D&D 5E Can mundane classes have a resource which powers abilities?

[Manbearcat]

So, what wound did that power attacking fire giant critting with a great axe inflict on my character?

Merely a flesh wound! Tis but a scratch!

 

[The Crimson Binome]

I want you to describe the following wound: My fighter has 100 HP. He is critical hit by a fire giant with a very big great axe for 109 points of damage. He stabilises (possibly on his own, or possibly with the aid of another PC, doesn't really matter.)

Now, the wound you describe will heal, without any outside help, in six days. That is the absolute longest it will take this character to heal. So, what wound did that power attacking fire giant critting with a great axe inflict on my character?

If you follow the proportional wound model, which really is quite common - I would hazard that it's actually the most popular model - then this scenario is almost exactly the same as your run-of-the-mill first-level fighter with 10hp being hit with a perfectly mundane battle-axe (wielded in two hands) for 11 damage.

And I would describe that attack as a perfectly solid swing, straight across the torso, resulting in a number of cracked ribs and massive bruising. Good thing you were wearing armor! That's about the sort of thing that a fantasy hero could wake up from her coma, six days later, and be expected to fight again.

 

[Hussar]

So, in your world, fractured ribs heal completely, without any medical attention in six days? Additionally, how is that wound potentially fatal. Remember, stabilizing comes after the wound, so the wound Had to be potentially fatal.

Note I'm not in a coma for six days. I'm in a coma for one at the most. The other five days I'm just resting.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In my world, after a week of complete bed rest with no strenuous activity whatsoever, Conan or Tarma or John McClane are capable of doing anything they would have been able to do had they not been injured in the first place. It's not a perfect model of reality. It's not even a particularly good one. It's intentionally skewed towards getting people back into the action with a minimum of fuss. It doesn't cover any sort of long-term injuries.

But it is a model, and it doesn't hurt my suspension of disbelief so badly that it drags me completely out of the story. I'm rather used to it, from all of the fiction I've read, and movies I've seen.

Are you particularly knowledgeable about human physiology and injury? If so, you might be suffering from the Dan Brown principle - your knowledge of the subject matter makes you too keenly aware of how unrealistic it is, where less-informed people can more easily accept it at face value. If that's the case, then I'm afraid that there's not much I can do for you.

 

[Hussar]

I'm not particularly knowledgeable. But the argument that a week is sufficient to heal all wounds isn't even supported by fiction.

When Conan is seriously injured, he takes months to recover. Frodo spends how long in Rivendell? Game of Thrones characters are sidelined for weeks or months by injury.

So what genre fiction are you reading where the hero takes serious, potentially lethal injury and is completely healed in a week?

 

[Neonchameleon]

In my world, after a week of complete bed rest with no strenuous activity whatsoever, Conan or Tarma or John McClane are capable of doing anything they would have been able to do had they not been injured in the first place. It's not a perfect model of reality. It's not even a particularly good one. It's intentionally skewed towards getting people back into the action with a minimum of fuss. It doesn't cover any sort of long-term injuries.

In mine this is also true. That's because they never actually take more than flesh wounds when they get hurt. The worst injury John McClane actually takes in Die Hard is running over broken glass. Bullets don't bounce off him - they just get too close for comfort rather than hitting him.

(And no, I'm not a doctor).

 

[pemerton]

while NPCs were described as being different from PCs, they actually used the PC rules wherever possible.

Just a brief comment on this, more for the sake of pedantry than anything else.

In Gygax's DMG, in the section on NPCs (that has the tables for generating personality traits etc) there are rules for stat requirements for NPC members of character classes. And they are different from the rules that govern PCs. Generally, they are more forgiving (eg a fighter does not have a min 9 STR, but rather after rolling stats for a fighter NPC you add 2 to STR; rangers, druids and monks also have noticeably less strict minima).

My sense from these boards is that many AD&D players didn't use that particular rule for NPC building, and just build NPCs as they would PCs when it came to character class eligibility.

 

[pemerton]

I'm pretty sure all of us are playing in a D&D world that does not conform to real scientific laws. The question you're positing is whether there is a distinct set of fantasy laws of physics that have nothing to do with the game mechanics but are also different from the ones we know in the real world.

<snip>

If hit points don't describe what my character is experiencing, then what is my character experiencing while all this (apparently meaningless to him) hp ablation is happening?

On the first paragraph: I assume that the gameworld conforms to the particpants' expectations for it, generally reached through shared genre expectations as communicated via the game rules. In 4e, for instance, an epic PC may be a demigod, and so expectations as to what is achievable for an epic PC, in terms of magic or endurance or other feats of might, are to be framed by reference to shared genre expectations around demigods. There is also a discussion of "tiers of adventure" in the PHB that helps set those genre expectations.

On the second paragraph: in my 4e game, there are two ways you work out what your character is experiencing. Some of it is via participant narration (most often the GM, at my table): for instance I might describe the effects of an NPC's successful attack. The second way, though, is more important: your PC is experiencing the same emotions as you are experiencing in the play of your PC. So if you are feeling anxious, as if you are boxed into a corner with no way to extract yourself and not much left in the way of reserves, than that's how your PC is feeling (the flip side of this: healing inspires the player, restoring hope, as much as it does the PC). It is a mark of good rules, for me, that they engender this sort of correlation between players' and characters' emotional states. And direct mechanical causation removes the need for mechanical simulation!

 

[Obryn]

I think it's pretty fascinating that we've moved from "I want my game rules to model the world as much as possible" to "The game rules are the physical and metaphysical rules of the world, and directly observable to imaginary inhabitants even when you get results that sound nonsensical."

 

[Emerikol]

I think as long as the core classes do not embrace such a resource everything will be fine. Not having a mundane fighter is the issue. It is not having additional classes that are special in some magical way. They are easy to ignore for folks that don't like that stuff. Like me for example.