Why do we really need HP to represent things other than physical injuries?

[Mallus]

The whole idea that hp represents your ability to turn lethal blows into less lethal ones and stamina never made much sense because the first one shouldn't diminish that much over time and if you are really losing stamina, then your hp should go down when you attack not just when you get hit.to me using it for anything other than damage introduces all kinds of believability issues.

Yes, hit points model stamina/fatigue badly.

Just like they model physical damage badly.

But they're simple, easy-to-use, and time-tested. So the simplest solution to the hit point conundrum is to stop worrying about what, exactly, hit points model, outside of "the ability of a character to not be dead/dying".

Are they all physical damage? Sure, why not.

Are they not physical damage at all? OK.

Are they a mix of both? If it makes you happy.

Are they a concrete measure of protagonism and an attempt to reconcile the ludic and narrative paradigms which are both operant in role-playing games? Say, were you an English Major -- anyway, yes.

And so on...

 

[Neonchameleon]

Sure, that's a good option.



That helps by making inconsistencies less common, but still doesn't solve the problem that *all* of them can be restored by Bob the Warlord or a five minute breather. Your maybe serious works, but no wound (that wasn't instantly lethal) is found to actually be serious, except possibly in retrospect after e.g. magic was used to heal it.

But a warlord isn't restoring all the damage. The hit point narrative has changed from something utterly inconsistent to something consistent - but different from what many people were doing.

In 4e hit points represent your shock threshold. There's a world of difference between being hit three times in the face by a boxing glove in five seconds and being hit three times in five hours. (Not that I want either).

Your damage is tracked by your healing surges. And unless something either restores a surge or provides hit points without spending a surge it doesn't actually heal you. It just enables you to keep going, stops bleeding, etc. The actual damage you've taken remains unchanged. If your nose was broken, it's still broken. But you've recovered your breath and are ready for the next round.

(Now the 4e extended rest rule is one thing I houserule).

 

[steeldragons]

The problem I have is that if hit points represent physical damage how do you describe the single 50hp hit from the bite of an adult dragon against the 60hp fighter?

Fun! Lessee...off the top of my head?

"Londar raced forward, placing himself between the dread wyrm, Crimsaw, and his fellow adventurers.

The dragon's huge toothy maw snaps forward and catches Londar, below his shield, around the waist and crunches down.

Londar hollers out in pain as Crimsaw lifts the warrior into the air and casually tosses the warrior in his enchanted platemail aside like a rag doll.

Londar lands with a clanging thud, his magic broad sword clattering noisily beside him (*but still within reach).

The pain is immense, not just from the severed skin where one of the teeth sank between his breast and back plates, the torn and bruised muscles for the force of the bite, but the jarring hard landing on the rocks of the cavern that made up the dragon's lair. Londar fights through his momentarily blurred vision and looks for his weapon.

Londar grabs his sword and rises. Unsteady at first, but easily within a few bounds of the massive beast (*he can easily attack again on his turn).

Alicia, the priestess, sees the blood seeping from between the plates, down his leg and the gash in the side of his face for his harsh landing as the dragon's attention turns to the companions who were behind the warrior.

Crimsaw opens its mouth and with a hissing roar in their direction, the party sees the beginning of glowing in the back of its throat.

Alicia raises her arms in a frantic invocation for her god's grace to protect her and her companions from the ravages of the wyrm's expected firy breath.

Londar leaps back toward the dragon's neck...

Roll to hit..."

 

[Crazy Jerome]

No, what I'm trying to say is that one of the options can be interpreted in another way consistently, while the other cannot.

And what we are saying is that this is incorrect. Either way is consistent, depending upon what the underlying assumptions are. That you don't happen to like one set of underlying assumptions is preference. Nothing wrong with that, but it does not inconsistent make.

It's like telling me there was something wrong with my math when I said 2 apples + 2 apples was 4 apples, because in your view what I actually had was 1 apple and 2 apples. There may be something wrong with my facts in that case, but not my math. Unfortunately, the underlying assumptions here are a lot more varied, complicated, and fuzzy than numbers of apples.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Mine is a very naive and honest question. Why can't we just live with HP representing only a creature's ability to take physical damage and injuries before dropping? What are the bad things that will happen to the game if we do that?

There are a number of disconnects that occur if you model damage as purely physical damage.

Now, there are models where this works. One approach is an anime-like ability to shrug away and ignore injuries that would be debilitating or even deadly in the real world. This may even be, arguably, the model under which hp make the most sense, but not everyone wants to play an anime themed game.

You could, alternately, say that every injury causes some amount of harm. However, at this point, luck/skill/etc. begin to enter the picture.

Take two 3e fighters, for example. One has 10 hp, the other has 100 hp. They both take 20 points of damage. The first fighter is dead, while the second fighter hasn't been seriously harmed. Now let's assume that that 20 points of damage came from an elephant trampling the two of them. It seems pretty unrealistic that the second fighter was just slightly bruised by an elephant trampling over him. Therefore, we chalk up the difference to luck, skill, or divine intervention. The first fighter died because the elephant stepped on him, while some factor allowed the second fighter to avoid being crushed. Fighter two may have taken a glancing kick, but he clearly wasn't stepped on like Fighter one was (given that he survives with no crippling injuries).

However, once you've allowed luck/skill/etc. into the picture as above, it's just as easy to allow that some attacks might not connect at all. In some circumstances, it just makes more sense.

Earlier, someone mentioned a character who could skydive without a parachute. IMO, outside of the anime explanation, the only way this can possibly make sense is through luck/divine favor. There have been real world reports of people who fell out of planes and were lucky enough to walk away. But that was luck. I don't think anyone is going to suggest that the reason that person survived was because of superhuman resilience.

Also think about attacks that would cause serious harm. I'd guess that getting hit with a giant's club could be equated to getting hit by a car. A high level fighter goes up against a giant. Are we really saying that he can withstand the trauma of being hit by a car repeatedly? Even if we say that he's just clipped by the club (sideswiped by a car), he should be in seriously bad shape after a few "hits". To me, it makes much more sense to model the first few "hits" as near misses instead. As for recovery time, luck is an abstract; who's to say it doesn't take as long to recover as a bone takes to mend?

Finally, I'll point out what the system's creator, Gary Gygax, had to say about the matter. To paraphrase him, it's absurd to think that a mid level fighter could absorb as much physical punishment as several warhorses. Hence, a small fraction of hp represents the ability to actually take physical injuries, while the majority represent other factors. If you'd like, let me know and I'll post the relevant (PHB 1e and DMG 1e) quotes for you.

It's not that you can't model hp as purely physical. It's that when you do so, you end up with something very different from the real world or even most fantasy (outside anime). If that works for you that's fine, but some of us prefer Gygax's views on the matter.

 

[Mattachine]

Your damage is tracked by your healing surges. And unless something either restores a surge or provides hit points without spending a surge it doesn't actually heal you. It just enables you to keep going, stops bleeding, etc. The actual damage you've taken remains unchanged. If your nose was broken, it's still broken. But you've recovered your breath and are ready for the next round.

Yes, yes, yes!

So many people, even ones that play and like 4e, do not get this. Healing surges represent damage, and hit points are tiny subdivisions of that.

In fact, one way to play a more lethal/gritty game of 4e is to reduce the number of healing surges, allow effects to take away surges (like, losing a surge on a crit), and so forth.

Unfortunately, 4e did a bad job explaining it.

 

[Kingreaper]

Admittedly, it is more balls to keep in the air, and if you get distracted, you might drop one. "Hey, wait a minute, Bob got nothing but arrows to chest, and now you shout it out?" For me, that's a call to get in the habit of varying my narration, which fortunately I did in 1981 because of the issue with hit points in Basic.

One idea I came up with to help

Essentially, you're restoring the HP, because the HP is the capability they have right then. Sure, they may have an arrow in them, but they've pushed past it, they can ignore it for now.

But they can only take so many wounds before they're done.

 

[Minigiant]

The truth is a lot of D&D relies on abstraction of a result which could be several possibilities.

A 20ft giant can hit a 3ft gnome and somehow he isn't automatically dead, knocked down, or knocked across the room. The same is how he evaded the fireball that covered the room with heat and took no damage. Then the dragon bites him and he still survives.

D&D, where the result of an attack can be anything.

 

[Andor]

Another useful thought is this: HP only really represent in combat damage. With adrenalin flowing humans can continue to operate with really staggering amounts of damage. For a little while.

Then the adrenaline crashes and you go into shock and it takes an emergency room to keep you alive, but before that some people carry others out of burning buildings while leaking from multiple bullet wounds.

And D&D (in every edition) kind of passes over out of combat wound treatment. Maybe Gognotz the berserker needed cpr and a transfusion after the fight, but it was folded into a 'long rest' and not show on screen.

All a positive HP score tells you is he can still swing an axe even if he's stepping on his own spleen while he does it.

This is similar to the way NeonChameleon describes 4e Healing surges, and while that then raises the question of how it is that no wound can take more than a night to heal, the fact of the matter if that we are playing Dungeons & Dragons, not Paramedics and Painpills. Damage and healing has never been modeled accurately in any past edition, and never will be in any future edition. Even the holodeck one.

Look at RoleMaster where a healing mage has entire seperate spell lists for every organ and body system. Blood spells, skin spells, muscles spells, tendon spells, organ spells. What does this add to the game? A lot of annoyance, as far as I can tell.

Damage in reality is really odd and swingy. Big strong guys have died of shock from minor wounds and little old ladies have been run over and walked home. When you consider weirdness like that, hp isn't really a bad way to model it.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

[MENTION=1879]Andor[/MENTION], yes, that is why I agree with several people that the more interesting and useful place to put options/restridtions on a 4E-style healing is in the restoration of surges, not the use of them. How surges come back, when, and what that costs you, has a far more dramatic effect on the model than whether a warlord shouts you back to your feet or not.