Schrodinger's HP and Combat

[AbdulAlhazred]

I understand he got the whole ball rolling, but I don't know why Gygax's opinion on the definition of hit points mean anything in 2015, the rules are VERY VERY different now they don't have to have the same definition.

Me, I prefer for the game to feel like an action movie. So HP as being physical damage don't make sense to me, and hurt my enjoyment of the game. I want inspirational healing.

I hear you. There's no particular reason why Gygax's opinions matter anymore, but they're still at least as good as anyone else's and show some of the intent in the original design. And I totally agree about the action movie feel. I'm partial to it myself, which was a good aspect of 4e.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The problem that I had was that the damage was still on your character sheet. If HP loss = physical injury, then no HP loss = no physical injury, but a dude who was impaled (taken down to 3/50) and then inspired (brought back up to 50/50) would still have a 47-point hole in his chest in spite of being at full HP.

That's why, if you want a consistent model (which is important to me, but not necessarily a lot of other people), I always thought that a better way of representing heroic inspiration to keep fighting would be with temporary HP. With temporary HP, you could be brought down to 3/50, and then gain 47 tHP to keep you in the fight, but the actual physical wound (and corresponding HP deficit) are still there. And if you lost those tHP, then that doesn't correspond to a physical wound, because it's not real HP loss. (So it prevents the problem where you repeatedly drain someone of meat points and fill them back up with inspiration points, even after the body has taken 9000 HP damage over the course of a week.)

Until of course you take another 40 hit points of 'impalement' damage on top of what you took before and now it comes off THP, why? There's just no really consistent model you can make with something as simple as HP, unless you add some sort of more specific wound dynamics to the game. Even then you can only do so much. If you want a true model you'd have to build a physiological model of each character, which is clearly not happening. Given that there is SOME limit to verisimilitude and consistency then it generally seems hard to justify any particular place to draw the line. Certainly its purely a preference thing, so the various game designers that have moved that line around should be off the hook, especially the 4e ones since they generally get grief over it. Nothing wrong with your preferences of course

 

[billd91]

I think it's worth noting that the amount those saves improve is generally lower in 3e than it is in earlier editions as well. For the warrior types, it's universally a smaller increase - the worst AD&D save improves by 11 points from 1st to 17th level, compared to the best 3e one improving being 10 points higher at 20th level. That those are made in 3e against save DCs that increase exacerbates the situation.

And that's where we run into trouble generalizing much about the AD&D saves. The variation in classes makes comparisons particularly hard. The warrior saves in AD&D improve at approximately the same rate as the good saves in 3e - improving by roughly a point every 2 levels. But magic user and thief saves improve more slowly, sometimes making up for it multi-point jumps, and sometimes not (like with that awful thief save against breath weapon - the only AD&D save to top out in double digits). So it's not like all comparisons between AD&D and 3e end up with AD&D on top.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Until of course you take another 40 hit points of 'impalement' damage on top of what you took before and now it comes off THP, why?

I never meant to suggest that THP loss corresponded to a physical wound on the body. How could it, when there's no damage written on the character sheet? THP corresponds phenomenally well with the idea that you can spend effort to avoid getting hit by something.

The "consistent model you can make with something as simple as HP," which has been proposed in numerous places, is to separate out meat HP (physical wounds that you suffer) from mojo HP (your ability to reduce injury, or keep fighting in spite of injury, in addition to luck, etc).

The solution that 4E chose was to effectively ignore the concept of meat HP (at least as far as PCs were concerned), and have all HP be mojo HP. A solution that worked in 3E was for real HP to be meat HP and temporary HP to be mojo HP. A solution that works (for me) in 5E is for HP to be mojo HP and use Lingering Wounds to cover meat HP.

 

[pemerton]

The only resembling rule element? That's pretty much the 3e poison save right there.

<snip>

The similarity is even more apparent with the Wisdom bonus for saves against enchantments and charms - it's essentially the template for the Will save.

In AD&D the bonus to poison saves for CON, for non-dwarves and halflings, kicks in only at CON 19 or above. That's not very close to 3E Fort save at all.

The WIS/DEX bonuses to saves in AD&D are closer in some respects, but I think the differences are still more significant. When the save is conceived of as a luck roll, with the stat factor being a secondary source of bonus, the scope is there to set saving throw numbers on a basis that reflect concerns around pacing, plot protection, sporting chance, etc. Rather than the sim logic of the 3E saves that leaves fighter's (for instance) sucking.

Its as simple as that, just a sporting chance to get back into the game without needing to go back to level 1 and start another character. It was never intended to 'mean' anything or have any specific logic. Presumably even Gary put some narrative to the results of making a save "OK, you managed to hold your breath long enough to get clear of the cloud of poison gas!" or whatever, but it wasn't a mechanic that rested on some sort of specific game logic. The mention of the scratch in the poison section is simply an example of such narrative

<snip>

4e (and to a large degree 5e as well) put alternative forms of plot armor in place so the job that was classically done by saves is now in 4e done pretty much by hit points, hence the "only die at negative bloodied or 3 death save fails" rules (and here of course we see the only vestigial survival of the old save in 4e, the death save).

I like the link you draw between the classic saving throw and the modern death save.

 

[pemerton]

I never meant to suggest that THP loss corresponded to a physical wound on the body. How could it, when there's no damage written on the character sheet? THP corresponds phenomenally well with the idea that you can spend effort to avoid getting hit by something.

Coming at it from this angle, then, the Gygaxian/4e approach is that all hp are temp hp except perhaps for the last few (as I posted uthread, Gygax and 4e differ a bit at this point).

 

[Balesir]

Fate manages to combine an absence of hit points and narrative malleability and potentially a death spiral too.

Much as I like FATE (Core, specifically, but I don't think the version matters much in this case), I don't think it gets away from hit points in a truly meaningful sense. It elaborates them, sure, adding in "big" hit points and "little" hit points, but you still have a limited pool of something that you can have ablated before you simply keel over.

When I think of a genuinely "non-hit-point" system I'm looking for a complete (or near complete) lack of any "life resource". There would need to be no pool of points or set of "levels" or collection of "traits" that, once exhausted, mean a character is "out of action". Rather, "out of action" happens stochastically, with the likelihood of it happening at any specific instant being strongly affected by in-game situation - particularly the condition(s) and hindrances affecting the character at the time.

All of which should not be interpreted to mean that I think "no-hit-points" is a neccessary or even inherently superior attribute in a roleplaying system.

I feel like this is very close to my position on the subject. Narrative malleability is something that I want to minimize as much as possible in a system, at least to the extent that it doesn't significantly increase the workload required to model anything. To me, the whole point of having a system is that it converts the objective reality of any action into a mathematical language that we can process and then spits back the objective reality of the outcome of that action.

At one time I think this was my (fairly fuzzily understood) desire, also. It seems odd to me, now, since I have learned so much more about how we actually view the world. Since the world is not really as we (think we) see it but, rather, every image of the world we have is an interpretation I find it much easier, these days, to view RPG systems in this light, also. Just as, in real life, we only actually sense sufficient cues from our environment to allow our brains to make a coherent model of what goes on around us which is good enough to let us survive, I now see RPG systems as merely providing sufficient "hooks" to allow us all to imagine the imaginary world as we wish without encountering too many clashes of understanding. As long as we all agree on whether the character is up and in the fight or collapsed on the floor (but with some chance of getting up again under some specific circumstances), it really doesn't matter if the specifics of injury, dishevelledness and consciousness are different from one person's vision to another. The idea that there is a unique, "objective" reality that is seen by all is a fallacy known as "naive realism"; I commend an investigation of it to you. It's real science, not some sort of fringe belief.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Coming at it from this angle, then, the Gygaxian/4e approach is that all hp are temp hp except perhaps for the last few (as I posted uthread, Gygax and 4e differ a bit at this point).

I certainly can't argue with that. Gygax even suggested, in other places, that you could see the outcome of an action and then choose to narrate it in whatever fashion was dramatic - how a save against dragon breath, while you were chained to a rock, might indicate that you broke the chains and then hid behind the rock.

There was a lot of what 4E did that meshed well with what Gygax suggested. Having started with 2E and continued through the whole 3.X cycle, I am bothered equally by both 4E and Gygax, for much the same reasons.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I never meant to suggest that THP loss corresponded to a physical wound on the body. How could it, when there's no damage written on the character sheet? THP corresponds phenomenally well with the idea that you can spend effort to avoid getting hit by something.

I just meant it wasn't really very consistent. The orc hits you, you take 47 points, you're punctured. Later the orc hits you again, you take 40 points, its all 'mojo'. Its totally feasible, it just didn't seem close to your model, so I wondered how THP really helped. In a practical sense I'm sure it USUALLY does help, its just not a panacea. I think your approach for 5e is probably the most robust overall, and the 4e approach would work too. I think the 5e approach would mostly be fine in AD&D as well, since you could just equate 'lingering wound' with hitting 0 hit points, something most fighters have experienced a time or two! Even high level ones are likely to go there now and then.

 

[LostSoul]

Random wondering...

Should we call it "Schrodinger's HP" or "Schrodinger's Attack"? You don't really know what the PC/NPC has done/tried to do until the attack roll has been made, damage has been rolled, and HP have been subtracted (and compared to the HP max). Until then, what's happening in the game world is a big cloud of uncertainty.