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

[tomBitonti]

The Elephant in the room (more PB&J please)

Hi,

There is a bigger problem: D&D has no meaningful damage state. You are either "fully functioning", "out of it, but within a rest of being on your feet", or "dead". Treating hit points like actual damage is silly when there is no meaningful consequence of the damage. Real wounds have recovery times in months, if not more, and many leave lasting impairment.

Net: Treating hit points as more than an abstraction leads one down a path detail that has a bottom much below the notion of hit point reduction being actual damage.

My best interpretation of hit points as the same sort of abstraction that we use to model electrons en-masse. In large numbers, you can treat electrons as having continuous behavior, as the quantum behavior manifests consistently. In detail, electrons work discretely, and the continuous math must be re-interpreted to fit it to the quantum level.

Like-wise, hit points are an abstraction meant to measure some level of "probably of being killed", formulated to allow possible killing blows to work ablatively.

TomB

 

[Aenghus]

And why is that a problem? When the quest has a strict time limit it just becomes another obstacle to overcome. The PCs have to press on even when not at full HP or with some empty spell slots. That imo adds challenge to the game and also makes it more believable than full healing after a nights sleep even when you were knocked below 0 several times the last day without any form of supernatural intervention.

Because I'm talking about a style of play in this case that can put story concerns over "realism" and mundane believability, one where player challenges come in different guises than hit point management. Bending over backwards to fit semi-gritty hp management to a more dramatic style of game is missing the point and mismatching the mechanics to the genre.

Slow healing just doesn't fit every conceivable style of play, and it doesn't have to, as the new game is supposed to give options to fit most play styles.

In a more action-adventure game, hp damage is superficial cuts and scrapes which doesn't impede the PCs (and indeed hp damage in the standard game doesn't penalise players). Recovering sufficiently to be functional overnight fits the action-adventure genre, even though its unrealistic.

Damage descriptions need to fit the type of game intended, and applying an inappropriate description to hp damage can result in glitches where what's described doesn't fit the game as it turns out.

 

[Fifth Element]

Your assuming the character has stabilized (which is not necessarily guaranteed when providing such narration).

We're talking about the capability to heal naturally and its effect on narration. If you have a dedicated healer you can auto-make a DC 15 Heal check by what, 3rd level? It's a mundane source of healing, and not magic.

As such, the considerable likelihood is that the guts across the floor injured character will die rather than get the opportunity to heal naturally in a handful of days as I described above.

Of course, and if the party's resting then the healers will be using all of their spells for healing on those days. But that has nothing to do with the natural healing rules.

My understanding of the rules, which I double-checked on the online SRD, is that it is 1 hp/level/8 hr of rest, or 2 hp/level/day of bed rest, and that a successful Heal check at DC 15 doubles either rate:

Providing long-term care means treating a wounded person for a day or more. If your Heal check is successful, the patient recovers hit points or ability score points (lost to ability damage) at twice the normal rate: 2 hit points per level for a full 8 hours of rest in a day, or 4 hit points per level for each full day of complete rest​

Taking 10 for the DC on the nursing check requires a +5 or better bonus - which is 4 ranks, +1 for stat or +2 for feat - hence my comment that nearly any trained nurse can provide the requisite level of care.

I forgot that entirely. So now we have a 20th-level fighter with 195 hit points, going from -9 to full hp in three days rather than five, through natural healing only.

Almost died from your wounds on Thursday? No problem, take the long weekend to rest and you'll be full strength on Monday!

This is why people have such a difficult time coming to any sort of agreement here. 1 day or 9 days? It's like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Who cares? If realism is the issue, both rules are about equally realistic. No matter how much you want to play with numbers.

Agreed. If realism is important, I suppose 9 days is better than 3, but arguably not because it's still extremely unrealistic.

In the heat of battle, decapitation is a wound. Everything else is abstract.

Dig it.

 

[Grydan]

And yet when they succeded, were all the wounded in the unit suddenly be able to fight at 100% again?
i admit I skipped the draft so I can't speak from experience, but lets take for example the events in Mogadishu (Blackhawk Down). They had wounded personell and managed to hole themselves up for a night. In D&D that means that the wounded would be combat ready again the next day.

No, that's not what it would mean.

In D&D terms, their injuries simply cannot have been solely or even primarily HP loss in the first place, or else they would still have been able to fight at 100% without requiring the rest in the first place.

An injury that doesn't have an impact on your ability to fight or flee isn't worth calling an injury.

If you actually want to model injury, you have to step outside of the HP mechanic, and start imposing lasting negative conditions that require significant time and/or significant resources to remove.

 

[Derren]

An injury that doesn't have an impact on your ability to fight or flee isn't worth calling an injury.

And yet those injuries bring you close to death so that only outside intervention within seconds can save you.

No, there is no way to describe something as this as not an injury. The problem is simply that D&D has no penalties for being injured. But that doesn't negate that the way D&D is structured such things are injuries and not abstract "chances to be hit" or morale or something like that.

In D&D you do not loose HP when something lowers your morale and you can't get poisoned by a non-hit.

 

[Grydan]

[MENTION=2518]Derren[/MENTION]

As I've said before, HP is purely an abstract measure of how likely your character is to fall unconscious and/or drop dead.

It's quite easy to describe something that doesn't impair you in any way as not an injury. It's much harder, in my mind, to do the reverse.

Take two characters with mechanically identical character sheets.

Hit one for 50% of his HP.
Hit the other for 10% of his HP, and impose a condition that gives him a -1 penalty to AC and Reflex, as well as to attacks, and all Dex, Str, and Con based checks.

One of those characters is a lot closer to death. The other is actually injured.

 

[Nethel]

Hey everyone, I've posted my thoughts to this debate over in http://www.enworld.org/forum/new-ho...l-solution-hit-points-debate.html#post5939624 I figured it was divergent enough to warrant its own thread.

Might be worth a look

 

[Aenghus]

Those who are content with abstract hit points don't need a more elaborate wound tracking system. Adding such a system for everyone is an unnecessary complication.

That's not to reduce it's usefulness to those who do want such a system.

But the simplicity of the hit point mechanic shouldn't be casually discarded without a clear idea of the desired result. While abstract hp lack the detail some people obviously crave, they have served D&D well for decades, and are sufficient for most games IMO.

A more complex system will need extensive testing to shake out any bugs and discover and deal with any unintended side effects. And it will need to be strictly optional.

 

[Derren]

While abstract hp lack the detail some people obviously crave, they have served D&D well for decades, and are sufficient for most games IMO.

So? Remember the 4E launch and the discussions about surges which were one of the things which drove people away.

Maybe more people carve for more immersive games than what abstract HP deliver? Maye what was good enough 20 years ago is not good enough now as the expectations of players have changed?

 

[Uller]

And yet when they succeded, were all the wounded in the unit suddenly be able to fight at 100% again?

What makes you think they succeeded in anything like complete rest for 8+ hours with no more strenuous activity than 2 hours of light guard duty? They were maintaining a > 50% security detail and some of them were too wounded to pull guard duty (much less fight). The guys that were at 0 hp when they entered the building were still there when they left (maybe some were at 1...they could hold a weapon...

The 5e rules as written definitely leave room for this scenario. You can't gain ANY hp short of magic without several hours of time passing. If you are at 0 hp you can't begin a long rest (or even a short rest) until you have at least 1 hp. You can't have the benefits from more than 1 long rest in any 24 hour period (so there must be at least 16 hours between the end of one and the start of the next...This leaves lots of room for a party to have to make choices and face challenges of having to manage who is resting, who is not, who has priority to get to full HP or full spells, etc.

The only thing I find lacking in it is you go from 1 hp to full the instant your 8 hour rest is complete....IMO it would be better if there was a little more granularity...maybe you start gaining hp after 4 hours of rest at a rate of 25% of HP per hour or some such...but since this is something that so rarely comes up for most group, it hardly seems worth worrying about it much.

If they put in a healing rate, it is easy for groups to increase the length of time needed to heal (or regain spells).