"Stumbling Around in My Head" - The Feeling of Dissociation as a Player

[S'mon]

This is a boxer who's gone down bleeding. That is what you know. You don't know why without a detailed medical examination. That it's something serious is a risk, and you need to account for that risk - but the rules don't zoom in that far. Indeed, they can't.

I think "the rules don't zoom in that far. Indeed, they can't" is another way of saying what Justin said - "it's impossible to describe the nature of a wound at the moment it's inflicted".

I would tend to go further - the rules do actually say "PC X is critically injured! He's dying!" when PC X is making death saves. So the rules are saying something important about the nature of the injury. But then the second wind is activated, or the PC receives a morale-boost healing ability that activates a surge, and the rules say: "Wait a minute! He was just low on morale!"
So from a rules-mechanic perspective, if anything it's less a Schrodinger indeterminate state, more an explicit retcon. Stuff like this happens in film and TV quite often though - Zander appears to have been killed by the vampire, then Buffy goes to check him and he's fine - so the more I can accept 4e as a Dramatist story-creation game rather than a world-sim game, the less it bothers me.

 

[S'mon]

This is a boxer who's gone down bleeding. That is what you know. Y
Likewise. But this assumes that the crossbow bolt misses. Not that it gets a good hit.

The high level PC with lots of hp is capable of ensuring that the bolt does not get a good hit. A bolt that gets a good hit can still kill anyone mortal, eg it's a viable method for 1e assassination % or for kill-helpless-character-in-one-round, no matter your level.

Personally I don't much like the rapid hp escalation and flatline defenses of 0e-3e, I prefer the 4e approach where defenses go up by level, and hp scale more slowly - this is a bit closer to both real life and movie physics. I don't mind Red Sonja taking the occasional scratch, but I'd think she should avoid most shots entirely. It should be both less likely that the bolt will hit, and less likely that it does serious injury if it does hit.
But again, there is a bit of an SOD issue, but not a dissociation issue - everything involved in the mechanics of shooting & damage does map onto events in-world.

 

[prosfilaes]

The only claim I made about pre-4e hit points is that they are "dissociated", because they permit the player to make decisions on the basis of information that the PC does not and cannot possess - namely, that a particular arrow shot cannot be fatal.

Why can't PCs know that? That's your own interpretation of D&D worlds. Mine is that they do know that the risk of a non-magical arrow alone killing them, unless it's a powerful bow wield by a powerful person, is nigh zero. In fact, that doesn't depend on the HP as physical interpretation; whatever HP are, I think it's one valid interpretation for PCs to have an understanding of how little some things threaten them and that damage is fairly neatly cumulative. What PCs do should make sense from an in-world perspective, and to some extent here the actions of the players are constrained by the tactical elements of D&D. I'm willing to resolve that problem here by making the game world a closer match to the rules of D&D.

 

[S'mon]

This implies that hit point loss equals dodging. Which seems at odds with hit points equals meat.

You need to grok that hit points are proportional meat - if you lose half your hp to an attack, you are just as wounded at 50/100 as at 5/10. But increase in hp with levelling is almost entirely increase in dodging/mitigation ability, yup (per EGG, no one has more than about 12 'real wound' hp). But even the lightest wound is still a wound - and frankly that seems to be the case in 4e too, given that there are still lots of secondary effects like poison damage that key off hits and only make sense if the blow connected.

 

[FireLance]

There's a lot of lipstick application to the proverbial pig going on in this thread, IMO. A surfeit of mechanics for D&D which are unenvisionable or difficult to map to anything going on in the fantasy world are IMO just plain old bad game design, not narrativist, dramatist, cinematic, or any kind of self-important sounding game design theory jargon word. But again this obvious flaw gets the runaround.

That's because it isn't "bad game design" or "an obvious flaw" to some people. I offer the following as an example of the difference between "It is bad" and "I think it is bad". Note the careful use of the phrase "This approach doesn't work for me", indicating that the views expressed are an opinion, and not objective truth.

There are a number of ways in which you could approach the issue of hit points.

First, you could take the approach that hit points are entirely "meat", and that a 4 hit point wound means exactly the same thing for a normal man with 4 hit points and a 6th-level fighter with 40 hit points. This approach doesn't work for me because this means that a 6th-level fighter could be sporting up to nine wounds that would have killed a normal man (sword thrust to the gut, arrow through the neck, broken skull, etc.) and would (1) still be making attack rolls normally; and (2) eventually be able to recover through non-magical means.

Second, you could take the approach that hit points are partly "meat", and partly some other factor, such as the ability to dodge attacks and turn otherwise fatal injuries into less serious ones (for the sake of this argument, let's call this other factor "vigor"). I see this approach as an improvement over the "entirely meat" approach because when a 6th-level fighter takes a 4 hit point wound, as long as it doesn't reduce his hit points to 0 or less, he isn't actually stabbed in the gut. Instead, he is able to avoid the full effect of the attack at the last second, so that a sword thrust that would have stabbed a normal man in the gut is reduced to a grazed stomach or something along those lines. The 6th-level fighter has still lost 4 hit points, but the physical effect of the loss of those 4 hit points is different from the physical effect that it would have had on a normal man.

Now, the approach that hit points are only partly "meat" could be further subdivided into whether, when hit points are lost and regained, they are always lost and regained in exactly the same proportions of "meat" and "vigor", or whether "meat" and "vigor" points can be regained separately.

The approach that "meat" points and "vigor" points are always lost and regained in the same proportions does not work for me, not because of the hit point rules, but because of the healing rules. If a normal man with 4 hit points can recover from a 3 hit point wound with 3 days of natural healing, it seems to me that a 6th-level fighter with 40 hit points with 30 hit points of wounds should be injured to a similar extent and should also be able to recover completely in 3 days. Unfortunately, this has not been the case in most editions to date. Interestingly enough, if hit point recovery were made proportional to full maximum hit points (something which was done in 4e), it would have made this approach more acceptable to me.

Given that I already have a preference for hit point approaches where hit points represent both "meat" and "vigor", and a preference for approaches in which "meat" and "vigor" points can be gained and lost separately, it is not too far a step from that to an approach where "vigor" points can be regained far more quickly than "meat" points.

That's all there is to it, and I certainly would not presume to suggest that a preference for any other approach is "bad game design" or "an obvious flaw".

 

[S'mon]

An aside on D&D combat as process-sim, flashing blades vs sloggers:

Gygax apparently based his AC/hit point system on a battleship warfare game. The system gives everyone scads of hp as they level, and defense goes up only with armour. This has the weird effect that (in 0e-3e):

1)Two high-level swashbucklers hack at each other, taking off scads of hp, until one keels over from accumulated damage. I remember a duel in a 3e campaign exactly like this. But in feel it resembles more the armoured sloggers of Excalibur than the duels of Princess Bride.

2) Two low level characters in heavy armour trade thrusts, searching for a weakness, until one gets lucky and deals a deadly blow. We had an exchange like this in my AD&D campaign on Friday, it was a classic swashbuckling exchange between elf-maid and sneering villain - but it was only possible because both characters were in platemail!

So in terms of the appropriate feel to combat, 0e-3e D&D seems to get it exactly backwards. It seems that heavy armour should be giving the slogger characters 'hit points' to hack through, while unarmoured swashbucklers should have a higher 'defense' score, but far fewer hp.
I will say that 4e seems to handle duels much much better. HP feel far more abstract, the combat roles work to distinguish skirmishers from sloggers, and at the same time the combatants are typically making choices every round which of several attack powers/techniques they'll use.

 

[S'mon]

This is true if all the wounds are to the same location, especially because of RQs weird weapon die expressions: sword 1d8+1, dagger 1d4+2. If you changed some of those to get onto single dice - say, sword 1d10, dagger 1d6 or 1d8 - then it would be possible, as typical abdomen hit points are 4, and 3 min-damage hits would still leave 1 hp in the abdomen.

If the wounds are to different locations then it is certainly possible to sustain multiple wounds in RQ and keep going.

Uhm, don't all RQ PCs have a single hp pool, typically around 10-18 hp, as well as location hp? And realistically, when you play RQ, no one without damage reduction will ever take more than about 4 hits overall, using the listed damage expressions, without going down (especially as most melee types likely add a bonus damage die for high STR). That was certainly my experience - you almost never fall to 1 hit, and you almost never are still standing after 3.

 

[Balesir]

Uhm, don't all RQ PCs have a single hp pool, typically around 10-18 hp, as well as location hp? And realistically, when you play RQ, no one without damage reduction will ever take more than about 4 hits overall, using the listed damage expressions, without going down (especially as most melee types likely add a bonus damage die for high STR). That was certainly my experience - you almost never fall to 1 hit, and you almost never are still standing after 3.

If I remember correctly (I may not - it's been a while*) hits to arms and legs don't also count against that "body pool". It also depends whether and how much healing you apply to yourself.

*: plus, we used to play several systems that were somewhat similar, and the main one of these definitely had this sort of rule.

 

[mmadsen]

The high level PC with lots of hp is capable of ensuring that the bolt does not get a good hit.

What does that mean inside the game world that someone can ensure that they won't take a good hit?

 

[Neonchameleon]

An aside on D&D combat as process-sim, flashing blades vs sloggers:

Gygax apparently based his AC/hit point system on a battleship warfare game. The system gives everyone scads of hp as they level, and defense goes up only with armour. This has the weird effect that (in 0e-3e):

1)Two high-level swashbucklers hack at each other, taking off scads of hp, until one keels over from accumulated damage. I remember a duel in a 3e campaign exactly like this. But in feel it resembles more the armoured sloggers of Excalibur than the duels of Princess Bride.

2) Two low level characters in heavy armour trade thrusts, searching for a weakness, until one gets lucky and deals a deadly blow. We had an exchange like this in my AD&D campaign on Friday, it was a classic swashbuckling exchange between elf-maid and sneering villain - but it was only possible because both characters were in platemail!

No. No it doesn't - it only comes close to doing that if you declare hit points to be proportional meat. I've already quoted the 1e approach to hit points earlier in this thread and I'm going to do so again.

Originally Posted by AD&D 1e DMG, page 61
Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the last handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections.
​

1e hit points for PCs and for skilled NPCs (monsters like ogres are a whole different story) are explicitely not meat - not even proportional meat. Gygax did this for many reasons including the one you outline - and the one about critical hits. Of course it in its own way throws into stark relief the almost unanswerable question "what is a hit point?", and this was probably the most house-ruled part of 1e even before Weapon vs Armour Type, and XP for GP because it feels wrong to hit with a natural 20 and not have hit properly.

This is why no other game I'm aware of other than Palladium has hit points that scale the way D&D does. Hit points have always been an incoherent metagame mechanic to keep the game on rails - and they fall over when people look at them too hard. The reason 4e hit points are hated by some isnt because splitting stun from endurance is less realistic, it's because you need to look at a fundamentally weird system again - and that system is best not looked at.

So in terms of the appropriate feel to combat, 0e-3e D&D seems to get it exactly backwards.

2-3e please. 1e gets it right, but has the disjunction when you record 'damage' taken.

It seems that heavy armour should be giving the slogger characters 'hit points' to hack through, while unarmoured swashbucklers should have a higher 'defense' score, but far fewer hp.

And many games including GURPS and I think Rolemaster do exactly that. (Actually, Rolemaster armour is from a process-sim perspective a joy. But even in the cut down MERP version you use a different lookup table for each armour type.)

I will say that 4e seems to handle duels much much better. HP feel far more abstract, the combat roles work to distinguish skirmishers from sloggers, and at the same time the combatants are typically making choices every round which of several attack powers/techniques they'll use.

I'd agree. The problems with 4e here are mostly to do either with naming conventions (call Healing Surges something like Endurance Points and a lot of them melt) and round the dying condition. I'd prefer to go full on gamist/narrativist with the dying condition, call it something like "Down", keep the saves, but the downside of failing three death saves is DM determined and always (a) bad and (b) results in the PC being unable to adventure for a time. The two ways of getting actually dead are negative bloodied and CDG (probably by a non-minion).