ... but not for bullets? Real world stories of people being shot 20+ times mean nothing because in some movies of a specific genre bullets are always 100% lethal. Except when it's "just a flesh wound" but apparently we're ignoring those. Bullets are never shown to simply bounce off or be stopped by body armor because we couldn't possibly have the equivalent of kevlar for armor (or just high quality steel) in a fantasy setting where we have made up metals like mithral and adamantium. There has never been a case were police fired nearly 2,000 rounds trying to take out a pair of bank robbers. Well except for this one.

To me, HP works to model your ability to defend against these attacks, generally they’re attacks you can see coming or come at a speed (if ranged) that you can react to in time to reduce the lethal damage to a scratch or a bruise or whatever.

Bullets are magical death delivery devices that never miss unless you are behind cover. Unless of course you're the hero of virtually every action movie ever made.

I think the difference is we know how lethal guns are, people are getting killed by them every day, and yes action heroes don’t get shot, but you also don’t see them get any sort of wearing down either. It’s cat and mouse until someone gets the lucky shot and it’s over (in the movie inevitably it’s the bad guy, but that doesn’t work in a game. The PC has to have some risk or there’s no tension). Modeling that through HP would work but the feel, IMHO, would be off (because, unless you’re wearing kevlar, a shot that hits is a shot that does major damage and is often lethal).

Probably the classic movie scene that sums this up is in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indy goes up against the sword fighter and after seeing some fancy sword play just shoots the poor guy dead.

Is the concept of HP a simplification of tracking damage? Sure. But as far as I can tell the basic concept has been adopted by nearly all video games that feature modern or futuristic weapons. So why is it they won't work for D&D again? Admittedly a lot of video games also throw in armor that can take damage, but pretty much all of the games I've ever played also have underlying HP that needs to be reduce to 0 to kill off your avatar.

In D&D, to me, it’s two things: For NPCs it’s tracking damage, because that’s fun for the players, but for PCs it’s tracking their fighting spirit. They get cuts and bruises along the way, but mostly it’s showing how their ability to stay in the fight is going. When PCs get to 0 HP that’s when their flagging resources have finally allowed an opening for a potentially lethal hit.

CapnZapp · Jun 22, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
If you're watching that scene in the movie, do you really expect the hero to get shot dead in that moment? Seriously?

Please don't do that, as if I'm presenting a completely baffling viewpoint for the first time.

I am explaining how and why using hit points as a damage model can run into acceptance issues. Some reasons are less obvious than others.

Refusing to accept that it is possible, common even, to run into issues with the hit point based damage model does not help in the slightest.

CapnZapp · Jun 22, 2019

Tony Vargas said:
And, if hp loss doesn't give you a sense of the character being in danger, functional alternatives, like Fortune Points or the like, aren't likely to, either.

No, that the exact opposite of what I am saying.

And for the umpteenth time, do *not* reduce damage models to plot armor.

Yes, both hit points and alternatives function as plot armor.

But that does not mean they are identical.

Indeed, my entire point is that these differences are *very likely* to make a difference.

It's a big reason why you might face acceptance issues for firearms even though you might not face any for greatswords.

CapnZapp · Jun 22, 2019

Oofta said:
So let me get this straight. HP works for flying arrows, being cut to bits or run through by a sword, bludgeoned by maces, ripped to shreds by dragons bigger than a city bus ... but not for bullets? Real world stories of people being shot 20+ times mean nothing because in some movies of a specific genre bullets are always 100% lethal. Except when it's "just a flesh wound" but apparently we're ignoring those. Bullets are never shown to simply bounce off or be stopped by body armor because we couldn't possibly have the equivalent of kevlar for armor (or just high quality steel) in a fantasy setting where we have made up metals like mithral and adamantium. There has never been a case were police fired nearly 2,000 rounds trying to take out a pair of bank robbers. Well except for this one.

Bullets are magical death delivery devices that never miss unless you are behind cover. Unless of course you're the hero of virtually every action movie ever made.

Is the concept of HP a simplification of tracking damage? Sure. But as far as I can tell the basic concept has been adopted by nearly all video games that feature modern or futuristic weapons. So why is it they won't work for D&D again? Admittedly a lot of video games also throw in armor that can take damage, but pretty much all of the games I've ever played also have underlying HP that needs to be reduce to 0 to kill off your avatar.

If you genuinely want to understand viewpoints of others than yourself, it would help if you actually listen. To them, not yourself.

Oofta · Jun 22, 2019

robus said:
To me, HP works to model your ability to defend against these attacks, generally they’re attacks you can see coming or come at a speed (if ranged) that you can react to in time to reduce the lethal damage to a scratch or a bruise or whatever.

I think the difference is we know how lethal guns are, people are getting killed by them every day, and yes action heroes don’t get shot, but you also don’t see them get any sort of wearing down either. It’s cat and mouse until someone gets the lucky shot and it’s over (in the movie inevitably it’s the bad guy, but that doesn’t work in a game. The PC has to have some risk or there’s no tension). Modeling that through HP would work but the feel, IMHO, would be off (because, unless you’re wearing kevlar, a shot that hits is a shot that does major damage and is often lethal).

Probably the classic movie scene that sums this up is in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indy goes up against the sword fighter and after seeing some fancy sword play just shoots the poor guy dead.

In D&D, to me, it’s two things: For NPCs it’s tracking damage, because that’s fun for the players, but for PCs it’s tracking their fighting spirit. They get cuts and bruises along the way, but mostly it’s showing how their ability to stay in the fight is going. When PCs get to 0 HP that’s when their flagging resources have finally allowed an opening for a potentially lethal hit.

There was a Mythbusters episode on dodging arrows. They had a martial arts expert try to dodge arrows shot from low-powered bows. He couldn't do it even when he knew exactly when and where the arrow was coming from. In addition, it doesn't really matter if you see that grizzly bear about to rip your face off, you're still not going to be able to get out of the way*. Last but not least, you seem to be treating bullets as some kind of seeking device that never misses. If you go by the western genre, Matt Dillon was shot 79 times (and once by an arrow). I can't count the number of times in movies/TV someone was just shot "in the shoulder", was grazed or just had a "flesh wound". They slap a bandage on it which immediately gets soaked in blood and ignore it after a minute.

As far as the sword guy in Indiana Jones, that was the standard bad guy minion. The same NPC type that gets taken out by a single punch, a thrown knife to the chest, a single arrow, being stabbed once with a combat knife, a single sword thrust, a single ... well you get the idea. Nameless bad guys die easily all the time.

My point is simple. We either accept the constructs of AC and HP (I do) or we don't. If we do, then I see no reason based on reality (people have survived being shot 20+ times, google it). People used bows and melee weapons to kill people for millennia because they were effective. If we go by fiction we have everything from Gunsmoke and Matt Dillon to Rambo. Video games? The vast majority of video games ever made rely on some combination of AC and HP.

As far as bullets leaving lasting wounds and healing ... so what? There are optional rules for that if you really want to implement it. I don't think it would be fun, but to each their own.

CapnZapp said:
If you genuinely want to understand viewpoints of others than yourself, it would help if you actually listen. To them, not yourself.

Can you summarize your point? Because my bullet point list would be

Guns kill people
The only way to avoid getting killed by a gun is to get behind cover
Bullet wounds should inflict lasting damage

My bullet points are

It's common in fiction (movies, TV, video games) to be shot or shot multiple times if you're a named character. Sometimes it's near misses, other times it's "just a flesh wound" or a graze.
If you're a nameless mook you can get taken out easily with one hit from just about any weapon or even just a single punch.
You can't dodge out of the way of arrows (see Mythbusters).
You might be able to dodge out of the way of some melee attacks but not as many as people are implying. Good luck dodging a charging grizzly bear.
We accept HP and AC because it works well enough for the game. Arguing about what HP really means has no real relevance, a solid hit with a claymore is going to make you just as dead as a solid hit from a .45.

Am I missing something? Or are you just pulling the tired old "If you really understood you'd agree with me"? Because people can have differences of opinion on what makes a fun game. It's not the end of the world.

EDIT: *If you can dodge out of the way of an attack that's reflected by adding your dexterity modifier to your AC, not HP. Personally I've been tempted to (but never have) limit the bonus to AC you can get from dex, but it's just one of those things I accept because it's a game.

Fenris-77 · Jun 22, 2019

You don't get that issue about greatswords because at a very fundamental level most people don't understand medieval combat and it's consequences at all. Most people have at least a semi-fictionalized understanding of guns and what they actually do, even people with firearms training and solid theoretical understanding of firearms injury. You can see that particular knowledge gap at work in this thread. The knowledge gap about medieval combat is significantly larger for most people, and the extent to which their knowledge is fictionalized much greater. Hit points do as poor a job modelling injury from bladed weapons as they do for firearms.

You know what though? It doesn't matter a whit. D&D isn't a simulation and isn't even pretending to attempt to account for realistic firearms injury. Anyone who's salty about that should play another system. That's not snark, just reality - D&D isn't interested in modelling accurate damage from anything, be it swords or guns. D&D is good at modelling the resistance of fictional heroes to fictional damage over the course of a fantasy story arc. If you want your fictional heroes to take their fictional damage a little differently, say Heroes Die instead of Elfstones of Shannara, hack away. But if you want to get all granular about the actual effects of hydrostatic shock you're probably riding the wrong ride.

CapnZapp · Jun 22, 2019

Fenris-77 said:
D&D isn't a simulation and isn't even pretending to attempt to account for realistic firearms injury. Anyone who's salty about that should play another system. That's not snark, just reality - D&D isn't interested in modelling accurate damage from anything, be it swords or guns. D&D is good at modelling the resistance of fictional heroes to fictional damage over the course of a fantasy story arc. If you want your fictional heroes to take their fictional damage a little differently, say Heroes Die instead of Elfstones of Shannara, hack away. But if you want to get all granular about the actual effects of hydrostatic shock you're probably riding the wrong ride.

That is a very simplistic way of looking at things.

It is perfectly possible - common even - to be content with D&D for faix-medieval melee-centric combat, and yet find the exact same system entirely inadequate for faux-modern ranged-centric combat.

So there must be more to it than that.

And sure enough, there is.

robus · Jun 22, 2019

Yeah I’m probably too wedded to my interpretation of HP to bend it towards firearms against PCs. Not that I’d run a game like that in D&D anyway. So it was mostly a thought experiment.

Fenris-77 · Jun 22, 2019

CapnZapp said:
That is a very simplistic way of looking at things.

It is perfectly possible - common even - to be content with D&D for faix-medieval melee-centric combat, and yet find the exact same system entirely inadequate for faux-modern ranged-centric combat.

So there must be more to it than that.

And sure enough, there is.

I didn't say anyone wasn't content (I am btw) with certain things, nor that the system might be better at one that the other (it i). The fact remains that, contentedness aside, D&D isn't modelling accurate damage from any kind of weapon. An individual might not be happy about how HP models faux-modern ranged combat, but really, so what? It isn't designed to do that. The point at which people find it "entirely inadequate" is because those people have very different expectations about firearms and their damage relative to melee with blunt and bladed weapons. Those expectations are based on very fictional understandings of medieval combat and less fictional understandings of firearms. You can't be ok with highly fictional on the one hand and not on the other without a willingness to admit that it's your expectations, not the system, that are the issue. Or at least a big part of the issue.

I do agree that there's more to it than that, but I also think it's pretty cogent to point out what amounts to a category mistake at the heart of the issue at hand.

Maxperson · Jun 22, 2019

robus said:
To me, HP works to model your ability to defend against these attacks, generally they’re attacks you can see coming or come at a speed (if ranged) that you can react to in time to reduce the lethal damage to a scratch or a bruise or whatever.

And that's fine if it's how you want to model hit points. The game however, needs to model damage for guns in the manner it models hit points, and to the game luck and divine aid are also forms of hit points. How many times have we seen in a movie where the cross-hairs or red dot are on the hero's head, but he moves at the last second and the shot misses him by a fraction of an inch? Those in D&D are modeled by both misses and hit point damage, depending on the situation.

If you don't want to include those sorts of hit points in your game, then of course you don't have to use them.

I think the difference is we know how lethal guns are, people are getting killed by them every day, and yes action heroes don’t get shot, but you also don’t see them get any sort of wearing down either. It’s cat and mouse until someone gets the lucky shot and it’s over (in the movie inevitably it’s the bad guy, but that doesn’t work in a game. The PC has to have some risk or there’s no tension). Modeling that through HP would work but the feel, IMHO, would be off (because, unless you’re wearing kevlar, a shot that hits is a shot that does major damage and is often lethal).

A knife strike that hits is also often a wound that does major damage and is often lethal, yet we're okay with hit points modeling those sorts of injuries.

Probably the classic movie scene that sums this up is in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when Indy goes up against the sword fighter and after seeing some fancy sword play just shoots the poor guy dead.

Indicating that the guy was first level and had like 6 hit points. Higher level guys don't just swing swords into the air to show off what they just learned in sword school. They know better and just kill the enemy.