D&D 5E Do NPCs in your game have PHB classes?

[MechaPilot]

So does 1e for that matter. Never in any edition have the rules said it is all about physical damage the Saelorn likes to play it.

I thought it might. It's just that I no longer have my AD&D 2e books, or my BECMI boxed sets, to go back and check. The farthest back I can go with the books I still have is 3e.

 

[Maxperson]

I thought it might. It's just that I no longer have my AD&D 2e books, or my BECMI boxed sets, to go back and check. The farthest back I can go with the books I still have is 3e.

This is what it says. It even differentiates between physical and metaphysical hit points.

Consider a character who is a 10th level fighter with an 18 constitution.
This character would have an average of 5 hit points per die, plus a constitution
bonus of 4 hit points, per level, or 95 hit points! Each hit scored
upon the character does only o small amount of actual physical harm -
the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart
merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and
sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the
right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage,
our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts
and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regainthe physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points.

 

[MechaPilot]

This is what it says. It even differentiates between physical and metaphysical hit points.

Consider a character who is a 10th level fighter with an 18 constitution.
This character would have an average of 5 hit points per die, plus a constitution
bonus of 4 hit points, per level, or 95 hit points! Each hit scored
upon the character does only o small amount of actual physical harm -
the sword thrust that would have run a 1st level fighter through the heart
merely grazes the character due to the fighter's exceptional skill, luck, and
sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the
right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage,
our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts
and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points.

Yeah. That's definitely consistent with the "ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one" in the 3e rules.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Yeah. That's definitely consistent with the "ability to turn a serious blow into a less serious one" in the 3e rules.

According to the quoted text, it sounds like 2E is suggesting a proportional wound system, so a hit for 9/90 would be the same scratch as someone getting hit for 1/10; and 3E is in line with that.

What I'm curious about is, how do you get from that model, to your model where HP damage can equate to a parried blow or clothing damage? Where do you make the jump to the idea that HP damage can correspond to no physical injury whatsoever? Because it doesn't say that in the books, and it's completely outside of my hypothesis space for ways that those words could possibly be interpreted.

 

[Hussar]

According to the quoted text, it sounds like 2E is suggesting a proportional wound system, so a hit for 9/90 would be the same scratch as someone getting hit for 1/10; and 3E is in line with that.

What I'm curious about is, how do you get from that model, to your model where HP damage can equate to a parried blow or clothing damage? Where do you make the jump to the idea that HP damage can correspond to no physical injury whatsoever? Because it doesn't say that in the books, and it's completely outside of my hypothesis space for ways that those words could possibly be interpreted.

Well, reread the quote:

and sixth sense ability which caused movement to avoid the attack at just the
right moment. However, having sustained 40 or 50 hit points of damage,
our lordly fighter will be covered with a number of nicks, scratches, cuts
and bruises. It will require a long period of rest and recuperation to regain the physical and metaphysical peak of 95 hit points.

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...ur-game-have-PHB-classes/page38#ixzz47gimolzy

So, right there, it mentions that he could avoid the attack at just the right moment. Plus, in 3e, it gets even more ludicrous when any wound you take, no matter how you want to narrate it, has to be 100% recoverable in about 4 days. Because, with someone using the Heal skill and bed rest, that's the MAXIMUM time it can take to heal someone from -9 to virtually any HP maximum.

So, what wounds are potentially lethal yet entirely recoverable in 4 days?

Note, 2e also had non-magical instant healing with the Healing NWP. So, any wound you describe had to be consistent with that as well.

The whole reason this ludicrous argument about HP=Meat got any traction is because in 3e, virtually all healing was done magically, so, you were free to describe anything you wanted to. And, of course, people simply didn't bother to look at it too closely.

However this whole sidebar on HP is beside the entire point. The original issue was that somehow everything in the game must follow from the mechanics themselves. Which is utterly ridiculous. Heck, I'm still waiting to hear how three creatures of roughly the same size have radically different Hit Points. If the mechanics tell us what things should be, then, how does this work? If HP are HP and always the same, then three creatures of roughly the same size should be roughly the same no?

OTOH, if you ignore the whole idea that D&D rules are some sort of bizarre physics engine, then having NPC's not be made the same as PC's makes perfect sense. In exactly the same way that monsters are made based on how much of a challenge they should be for the PC's, not out of some rather vague, confused notion that we are making worlds using D&D rules.

 

[Maxperson]

According to the quoted text, it sounds like 2E is suggesting a proportional wound system, so a hit for 9/90 would be the same scratch as someone getting hit for 1/10; and 3E is in line with that.

The last line refutes that completely. If it was just proportional, there would be no skill involved, no luck involved, and most importantly, no such thing as the metaphysical hit points that Gygax explicitly says exists in ADDITION TO the physical hit points.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Most simulations cover situations that would be impractical or impossible to test in the real world. The obvious example of a simulation would be Sim City, and even that includes simulated kaiju attacks.

Or flight simulators. There are flight simulators, there are airplanes, you can compare how accurate the former are compared to the latter. 'Simulating' a kaiju attack isn't really simulating a kaiju, but it could well simulate the response to a hypothetical amount of damage to a city. The former, you can't check for accuracy (because kaiju don't exist), the latter, you can - because emergency responders do exist, and cities do on occasion suffer from catastrophes.

The game at hand simulates combat between 2-20 individuals well enough, though, as well as simple task resolution.

"Well enough" is a very subjective qualifier. D&D doesn't even try to simulate melee combat - RQ did, at least, based on melee combat as it was simulated in the SCA - and still made plenty of compromises to make it a game.

 

[pemerton]

I agree with a more abstract interpretation of hit points, but I am not going to convince someone else their viewpoint is wrong based on the abstract nature of hit points.

I'm not trying to persuade anyone to narrate hp in any particular way.

I'm arguing that D&D combat is not process-sim. It doesn't, as such, model any particular ingame causal process, nor tell you what exactly has happened in the fiction (no hit location, no physical debilitation, no bleeding (except when dying), positioning that does not correlate to the passage of time because of freeze-frame initiative, etc).

Someone who wants to treat every hit as a strike that makes contact, and every event of hp loss as physical injury, is free to do so. But the rules don't themselves force or even really engender that sort of interpretation. The contrast with systems that I regard as genuinely process sim (RQ, RM, HARP, Classic Traveller, elements of Burning Wheel, etc) is very marked.

Say that hit needed a natural 11, it's simulating a reality in which that attacker, attacking that target, under those circumstances, necessarily hits 50% of the time. Similarly, 7 hps represents exactly that much injury, half as much injury as 14 hps, 7x as much as 1 hp, 1/7th as much as 49, but all injury, and all in precise proportions. The rules do not merely simulate that reality, they first define it into being, then simulate it perfectly.

That's what I mean by rules-as-laws-of-physics. It's exactly like a simulation. Just a self-referent one. In the same way that a tautology is necessarily true, a rules-as-laws-of-physics system is necessarily a perfect simulation.

I think you're being ironic.

Irony or not, from my point of view a process sim system actually correlates the mechanics to independently conceivable processes in the gameworld. Eg distance and time. Physical locations of people, weapons, injuries. Etc.

It can be more-or-less abstract: Classic Traveller tells us how severe an injury has been caused by a hit, and the degree of debilitation, but not where the person was injured. RQ and BW both go one step further and tell us the general location of the injury (torso, limb, head). Rolemaster distinguishes between (say) hand, forearm and shoulder injuries, bruises vs broken ribs, etc, and has a correspondingly intricate healing system. But in all these systems, the combat resolution forces some general conception of what is going on in the fiction. They don't define so-called "processes" and the outcomes of so-called "processes" purely by reference to mechanical concepts. (What you call "self-referential".)

It's simulating an in-game fictional reality in which a dragon's natural armor is at least 230.77% better than the best possible magical full plate. What reality is that? The reality of that edition of D&D.

Where this loses me is I don't actually know what that is. Eg why can't I use that dragon's hide to make armour of comparable toughness? In fictional terms, what is this actually supposed to mean?

 

[pemerton]

According to the quoted text, it sounds like 2E is suggesting a proportional wound system, so a hit for 9/90 would be the same scratch as someone getting hit for 1/10; and 3E is in line with that.

What I'm curious about is, how do you get from that model, to your model where HP damage can equate to a parried blow or clothing damage? Where do you make the jump to the idea that HP damage can correspond to no physical injury whatsoever? Because it doesn't say that in the books

[MENTION=23751]Maxperson[/MENTION]'s quote was from Gygax's DMG (p 82).

The previous page contains the following passage:

For those who wonder why poison does either killing damage (usually) or no harm whatsoever, recall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the
saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

Perhaps a scratch. That is to say, hit point loss need not correlate to physical injury.

From p 61 of the same book:

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.​

A mere nick or scracth. Also, from the previous paragraph, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. Which is to say that the loss of 1 hp, 3 hp or 7 hp can all be the same thing, in terms of physical injury (ie perhaps a mere nick or scratch). What is being worn down is luck, favour, endurance, verve, the will to fight, etc.

The only oddity of this system, in 1st ed AD&D, is that healing is not proportional, so the fighter who has lost "metaphysical" reserves needs a Cure Serious or Critical Wounds spell, while the dying MU can be restored to maximum hp (though not full health) with a Cure Light Wounds spell. 4e corrects this particular oddity with surge-based healing.

(A proportional interpretation - that losing 1 in 10 hp correlates to losing 10 in 100 - also faces the same oddity of non-proportional healing in AD&D.)

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think you're being ironic.

I'm trying to understand and express a point of view that I do not share. Maybe I'm letting that show a bit.

Irony or not, from my point of view a process sim system actually correlates the mechanics to independently conceivable processes in the gameworld.

That's nice, but if those mechanics also define the game world, they're self-referent, if they're not only independently conceivable, but independently defined, so you can check the results of the mechanics of the game against the processes as they were conceived before the game, then, sure, they're simulating something. Even if it's something imaginary.

D&D is often compared to Middle Earth. If it's a simulation of Middle Earth, you could grade it for accuracy. That grade would probably not be a passing one.

It can be more-or-less abstract: Classic Traveller tells us how severe an injury has been caused by a hit, and the degree of debilitation, but not where the person was injured.

Traveler, for instance, looks a lot like a take on H. Beam Piper's 'Space Vikings,' to me. You had big spherical-ish star ships that 'jumped' interstellar distance but spent substantial time in jump-space, unable to interact with real space or eachother, and once the raider got to another planet, they fought with machine guns and, anachronistically, blades.

RQ and BW both go one step further and tell us the general location of the injury (torso, limb, head). Rolemaster distinguishes between (say) hand, forearm and shoulder injuries, bruises vs broken ribs, etc, and has a correspondingly intricate healing system. But in all these systems, the combat resolution forces some general conception of what is going on in the fiction. They don't define so-called "processes" and the outcomes of so-called "processes" purely by reference to mechanical concepts. (What you call "self-referential".)

I'm familiar with RQII and a bit of the game's history, and yeah, it tried to be a more faithful simulation of what the authors found to be true of melee combat in their SCA experience than D&D was (shields being much more significant in stopping attacks, being the example I vaguely recall being used).

Where this loses me is I don't actually know what that is. Eg why can't I use that dragon's hide to make armour of comparable toughness?

Same reason you can't cut off it's wings, hold one in each hand and flap them to fly.

In fictional terms, what is this actually supposed to mean?

Exactly what it says. That a Dragon's hide is that much better at bouncing attacks than plate worn by a human. (But, size penalty, Touch AC, et al, actually laying a finger on the dragon is probably easier.)