Part of the virtue of this is that whenever someone says, "Well, then it HAS to have quality X!" about this system, they're probably wrong.
At least in my case - that you quote - I wasn't talking about your system. I was replying to Crazy Jerome's suggestion that ability damage would make for a good wound system because it is
not just another pool of points - and he agreed with me!
For a lot of people, all the "gritty realism" they want or need is that you fall unconscious at 0 hp from an actual wound. For others, they're OK with you just running out of luck and dying from sucking too hard.
Are you serious?
I assume you've heard the phrase "His luck finally ran out". Do you interpret this as meaning that the man in question died from a luck deficiency? It's not in dispute that swords kill people. There is next to no disagreement between anyone that 0 hp means a potentially serious wound (the fortune-in-the-middle aspect of 4e healing is othogonal here - other editions have fortune-in-the-middle aspects too, like self-stabilisation and recovery in 3E, the odds are just lower). The disagreement is over what is happening in the fiction when a PC loses hp but does
not drop to 0 or below.
My OP is kind of a roundabout way of weeding "fate" out of the assumption of Hit Points, and allowing it to be an add-on to the central purpose of hit points: to tell you when are dying.
This doesn't make sense to me either. I run 4e, assuming fate/metagame/divine favour hp. What do you think my group envisages is happening in combat? Swords are beings swung, glancing blows struck, and occasionally - such as when the wizard was killed by the angel of battle's blades of vengeance - moral wounds are suffered.
The fate interpretation of hp is not an
add on to hp as a measure of being dead or alive. It's an interpretation of what is happening in the fiction when hit points are being whittled away
but have not yet dropped to zero. That is what the differences in hit point interpretation are about.
I don't know what you mean by "in the fiction."
I mean "in the gameworld, that fictional sequence of events that the players of the game are jointly imagining". In the fiction, what is the difference - on your model - between losing fate, and losing hp but not being dropped to zero? Are hands being lopped off? Arteries severed? Minor grazes suffered?
The fiction at the table is just what the DM describes, and this, like the 5e HP notation, gives the DM guidance on how to describe various injuries. Took an arrow to the knee? It's HP damage unless fate intervenes, in which case, it's not.
So why do we need a hp/fate point split to do this. You can do this with hit points, in B/X, AD&D, 3E, 4e etc.
I mean, you're assuming people are happy to say that an arrow to the knee doesn't impede your physical mobility. So what is your objection if some groups also want to say that an inspriration speech from one's noble leader can actually let someone push on despite the tearing of soft tissue in the knee?
It's an important distinction since, as you can plainly see, people have different ways that they conceive of this event.
In the absence of any tight fit between mechanic and narration, why do we need two pools of points. Or, to put it another way, how do you envisage someone narrating
fate points lost to a hit from an arrow?
Inspiration heals Fate. Fate lets you fight on longer, since you can substitute it for HP and it comes back faster.
But healing hp lets you fight on longer too. So why not just have the warlord heal hp?
Dude, they can deal HP damage.
That's the distinction between It's Magic And Thus Deadly and It's Just a Word And Thus Not. You can do either one. You can do both at once, even. The system don't care. The systems like, "You want your metaphors to be absurdly physical. Mokay, boss, here's how."
But then why bother with the two pools. No one (or almost no one) who like "hit points as meat" is going to use bardic psychic damage to fate. [MENTION=11300]Herremann the Wise[/MENTION] wants very liberal "fate" points, but his wound pool is going to behave like a traditional W/V system, not like your approach.
Dude, this is a design you can manifest in a hundred different ways.
My fave? Aragorn has regen.
Like a troll? Or does he just regen fate points? And if he only regens fate points, then how does he recover from unconsciousness?
Another? Aaragorn has a "Tenacious Destiny" ability that lets him fight on as long as he has Fate left, regardless of his HP.
But then why does he swoon at all?
You might also rule that Arwen being a magical mystical elfy maiden lady has a magical mystical elfy ability that magically mystically elfily gives him HP back.
Which means it's no longer a romance, but instead a procedural. I know this is sort-of the default D&D route, but at least since Dragonlance many people have been playing the game in a different way, and I don't see why the core mechanics need to be changed to push that alternative approach into the margins.
This has gone from One Vision of Hit Points That All Must Share to a meat dial
I don't understand why you think that I (and CJ and others) are opposed to hp dials. Some of us - me, CJ, Hussar, at least - have been posting on these hp threads over the past weeks and months expressly advocating that hp needs to be flexible and able to sustain multiple approaches.
If you're for a broad church on hit points - which you profess to be - I don't understand why you would insist that the fate interpretation is not a legitimate interpretation of the core rules. Why does the core mechanic have to express a definitive view at all? Why can't it say, for example, that different groups have different interpetations of what, in the fiction, is represented by hit point loss that doesn't reduce total hit points to zero (flesh wounds, dodging, fatigue, calling on skill, calling on luck/divine favour, etc)?
My personal concern is simply to contend that inspirational healing and psychic damage are parts of the D&D tradition (ie 4e counts too) and that it is not an automatic disqualifier of a hp and healing system that it makes room for them. The most inclusive core mechanic is traditional D&D hp in a single pool - after all,
that is what all these different interpretations have been using for years. Warlord healing and bardic psycic damage should be associated with those classes/monsters, which groups can then use in their game or not as they see fit (I don't use flumphs, nor bulettes, nor rust monsters, but it doesn't offend me that they're there in the MMs for others to use).
The only place where the mechanics have to take a view that
doesn't admit of flexible and varied interpretations is in relation to healing. And this clearly needs to be modular. I think nearly
everyone agrees that healing should be proportional to total hp (ie that it's weird the Cure Light Wounds sometimes cures mortal wounds and sometimes barely heals a scratch). Beyond that point of uniformity, my own approach would be to have a natural healing rule that allows recovery of "healing values" at whatever rate the group sets (with some discussion of pacing implications of such a choice). 4e short and extended rests then become a complex variation on this - you can recover at a quick pace for a while, then have to slow down a bit.
TL;DR - there is nothing inclusive about a default interpretation of hp that excludes a fairly common reading of them for no mechanical benefit to anyone.
