HP definitely would break down under scrutiny.
I don't think that hit points, as Gygax describes them, break down at all. They play just the same role in the game as the "heroic soak points" that [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION] described upthread in relation to Savage Worlds.
it was very hard (at least for me) to not essentially see them as being physical damage, because physical damage was always at least part of the equation
If you see hit point loss as corresponding to physical damage then you will tend to see hit point loss as a measure of physical injury. Which then gives rise to all sorts of puzzles, such as "what sort of injury?" and "why does it not debilitate the character?" etc.
But if you see hit point loss as not, in general, corresponding to physical damage at all (as per Gygax and 4e) then these puzzles don't arise, psychic damage becomes a coherent part of the game, etc.
That's not an option for most of the time, because PCs are often narratively gouged, trampled, stomped, stabbed, cut, sliced, diced, fall down stairs into a pit of broken glass and snakes.
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HP loss models many different types of very bad things happening to PCs, and losing grit / mojo is not at all serious.
Obviously, if you narrate hit point loss as being gouged, stabbed etc then you probably won't think of all hp as mojo. But at that point you're not playing in the Gygaxian way that I've been describing.
For instance, if someone is gouged or stabbed then it obviously makes sense to ask "where?", and "how deeply?" and "what is the consequent physical debilitation suffered by the character?" etc. But these are all the questions that Gygax, on p 61 of his DMG, says are
not germane to hit point loss precisely because hit point loss is
not a measure of physical damage.
In my 4e game, hit point loss corresponds to PCs
avoiding bad things, but having their vigour and resolve worn down in the process. That's why I said to [MENTION=85870]innerdude[/MENTION], upthread, that 4e's hit point and healing system is the same as the Savage Worlds system he was describing (well, not quite - it doesn't have the "real injury on failed/incomplete soak" option that Savage Worlds seems to have).
If the player loses grit / mojo, why did the DM just describe my player getting crushed by that boulder and knocking him unconscious?
Which GM are you talking about? (I also assume that, by "player" you mean "player character".) Presumably a bad one, if s/he is narrating the ingame events in a way that contradicts the mechanical resolution of those events.
Do you seriously expect me to believe that you can wipe away all those things as if they didn't happen just by saying so? How do you expect to keep the narration consistent, when going below half health was referred to as "bloodied"? So you're bloodied, and it only takes 5 minutes to go back to full health? Without magic? Really?
The option you are referring to is gamism. It's saying you don't care about the narrative being consistent.
You can't just handwave away inconsistent narrative effects of different game mechanics (HP loss vs restoration) in a game about narrative. In effect, you are saying HP loss means one thing, but regaining HP is something else.
So if HP restoration means restoring grit or the will to live, how come HP loss comes about when your PC gets stomped and rendered unconscious?
4e HP rules was an inconsistent, incoherent mess. It was the edition that explicitly called it being "bloodied" and then you're now handwaving that away as being "grit". Sure, whatever.
Oh please, D&D characters only ever lose "mojo" when they lose HP? What kind of fatuous rubbish is that?
It's always helpful to have someone on a messageboard tell me that my game sucks and is narratively inconsistent, but that I'm a sufficiently bad player that I don't care about those things. Otherwise I'd go through life thinking I was just an ordinary, half-decent RPGer and GM!
Now returning to reality:
Upthread I've already described in detail how hit point recovery works in 4e: it is overwhelmingly inspirational (surgeless healing is a more complicated exception, which I've also discussed), whether that inspiration comes from the benediction of a cleric, the tales of a bard, or a gentle word of encouragement from a battle captain. So I am not saying that losing hit points means one thing, and recovering them means another.
The "bloodied" condition means that blood has been drawn. That does not mean that a PC has been "stomped, gored, trampled" etc. It means that blood was drawn; no more, no less. Given that the PC suffers no debilitation from that blood being drawn, it follows that it was not a serious injury. And the gaining and losing of hit points doesn't measure anything to do with that injury. If it is a scratch or superficial cut (which is my standard narration), then no one supposes that it goes away when hit points are restored. The slight injury to a PC that results from the "bloodied" state being reached is purely part of the flavour, with no mechanical expression in the game.
Upthread I've also discussed the "dying" state in some detail. It is not literal at the ingame level. In the game, either the PC is dying and will die; or has merely swooned. We know which by resolving the dying state (via saving throws plus any healing that is delivered). If the character recovers, we know it was a mere swoon (like Frodo in Moria). If the character dies, we know it was more serious than that.
It may not be an entirely satisfying narrative, of course - after all, it's a system where the primary effect of hitting someone with a sword is not that the person becomes injured - but that's a matter of preference, rather than consistency.
When PCs hit monsters and some NPCs with their swords those enemies do become injured. This is the asymmetry of the narration of hit point loss that Gygax mentions in the posts I quoted upthread.
In 4e, very few monsters or NPCs have any sort of hp recovery mechanic, so there is no reason not to narrate their hit point loss in terms of physical injury, if that is what seems to make sense at the time.
If the GM narrated a PC cutting off an NPC's hand, and then the player elected for the final blow to be non-lethal, the NPC would still be maimed even when s/he regained consciousness. The rules don't specify explicitly what sort of magic is needed to reattach a hand, but the PHB (p 277) says that "The Remove Affliction ritual (page 311) can be useful for eliminating a long-lasting condition that affects you", and the text of that ritual (p 311) says that it "wipes away a single enduring effect afflicting the subject". I think the designers mostly had in mind curses and the like, but in my game it has also been used to heal blindness, lameness etc that has been suffered by NPCs due to injuries that they took in combat.
Does anyone actually imagine their PCs never being physically hurt? I think this is a forum meme, only. It's poppycock. You can't describe getting hit squarely by a fireball and it not damaging the character leaving him or her completely unscathed. Or getting knocked unconscious and walking away without a scratch.
Does anyone imaging his or her PC being squarely hit by a fireball yet not collapsing and writhing in agony? Apparently you do, if you think that a character can be squarely hit by a fireball yet not reduced to a state of incapacity (which, in mechanical terms, is zero or fewer hit points). All the Rolemaster and Runequest players think this is poppycock! As one of them, so do I. It makes no sense to me. Hence, when I want a game in which character are about as vulnerable to fireballs as people in real life, I run a game like that.
When I run a game with hit points, though, I adopt a narrative that makes sense - namely, precisely because the character is
not debilitated by the fireball despite losing hit points to it, it follows that s/he wasn't "squarely hit" at all, but rather ducked, or took cover behind a shield, or manipulated the magic so it didn't affect her, or prayed to the gods for a miracle, or . . . (ie all the stuff that Gygax talks about in his discussion of saving throws and their relationship to hit points on pp 80-81 of his DMG).
Dissociated mechanics are the pinnacle of lazy game design. Anyone off the street could write absurd mechanics and game rules if you don't need them to make narrative sense in the confines of the other rules and how the game plays.
Gygax was not a lazy game designer. It's a clever system that produces heroic narrative, and I very much doubt that "anyone off the street" could write it.
No one's forcing you to like it or play it, but your preferences aren't any sort of measure of objective design quality. And if you want a combat system that
models the infliction of physical injury in combat, I don't know why you're using D&D at all. Why not play one of the excellent FRPGs that actually does this? I hear good things about the recent versions of RuneQuest, and Rolemaster is currently in a free playtest of a revised edition on the ICE site.
What I'm hearing is that for some folks, the particular words which were used -- "healed", "bloodied" -- are important, while for other folks, the words are unimportant. I imagine for the second set of folks, the numerical results which are attached to the words are more important.
Good post.
For me, the words are terms of art, much like the old spell descriptions (no one who plays hit point loss as physical injury really thinks that a Cure Light Wound spell is capable of curing only light wounds, given that it has a chance of healing up to 8 hp of damage, which is the maximum damage that a single sword blow can deliver, which is clearly capable of being more serious than a light wound).
And yes, the mechanical effects are what matter to me. Losing hp does not cause any sort of impedence; hence, it is not injury. It's about grit/vigour/mojo, and whether the tide of battle is running with a character or against him/her.
I do play systems with non-mojo injury mechanics - Rolemaster and Burning Wheel - but in those systems characters who suffer injury are impeded by it. (Burning Wheel also has a separate mechanical system for "mojo", called Steel - and combat commanders can buck up their troops as part of that mechanical subystem - and it has a system for temporarily shrugging off the effects of minor injuries.)
